Finding the one person who actually owns the problem

The best written email in the world does nothing in the wrong inbox. Here is how to find the right one in about ten minutes, without a data tool.

Generic inboxes are where messages go to be ignored

info@, hello@, contact@ and enquiries@ are read by somebody whose job is to sort post, not to solve the problem you are writing about. At best your message gets forwarded, stripped of context, to the person you wanted in the first place. At worst it sits alongside forty pitches a week and is deleted in a batch on a Friday.

The whole difficulty of cold outreach is competition for attention. A named recipient who owns the thing you are writing about is not really cold at all.

Work out who feels it, not who buys things

The person to write to is whoever is absorbing the pain right now. Not the CEO, unless the company is small enough that the CEO is also doing the invoicing, and not procurement, who buy what somebody else has already asked for.

A job ad tells you this outright: it says who the role reports to, and that manager is the person currently covering the work. A recall points at the shop owner holding the stock. A rule change points at whoever signs the thing that has to change, usually operations or finance. A published contract points at the named contact on the notice, which is the rare case where it is simply printed on the page.

Ten minutes, in this order

Start on the company's own site: team, about and press pages name people, and press releases name the person who spoke for the department you care about. Then LinkedIn, searching the company plus the function rather than a job title, because titles vary wildly and functions do not. Then the country's business register, which for a small company names the directors for free.

Work out the email pattern rather than guessing the address: one confirmed address on the site (usually in a press contact or a job ad) tells you whether the company uses first.last, firstinitiallast or just first, and that pattern almost always holds across the whole company.

In a small business, it is the owner, and that is easier

Under about fifteen people there is usually no layer to get through. The owner is the operations manager, the finance department and the person who will actually read a five-sentence email at nine in the evening. Write to them directly, keep it short, and do not perform being a company.

If you genuinely cannot find a name

Send it to the generic address anyway, but address the body to the role: "for whoever looks after the depot". It is noticeably better than "To whom it may concern", because it tells the person sorting the post exactly where to put it.

Then get on with the next one. One correct recipient is worth thirty wrong ones, and ten specific messages beat two hundred generic ones, so the time is better spent finding the next real name than perfecting a message to nobody.