As the subject indicates, this article will be a step by step guideline to assist you find the business email address of professionals that you are trying to contact through email. This is a very sensitive subject and many people may not like it as they want to keep their business email address confidential and to be shared with people on need-to-know basis. However, you will eventually need to connect with other professionals for various business purposes and connecting through email is one of the top channels to catch the attention of the person you are trying to connect with and be able to deliver your message in detail. There are many possible business purposes for which you will need to connect with other professionals through email. I am listing below few of them so that you can relate to:

• Sales Managers and Executives trying to identify sales leads and offer services or products by connecting to prospect clients.
• Job Seekers trying to pursue new career opportunities by connecting to recruiters, hiring managers, and head hunters to share their CV.
• Business Development executives trying to identify opportunities for new joint ventures, partnerships and other relevant business opportunities through connecting with other business professionals and owners.

Below are the steps to be followed in order to find the business email address of your targeted person:

• Step 1 – find the name of the person: in this step you need to find the first
  and last name of the target person. You can simply accomplish this using LinkedIn search by specifying the job title, company name and country. For further details on advanced searching on LinkedIn, read this article. (Unleash LinkedIn Search Capabilities)

Now you may face two issues:

1. You may find a person on LinkedIn but the name is hidden for various reasons as in the below example. Now to find out his hidden name, copy his job title and company name as highlighted below and search that in Google. You should most of the time get the profile of the person in the first three results. 
2. You may find a person on LinkedIn but you can see only the initials of the last name as in the below example. You need to do the same search as in the previous example but over here you need to also include the first name which is already shown. You should also get the full name of the person in the first two Google search results. 

• Step 2 – find the email domain of the person’s company: the email domain is referred to the part of the email address that comes after the “@” sign (e.g. the email domain of xxxxxx@lin
  kedin.com is linkedin.com) or the part of the company’s website that comes after the “www.” (e.g. the email domain of www.linkedin.com is linkedin.com). let’s take the example of Tahisha Smith from the previous step. To find out the website of the company, simply enter the company’s name in Google search. You can as such conclude that the email domain is mskcc.org. However, it is not always the case that you can conclude the email domain from the website address as company’s may have different email domain than the website address. To make sure of the email domain, go to the Contact Us page from the company’s website, you will usually find an email address for contacting the company (e.g. info@xxxx.com). If you did not find an email address in that page then do a simple Google search with the company’s name in addition to the word “email” at the end. This should result in finding any email for the company from which you can conclude the email domain.

• Step 3 – search for the person’s email address: now that you know the person’s first and last names as well as the email domain address, type his first and last name in Google search followed by “@email_doamain” (you must use the quotes). Below is an example. Note that you will not always be lucky as in this example. In case you did not find the email address through this step, go to the next step.

• Step 4 – find the email address of other people working in the same company: as mentioned earlier, you will not always be able to find the email address using the previous step. You should accordingly try to find the email address of other people in the same company. You can establish this by doing a simple Google search for (“@email_domain” email) which will result in finding any email address in that domain which were mentioned somewhere on the Internet. Alternatively, you may want to find the first and last name of other people who worked for at least 2+ years in the same company and apply Step 3. You should apply this to recruiters, public relations executives, or sales executives working in the same company as these people usually post their email addresses publicly on the Internet.

• Step 5 – understand the naming convention used for email addresses. Once you find email address of other people working in the same company as described above, understand the naming convention used for email addresses (e.g. firstname_lastname@email_domain, lastname@email_domain, firstnameinitial.lastname@email_domain, etc.).

• Step 6 – conclude the person’s email address. Once you understand the company’s naming convention for email addresses as explained above, you may easily conclude the email address of the target person.

In some cases you will be lucky to find the email address of the target person on his LinkedIn page. This is mostly applicable to recruiters and headhunters who share their email addresses publicly to collect as many CVs as possible.

I hope that you find these guidelines beneficial and will assist you in finding the email addresses of your targeted persons. Make sure to use this guideline professionally and only contact people for business related purposes.