Copier prospecting without having contact information? How can you locate an unknown email address?
I believe the year was 1995. I had taken my first copier sales job working for a Lanier direct location. Sales was a pretty straightforward prospect. I would drive up and down the street (dressed in a suit and tie no less), walk into someone’s business, and try to reach the owner. Face-to-face contact was always, and arguably still is, the best way to reach new copier prospects. At that time I really only had two methods to reach them – the telephone and my oversized Smurf blue colored van full of gas.
Then Lanier did something special. Every salesperson for Lanier received a brand-new, shiny laptop (thank you Mike Murray), which we were able to utilize to store all of our contact information and database notes. Most important to me through this process was I had an efficient way to reach out to clients through email. I had great templates set up and was able to build a pipeline pretty effectively utilizing them.
Fast-forward 19 years. For some reason people are not as willing to give out their email address today. With all of the interruption marketing and spam that goes out through email, it’s no wonder that CEOs are unwilling to give their email address to a sales person. They already have an influx of newsletters, advertisements, business emails, personal emails, and 1000 other items that they have to delete every day. Why would they want to give their email to a sales rep who will then add to the bevy of emails received each day?
The purpose of this article is not to discuss the quality of emails that you send out to your prospects but to show you the most effective way to find the email address of the prospect who won’t give it to you.
Google Knows …
Google knows just about everything you need to know thanks to well-optimized websites – including the email address of your prospects! Here’s how to put this amazing tool to work for you in two simple steps.
1) Know the Obvious
You really only need to know two things to make this work – the correct spelling of your prospect’s name and the website address of the company they work for. The correct spelling of their name will be vital in getting the proper results to show in Google.
2) Learn to Quote
There is a little-known technique that Google allows you to use which will return exact results. Quotation marks. When you do a search, anything you put in quotation marks will force Google’s results to return only pages that contain that exact results. If you search for “Baconator” (which happens to be 1330 calories of deliciousness from Wendy’s), the only results that you get will be results that have either the word Baconator in the title of the page or in the actual content of the page. No other results will be given to you.
What’s cool about this method (and incredibly valuable to you) is that it also works with URLs and email addresses.
So let’s make this practical. You have the name (i.e. Darrell Amy) and the URL where they work (i.e. dealermarketing.net). Now let’s get to work.
- Go to www.google.com
- Search for the name of the contact you’re looking for and “@sample.com”. Obviously instead of sample.com, you will use the name of the company website of the person you’re searching for.
- Scroll through the results and look for their email address in the results.
That’s it!
You may have to scroll through a page or two, but rarely will you be unable to find an email address for someone. For those rare occasions and what to do then, watch for my next article.
Now, make sure that you reach out to these folks with your newfound email address on an individual basis to connect with them. Legally, you cannot find their email address and add it to your database for next month’s email blast. That is a CAN-SPAM no-no, not to mention a sure-fire way to tick off your prospect. This is for reaching out and connecting individually as a sales rep, not a tactic to grow your marketing email database.
So there you have it. My top-secret recipe for locating that missing copier prospect’s email address. Give it a try.
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