How to Find a Decision Maker's Email Address (CEO, Founder, Director)

A study of more than two million emails found something worth acting on: when you email a CEO or C-level executive directly, you get around 14.6% more replies than when you email a lower-level manager. Target correctly and the rate of genuinely positive, high-quality replies runs roughly three times higher.

The logic is not complicated. A lower-level manager is not the person who decides. The decision does not sit with them, so the reply does not either.

Which leaves one problem: where do you actually get that data? Here is the workflow I use for my own agency outreach.

Why decision-level targeting changes the numbers

Before the tool, the reasoning. Most outreach fails not because the email was badly written but because it arrived in the wrong inbox.

If I am approaching a law firm, I want the partner or the director — not a general info@ mailbox that three people share and nobody owns.

Method 1: the extension, on a company's own website

Say I want to approach a personal injury law firm in Los Angeles. I find one, open its site, and the question becomes: who do I actually write to?

The website will have emails — an info@, a public relations address, a few more on the contact page, maybe team addresses. All of them are mailboxes, not people.

1. 01

   Open the company's website

   Any page will do. The extension reads the organisation, not the page.

2. 02

   Click the extension

   It lists the decision makers attached to that company — names and roles, without you visiting LinkedIn or hunting through an About page.

3. 03

   Reveal the email

   One click per person. A green verified flag means the address has been validated rather than guessed, which is the part that matters.

4. 04

   Take what you need

   You can pull the whole set or just the one person you actually intend to contact.

What comes back is often more than one address per person — a work email, sometimes a personal Gmail, occasionally an older Yahoo or MSN address. The data is assembled from their LinkedIn profile, so you are looking at a real, identifiable professional rather than a pattern-guessed address.

Method 2: LinkedIn, including people you cannot message

The second use is the one I find most valuable. Open any LinkedIn profile and the extension works there too.

Try to message a 3rd-degree connection and LinkedIn blocks you — you can send a connection request and wait, or you can do nothing. But the extension will still retrieve the email, with the same verified status.

That matters because of how professionals actually behave:

I still send the connection request. But if I already have a direct, verified address, I have a channel that actually gets read.

Method 3: bulk, by title, industry, size and city

The third use is for building a list rather than finding one person.

Inside ContactOut's own search you filter the way you would brief a researcher:

A real search I ran

• Job titles: founder, director — the two that matter most
• Industry: law practice
• Company revenue: $5 million and above
• Location: United Kingdom → London

That search returned 1,642 profiles. Changing the city to Manchester returned 228 — all solicitors, advocates and directors at genuine firms. Then it is simply export: personal email, work email, phone number, as many records as your plan allows.

On the phone numbers

One tier includes direct phone numbers alongside emails, with around 600 exports a month. If you run any kind of cold calling, that is the line that matters — because the first obstacle in cold calling is always the gatekeeper, and a gatekeeper exists specifically to stop you getting past them.

A direct number for the decision maker removes that step entirely.

Use it responsibly — this is real people's data

This deserves more than a footnote, because the tool makes it very easy to go too far.

Before you send anything

• Cold email to businesses is regulated differently by country — GDPR in the UK and EU, CAN-SPAM in the US, and others besides
• Identify yourself honestly and make it genuinely easy to opt out
• Write to a named person about something specific to their business, not to a list
• Personal Gmail and Yahoo addresses are the ones to think hardest about using
• A verified address is permission to reach someone, not permission to add them to a sequence forever

In the video I deliberately hide every email on screen, because the data belongs to those people and showing it would be careless. Apply the same instinct to how you use it. Outreach that reads as written-for-them earns replies; outreach that reads as scraped earns a spam complaint, and spam complaints follow your domain around.

Targeting without messaging gets you nowhere

The last point is the one people skip. This tool solves targeting. It does not solve what you say.

If your messaging is strong but your targeting is wrong, nothing happens. If your targeting is perfect and your message is a template, nothing happens either. Both have to be right, and only one of them comes out of a tool.

What you get here is high-quality data on a verified audience — real professionals, pulled from real profiles. What you do with that first sentence is still entirely on you.

Frequently asked questions

The bottom line

Outreach fails more often on targeting than on writing. Find the person who can actually decide, get a verified address rather than a guessed one, and write to them about their business specifically. ContactOut handles the first two — from a company website, from a LinkedIn profile you cannot even message, or in bulk by title, industry, revenue and city. The sentence that earns the reply is still yours to write.