Let’s get into character: You’re a fresh sales recruit in a spot-on company and you’re ready to make some green rain 💸 This is your first day, and your boss drops on you this huge file of potential leads contacts (mostly emails). No time to panic, you swallow that anxiety so you start right away. The first thing on the To-do list is “Find the lead’s LinkedIn”.
Your brain goes “Okay, cool…but what for? “ Isn’t getting in touch via Linkedin kinda ..meh ? “ Let us explain.
Why should I find the Linkedin of my leads?
Your LinkedIn profile and social networks serve as the first RELIABLE point of contact with potential clients/employers. In terms of networking and lead generation, Linkedin has been the most widely used professional network platform of the decade.
However, it can be difficult to locate a specific profile if it is not sufficiently detailed. Finding a person's information is easier if you already know who you're looking for, if you don't, how can you ensure that the information you receive is really “legit”?
This person's email address is: personal? professional? scam? hard to tell.
So what can you do? How can you find your lead’s LinkedIn profile?
Google SERP (The old-fashioned way):
The easiest way to find a person's Linkedin profile page is by asking your best friend (Google).
For example, if you google you type “julien@visum.run LinkedIn” on Google, you find your search results for the LinkedIn user, and just have to click the 1 position link with the right Linkedin URL.
The difficulty with this method is that it works only for business email addresses and the prospect’s profile page on Linkedin has to be up to date for it to work.
✅ pros: easy to use
❌ cons: only works for business email addresses
Outlook Synchronization (The hacker’s way):
Another (hack) way to locate and find LinkedIn profile by email address is to use Microsoft Outlook Linkedin email finder tools to find the LinkedIn of email contact. All you have to do is synchronize your Outlook account with your Linkedin. You'll then get the Linkedin pop-up notification window, have to add a new contact in Microsoft Outlook and go to the “Linkedin” section.
However be careful with this method, it will only work for the email address the last LinkedIn profile user has used to post or sign up (mostly personal email). This technique is very precise but takes a lot of time to set up and search manually.
✅ pros: very precise solution for personal email
❌ cons : difficult to set up & can’t manage volume & time consuming & don’t work for professional email
ChatGPT (The New way):
With the latest advancements in AI models that can directly fetch real-time information from the web, finding relevant data linked to an email address has become significantly more efficient. Over the past year, I have meticulously refined a prompt designed to optimize email-based searches using ChatGPT. This prompt enables you to extract valuable insights about an email address quickly. To illustrate, I'll share an example of the optimized prompt I developed, which you can leverage to gather useful information about an individual.
Here the prompt, replace the value of the email (here "julien@visum.run") with the email you want to search:
Given an email address as input, your task is to collect and analyze publicly available data associated with it. Follow these steps while ensuring compliance with ethical and legal guidelines.
1. Data Collection Sources:
- Social Media: Check for profiles associated with the email on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and GitHub.
- Data Breaches: Search for any appearances of the email in known data breaches (e.g., Have I Been Pwned).
- Company Domains: If the email is corporate, identify the company, its website, and relevant personnel.
- WHOIS Lookups: If the email is linked to a domain, retrieve WHOIS registration information.
- Public Databases & Forums: Scan forums, public databases, and archives for any mentions of the email.
- Newsletter Signups: Identify if the email is associated with specific services or newsletters.
2. Data Enrichment & Analysis:
- Email Validity & Type: Check if the email is valid, active, and determine if it’s free (e.g., Gmail) or corporate.
- Associated Names & Usernames: Extract any linked full names, aliases, or usernames.
- Social Footprint: Estimate the individual’s online presence based on public activity.
- Geolocation Clues: If available, infer location based on domain, social media, or public profiles.
- Profile Pictures & Avatars: Extract profile images if publicly available.
- Job & Education Details: If found on LinkedIn, GitHub, or other platforms, extract professional details.
3. Output Format (Structured JSON):
{"email": "example@email.com","validity": true,"type": "corporate","associated_names": ["John Doe"],"usernames": ["johndoe123"],"social_profiles": {"LinkedIn": "linkedin.com/in/johndoe","Twitter": "twitter.com/johndoe","GitHub": "github.com/johndoe"},"company": {"name": "Example Corp","domain": "example.com","position": "Software Engineer"},"data_breaches": ["Adobe 2013", "LinkedIn 2016"],"geolocation": "San Francisco, CA, USA","profile_pictures": ["https://example.com/johndoe.jpg"]}
4. Guidelines & Constraints:
- Use online available data.
- Do not try to create a script for this.
- Prioritize accuracy over quantity.
- Avoid speculative data.
- Format results cleanly and provide sources when possible.
Here the email: "julien@visum.run"
And here the response I receive from this prompt:
✅ pros: very precise solution for professional email
❌ cons : The model can take some time (up to 1 min) to search and deliver the data for you
Reverse Contact (The Best Way):
Fear not my friends, for there is another way to find someone's email and that can help you keep your job. Four magic words: Reverse email lookup tool. All you need is an email address, and the tool will do the rest. 🦸
This tool can look up any information connected to an email address, by searching through public records and other online resources; Identifying the owner of an email account, verifying the person’s name and identity, employer, and contact info, additional information including job title and phone numbers, social media, relevant company details like company name/company domain/ company website, and much more…
Reverse Contact is specialized in finding LinkedIn profiles from email addresses and will allow you to take your lead enrichment process to the next level by enriching your database in a few clicks. How to use Reverse contact ? Easy peasy:
Profile Lookup (Individual Lookup)
Do you have to find people's Linkedin pages and just have some email addresses? Very simple, just use the unique search tool in the Reverse Contact application: Just put an email in the search bar, hit the button, and get on with your sales prospecting campaign.
Enrich email list (Bulk Lookup)
Do you have a list of many emails and don’t want to search one by one? Use the CSV Reverse Contact enrichment. The enrichment takes approximately 10 mins for 1000 records.
Integrations
We do know that if you have a lot of new emails to enrich each day, you don’t want to do it manually each time. With our API key, you can integrate Reverse Contact in your enrichment tools and create an automation process to automatically enrich new contacts, leads or subscribers in your current CRM. If you’re not a developer, don’t worry we got tools for you, you can integrate the solution via Zapier, Make, or n8n with NO-code.
✅ pros: easy to setup & very precise solution & can manage volume
❌ cons: paid tool but offers more data, a free plan, and different pricing
That's all folks! Happy finding!
