About a
week ago, I had a very bad experience with an airline. When I returned home, I decided to email the
CEO. How did I get his email address? Before, I let you in on my little secret, I
wanted to let you know that what I’m about to tell you can be used in the sales
world as well and that is why I’m sharing this with you.
First, I
needed to find out the name of the CEO.
I went to Google and entered the following in their search box: “CEO and (the name of the airline was
inserted here).” In the natural search
results, I found out the name of the CEO.
I wanted to confirm his name because these days CEOs are in and out
like water so I went to Yahoo Finance to seek confirmation. Once there, I typed in the ticker symbol of
the company and then clicked on the “Profile” button to the left. Yes, he was definitely the CEO.
Now, the
hard part, how do you find the CEO's email?
I went back to Google and typed in the name of the CEO and their company
along with the word “email.” Did I find
anything? I didn’t find anything so then I typed in
the following: “@(the name of the airline was inserted here).com” and followed
this with the word “email.” In the
natural search results, I found the email address of a media contact
there. The structure of the email was firstname.lastname@(name of airline).com. Ok, now I found an email address structure and I was definitely on to something.
To double
and triple confirm the structure of his email address I decided to visit the
following websites:
- Godaddy.com (type in the name
of the domain in the search box, click go, click on the "click here for more
information link" and then look to see how the technical contact’s email address is
structured)
- Businesswire.com and
PRnewswire.com (type in the name of the company and search for press
releases and locate contacts at the company at the bottom of the news
release to confirm email structure)
- MarketWatch.com and Yahoo
Finance (type in the ticker symbol and search the news headlines and
releases and apply the same techniques as in the previous bullet point.
This process
that I’ve just described above has worked many times over to find email
addresses of major CEO at other 1000 companies Fortune. Sometimes you might need to play around with
the structure of email address. What this really means is you will need to test different versions of the email address before you hit the
CEO Jackpot.
