To find decision-makers at a company, search for people by their role instead of guessing names: pick the target company, filter a people database by job title, seniority, and department to surface the roles that own the decision you sell into, then pull a verified work email for each match. That's exactly what Enrichley People Search does — 500M+ professionals, filtered in real time by title and seniority, each returned with a verified email ready to reach.
This guide covers the whole play: how to define who the decision-maker actually is, which titles to search for, how to get a verified work email for each one, and how to run it across hundreds of target accounts at once instead of digging through LinkedIn company by company.
Who Counts as a Decision-Maker?
A decision-maker is whoever owns the budget and can say yes to your offer — typically a director-level-or-above role in the function you sell into. But in most B2B deals "the decision-maker" is really a small group, and treating it as one person is how deals stall. It helps to name the roles you're looking for before you search:
Economic buyer
Controls the budget and signs the contract. Usually a VP, Head of, or C-level in the relevant function. This is the person your core pitch is built around.
Functional evaluator
Judges whether your product actually works — a manager or director who'll be asked "does this fit how we work?" Multithread to them early.
End user / champion
Feels the problem daily and can champion you internally. Often the easiest first conversation and the person who opens the door to the buyer.
The founder (small teams)
In startups and SMBs, the CEO or founder is frequently the real decision-maker for anything material. Don't over-target VPs at a 15-person company.
The practical takeaway: define the function that owns your problem and the seniority that owns the budget, then find the people who match — the person who signs first, and the evaluators around them so you can multithread the account.
How Do You Find Decision-Makers at a Company?
You find decision-makers by searching a people database on role, not name. Manually scrolling a company's LinkedIn page works for one account, but it doesn't scale and it leaves you without a reliable way to contact anyone. A role-based people search flips the problem: describe the person you want, and get matching people back with contact data attached. Here's the workflow:
Start from the target company (or list)
Point the search at one company, or a whole set of accounts at once. If you don't have the list yet, build one with lookalike prospecting first, then find the people inside it.
Filter by title, seniority, and department
Combine a title keyword with a seniority band and the right department so you catch every variation of the role — "VP", "Head of", "Director" — without typing out each one. Enrichley filters 500M+ professionals in real time on exactly these fields.
Review the matched people
You get named people who hold the role at each company — not a job-board list of open positions, and not a wall of unrelated employees to sort through.
Get a verified email for each
Every contact comes back with a verified work email — confirmed deliverable, catch-all domains included — so the list is ready to reach with no separate verification step.
The output is one enriched dataset: named decision-makers, each with a verified email, exported to CSV or pushed straight to HubSpot. No manual copy-paste from profile pages, and nothing left to guess.
Which Titles Should You Search For?
Search for the titles that own the function you sell into, filtered to the seniority that owns the budget. Start broad on function, then tighten on seniority — a title keyword plus a "Director and above" filter usually beats listing every exact title, because it catches the "Head of" and "VP" variants automatically. Some common mappings:
Selling to Sales
CRO, VP of Sales, Head of Sales, Sales Director, VP of Revenue. For self-serve tools, add Head of Sales Ops or RevOps.
Selling to Marketing
CMO, VP of Marketing, Head of Growth, Director of Demand Gen. For content tools, Head of Content or Brand.
Selling to Engineering
CTO, VP of Engineering, Head of Platform, Director of Engineering. For dev tools, also target senior/staff engineers as champions.
Selling to Ops / Finance
COO, VP of Operations, CFO, VP of Finance, Head of RevOps. In SMBs, the founder often owns all of these.
One rule that saves a lot of wasted sends: match seniority to company size. A "VP of Sales" filter is right for a 500-person company but returns nothing at a 12-person startup where the CEO is the buyer. Pairing your title search with company-size filters — or with a lookalike company list that's already size-matched — keeps every result relevant.
How Do You Get a Decision-Maker's Email?
Get a decision-maker's email by role-matching their name and company to a verified work address — not by guessing a format like first.last@ and hoping it lands. Guessing produces bounces, and bounces damage your sender reputation. A verified email is confirmed deliverable before it ever reaches you.
Guessing the format
You build [email protected] and send blind. If the format is wrong or the mailbox doesn't exist, it bounces — and on catch-all domains you can't even tell in advance.
Role-matched & verified
Enrichley resolves the person's current employer, finds the address, and confirms it's deliverable — including catch-all domains most tools only mark "risky" — before you see it.
With Enrichley, the email comes attached to the People Search result automatically: every contact ships with a verified work email, so there's no second step. If you're starting from names or profiles you already have rather than a search, the Email Finder role-matches name + company to a verified address on its own — and only charges you for emails it actually confirms. We cover that path in the LinkedIn email finder guide.
Find buyers, not gatekeepers
People Search filters 500M+ professionals by title and seniority and hands back verified work emails — decision-makers ready to reach, straight to CSV or HubSpot.
Try People SearchHow Do You Do This Across Hundreds of Accounts?
You do it across hundreds of accounts by never working one company at a time. The whole point of role-based search is that the same filter runs against your entire target list at once — set the title and seniority once, and get named, verified decision-makers back for every account in a single dataset. People Search takes its account list from any of these:
From a Company Lookalike run
Start from your best customer, generate a ranked list of similar companies, then pull the decision-makers straight off the matched accounts.
From a CSV or HubSpot import
Already have a target account list? Upload a CSV or import companies from HubSpot and get named, enriched, outreach-ready people back — no manual digging.
From filters, with no seed at all
Combine contact and company filters from scratch — industry, size, geography, plus title and seniority — to build a decision-maker list without any starting list.
Whichever route you take, the output is the same: one enriched dataset of verified decision-makers at 1 credit per person, exported to CSV or pushed to HubSpot and ready to sequence. That's the difference between researching accounts and actually working them.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you find decision-makers at a company?
Who is the decision-maker in a B2B sale?
Which job titles should I search for to find decision-makers?
How do I get a decision-maker's email address?
How do I find decision-makers across hundreds of target accounts?
How much does it cost to find decision-makers with Enrichley?
Reach the People Who Actually Sign
Filter People Search to the exact decision-makers at every target account and get a verified work email for each — ready to export or push to HubSpot in minutes.