An Ultimate Guide On Hunting For CEO Email Addresses

A busy daily routine with endless in-person and online meetings, strategic planning, investor talks, and other company-critical tasks creates almost insurmountable obstacles to getting your sales proposal across to the company CEO. 

Meanwhile, a typical chief executive would check their email inbox often during the day and even at 3 am. Take this chance to reach out to a top-ranking company official!

Forget the phone. Email, only email. 

The main thing is to know how to find the email address to send your precious sales proposal. Our guide can help you hunt for the right CEO email addresses with as little time investment as it’s physically possible.

There are several obvious (and not very obvious) ways to find any email address, including those of decision-makers. We’ll show some of them, going from simple and accessible to hidden and sometimes costly. As practice shows, the latter are more effective, especially when you’ve tried the simple path and got no results or when you face the need to find CEO email addresses at scale.

1. Go to the “About us” page on a company website

This is the most apparent way ever. It’s great for people who believe that truth is always on the surface, and they are often right! You’ll be surprised how many corporate websites have CEO and founder information in the “About us” section. 

If you can’t find the email address you need, try searching as shown in the examples below. Just replace example.com with the domain you are interested in:

• example.com/about

• example.com/about-us

• example.com/contact

• example.com/contact-us

This road is straight and free, and when you’re looking to reach out to a founder or senior executive of a young company in its startup phase of a business growth lifecycle, it’s probably the best path to take. 

Take Snov.io as an example: you can find its CEO’s email address in a heartbeat.

It’s also easy to get contact information about the management of public companies, as they are required by law to keep this information public. With large private companies, however, difficulties can arise. But don’t worry, there are other ways!

2. Call the company and ask for the CEO’s email address

It’s often impossible to get through to key decision-makers by phone with your business proposal, but asking the receptionist or assistant for their email is a viable chance to get it. 

However, it all depends on the corporate structure and the company’s size. Hmm, try this trick and get a valid CEO email address for some of the private tech unicorns with billion-dollar valuations, and see what comes of it.

3. Make assumptions

Well, you can build sound assumptions based on your experience and how the company structures its emails. If you found an email address of someone from the same organization (e.g., on LinkedIn), you can likely guess how the CEO’s email address is structured. 

Potential email structures can look like in the example below:

• john@example.com

• john.doe@example.com

• johndoe@example.com

• j.doe@example.com

If none of your attempts are successful, you can inquire through a generic, role-based company email address, which you can always find on a company website, e.g., contact@example.com.

Usually, this address will redirect you to someone in charge of administering communication. But this is a double-edged sword as, very often, this is exactly the person whose functions include weeding sales offers out as spam. It all depends on the quality of your proposal. So, keep it brief and right to the point, providing a solid reason to answer your inquiry. And don’t forget to address your email to the CEO’s name.

This kind of search is free but time-consuming, with no guarantee of any positive outcome. But if you’re in no hurry and like guess games, try it out! 

4. Explore organizations the CEO is affiliated with

This is a round-about path, but with some luck, it can still bring you results. 

Suppose the senior executive you’re trying to reach leads a holding of companies or is affiliated with multiple companies, funds, or NGOs. In that case, you can write a request to these organizations to provide you with the CEO’s email address. 

This job requires much of your attention and even some detective skills. But if you need that C-level decision-maker who can make the transaction and affect your team’s closing ratio, you’ll do everything possible and impossible to get their email.

5. Goooooooooooogle

How would you start looking for any other information? 

Just enter the name of the person you want between quotation marks and then write “email address,” “mail,” “contact information,” or “contact me.” Using quotation marks lets the system know that you’re interested in the full name of the person, not variations of it. 

And if the name of the CEO is typical, then add the company’s name to your search request to give Google a clear picture of whose contact details you need.

For example, we decided to find the email address of the CEO of a financial software company Intuit by applying the above simple formula.

You can find an email through Google or other search engines if the СEO you are hunting for has left it on Twitter, Facebook, other socials, blogs, forums, and so on. Google is also likely to redirect you to their LinkedIn profiles, yet you will only be able to see CEO email addresses if they are your 1st connections. 

But don’t worry, there are some more sophisticated methods to find their contact details, even on LinkedIn. 

6. Dig deeper into LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a leader among social media platforms in prospecting, and today, 80% of B2B marketers are successfully using it. 

You might think there’s hardly a better choice than LinkedIn, with its 63 million decision-makers when you need to contact and connect with a company CEO. We understand your enthusiasm. However, as practice shows, your connection request with a “Hello” message to a big company’s top-ranking official can be pending for years, together with hundreds of other similar invites to connect. 

Again, email, only email — this is your best strategy to get a response, especially if you want to share your proposal not only with one specific CEO but with dozens or more company leaders at once. 

