Prospecting — collecting prospect data to build a list that you can use to fuel your sales engagement efforts and grow your pipeline — is a challenging and time consuming process. It’s also a very important part of the sales process in general, so you need to approach it with all the seriousness.

There are a few different data sources that you can use to find contacts for prospecting.

If you require large amounts of data and are ready to sacrifice the quality of provided contacts, popular B2B databases should be your first choice. There are several reliable providers here that offer millions of contacts to filter out based on your criteria, varying mostly in price. Yet, the data on such lists aren’t always up to date.

If you are mostly interested in the quality of contacts, it’s definitely better to go with manual research. In this case the best data source you should consider is LinkedIn. The largest professional network in the world, it boasts an impressive number of users — businesses and business contacts.

Speaking of Linkedin, there are several ways to find prospect emails there. First, you can use search to discover the profiles that match your buyer profile and visit each profile to see if it features the person’s contact details. This can be done by looking at the person’s profile and trying to find clues in their work history or contact information.

For example, if you see that someone is working at a certain company you can try to guess the person’s email based on the common formulas using the first, last name and the company domain. Or, if you see that someone has listed their personal website in their contact information, you might be able to find the required information there.

Yet, a better way to find LinkedIn emails is to simply use an email finder tool, which will scour the platform for the available email address related to each given profile (or all contacts associated with the chosen company). There are also tools that allow you to enter in a person’s name and LinkedIn URL, and they will return any email addresses associated with that account.

Email finders can be helpful, but not all of them are accurate. If you’re serious about prospecting and connecting with someone on LinkedIn, make sure to pick the most trusted and reliable email finder on the market or take the time to do some research and find their email address yourself.