If your plans don’t include spending many hours of manual work on getting the necessary emails and checking their validity, then automating this process is indispensable. Here, specialized Chrome extensions designed to collect emails specifically from LinkedIn come in handy. 

Snov.io’s LI Prospect Finder extension is one of the most powerful ones gaining popularity with users worldwide. Once installed, it will help you collect emails from relevant chief executives who are LinkedIn users. 

You can utilize the extension with the platform’s free and premium accounts and find dozens of CEO emails within seconds.

Use the tool on a company’s LinkedIn profile page, CEO’s LinkedIn profile page, and a LinkedIn search page — CEO’s email addresses won’t be able to escape from you.

It would be even better if you use LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which allows you to view the accounts of people outside your network safely and filter your lead search using advanced filters.

A perfect combination of LinkedIn Sales Navigator and Snov.io’s LI Prospect Finder can streamline your high-touch prospecting and enable you to find CEO email addresses and add them to your list in no time.

Sales Nav will filter the initial contact list, and the LI Prospect Finder extension will find emails of all the people in the list and save them to your CEO contact list. 

After verifying your email list, you can start sending your personalized email drip campaigns with the help of Snov.io’s creative templates — simple, fast, and incredibly effective! 

Fact: Did you know that marketers who use LinkedIn Sales Nav are 5x more likely to view profiles of decision-makers and 2.5x more likely to connect with them than those who neglect this tool?

Although this method isn’t free as previous ones, the price you’ll pay for fast results is moderate. 

Using LinkedIn Sales Nav will cost you $79.99/month, but you can benefit from it for one month for free and start using the LI Prospect Finder tool on a forever-free plan. You will get 50 free monthly credits on email search, and if you need to compile a short list of contacts, this will be enough to hit your target. 

Should you need more than that, just check out a plan that fits your needs:

You can also do your own research and take a look at some other excellent LinkedIn email extractor tools we’ve collected for you here.

7. Find CEO emails anywhere using lead generation tools

The most prolific way of finding CEO email addresses and any other emails for your prospecting is to take advantage of modern lead gen tools. They give you the superpower to collect emails literally from EVERYWHERE on the Internet. 

For example, Snov.io Email Finder will be a discovery for any salesperson who wants to reach out to key decision-makers within a business. Here’s what it can do to ensure you access the email addresses of even the most heavily-guarded executives:

✔️ Email search by name and company: Find the email address of a top official by searching their first name, last name, and company name. 

Let’s find the CEO of one of the U.S. highest-valued unicorns, Brex, for example. One moment… here it is!

✔️ Domain search: Find CEO email addresses from the website domain that you are visiting. Here we found the Brex CEO’s email address by filtering the search results by job position: 

So, if you intend to source accurate CEO contact information quickly and at scale, the lead gen tools are the right choice. 

With Snov.io, you can find up to 50 emails per month for free by simply signing up. 

8. Finally, buy the CEO email address database

Today, data is the new gold, and many companies build their businesses on selling data for profit. Some of them specialize in collecting and updating specific information on corporate decision-makers. These platforms become sources to get B2B company and contact data, including CEO emails. 

Sometimes, this is the only way to get this information as quite a lot of CEO email addresses may be obscure to avoid spam. If this is your case, check out some of these platforms with a good reputation that claim high data accuracy: Techsalerator, Span, Averickmedia, or Bookyourdata. 

However, purchasing a database with email addresses is probably the most costly way to reach out to chief executives that only big sales teams with huge budgets can afford.

A comprehensive CEO email address database comprising more than 45,000 emails will cost you $3,734 at Bookyourdata, for example. But if this price doesn’t seem eyewatering to your team, why not try and take it all?

9. Make sure you write to authentic email addresses only

None of the above email search methods can be called 100% accurate. The human factor can’t be discounted, and even top managers can sell their part in the company and quit/move to another company. There are many reasons an email can become invalid. 

Therefore, the validity of emails must be verified before sending your sales proposal in order, firstly, not to waste time, and secondly, not to risk your sender reputation.

Here, an excellent idea would be to use an email list cleaning tool like Snov.io’s Email Verifier, which guarantees 7-tier verification of email addresses that cleans your email list from old and invalid emails.

Bottom line

Companies don’t buy; people do, a famous saying goes. And if you want to make something big that usually involves the company’s senior executives, you need a very targeted and personalized outreach. 

For many companies selling tech products and solutions, calling on top managers has become vital for strategy execution and overall sales success. 

Therefore, please don’t be shy to leverage all opportunities to find proper channels to present your ideas to the CEO, and finding their email addresses should be your top priority. Crucially, choose the most rational and least laborious paths for your email hunt. Some of them can impress you with their capabilities through automation.