If you wanted to build a list of CTOs/CIOs of tech companies who’ve raised money in the last year with their names and email addresses, you can now do that with People Search. If you want to find the email addresses and phone numbers of founders/CEOs of NY companies who raised money in the last 3 weeks, you can also do that. Or if you want to find the names and email/phone numbers of mid and senior management personnel at recently acquired companies, you can do that now as well.
Earlier this week, we rolled out People Search. We wanted to walk you through how this works as we believe this is really a game changer for our customers. Contact data for company executives and staff as well as investors/acquirers was a recurring request we have been receiving and so we’ve been working hard to close this gap. To this end, we recently added contact records for 2.1 million contacts to CB Insights. Note: For something to be considered a contact record, we must have the person’s name, email and phone number.
Below, we will cover three things:
- How can I use People Search? (example below)
- How do VCs, biz dev, wealth management, consulting and others use People Search?
- How do I access People Search
How Can I Use People Search?
Simple is the operative word. If you’ve used Kayak.com before to look for airfares, People Search is just as easy. So the reality is that in less time than it’ll take you to read this overview, you could probably just login and run a People Search and start getting contact data. We’ve also provided an example with step-by-step instructions below, but depending on your needs and the specificity of the results you’re aiming for, you can put in as many or as few criteria you like.
In this example, let’s assume your goal is to identify C-level, Founders and VPs at tech companies in California who’ve raised mid- to later-stage funding in the last 30 days. That’s pretty specific but is a good example of one popular way we’ve already seen folks using People Search.
Step 1 – Pick the Level / Role You Want to Target
Over to the left, you’ll see a number of different filters you can apply to target exactly the right people. The first filter will allow you to search by Title/Role of the person.
You can select from some preset levels/titles which allow you to search for CEOs, anyone C-level, VPs, Engineer/Architects and more. Or you could also choose to couple these with keywords so if you wanted Vice President of Sales, you could you could use the text box to enter the title keywords you require to find very specific people, i.e. people who are both Vice Presidents and in Sales in this case.
For this example, we’ve picked All C-Level, Founder/Co-Founder and Vice President level people as illustrated to the left.
Step 2 – Add Industry Filter
If you’d like to target people who work in a particular industry, this is where you’d do that. You can get vary granular in fact looking for people at just online payments companies (see example to left) or could look for people who work at Ed Tech companies.
In this example, we’ve picked the Internet, Software and Mobile Sectors.
Step 3 – Add Stage Filter
In this case, you’re interested in companies who are a bit further along in terms of maturity so we’ve excluded the earlier stage seed, angel and Series A companies and have used the Investment Stage filter to select companies who’ve received Series B through to Growth Equity and Private Equity financings. The screenshot to the left highlights the Investment Stage filtering capabilities and the ones you would apply in this case.
Step 4 – Add Date and Geography Filters
If you want deals for a particular time period or just want deals in a particular location (city, state, country) or within X miles of a particular postal code, you can enter those here.
In this example, you’re looking for deals in the last 30 days for companies based in California.
Step 5 – Get your Results
After spending 30 seconds to set your filters (Steps 1 to 5), you simply click the “See Results” button up top and the magic happens now. You will then will see your results, and they will be displayed as shown below.
In this particular case, this search yielded over 1000 people with emails, phone numbers and names. If you just wanted to get contact info for a handful of people, you could just hit “Click to Reveal” and the person’s name, email and phone number would appear. So in the example below, you want to get the details for the VP, Engineering at Xobni (a First Round Capital and Khosla Ventures backed company), you would simply hit “Click to Reveal” and voila!
However, let’s say you want to view many of these results or export them to create marketing lists, import to your CRM, dealflow or other proprietary systems. You can do that as well as illustrated below by clicking the Export to Excel button. This will generate a downloadable report with names, phone numbers, email addresses and some basic information on the company.
How do VCs, biz dev, wealth management, consulting and others use People Search?
This is probably a subject for a more detailed post, but in just the first few days of being live, here are some ways our customers are using CB Insights.
- Business development / sales – If you’re selling technology, find engineers/architects at technology companies you should reach out to. If you’re an accounting firm, identify CFOs and VPs of finance at companies.
- Marketing – You’re planning an event on the Enterprise space and want to reach out to some founders of Big Data companies to invite them to be panelists for your event. Run a search and build your target outreach list in 30 seconds.
- Venture capitalists – Find talent that you can poach for your portfolio companies or reach out to entrepreneurs who recently exited to develop relationships that might drive future dealflow.
- Wealth managers – Find executives, founders and senior employees at recently exited companies.
- Consultants/Strategy Professionals – Need to talk to CEOs and CTOs of Big Data companies to get insight into emerging innovations or developments in a particular space. Use People Search as a flexible, highly customizable Expert Network of sorts
- Economic development – Find companies that you wish to recruit to your area and identify their decision makers and reach out to them.
There are hundreds of applications of People Search and these are just a few that have surfaced in the first few days since launch. We will explore more use cases for People Search over time, but as always, if any questions or ideas, definitely don’t hesitate to reach out or leave a comment below, and we’ll respond quickly.
How do I access People Search?
It’s simple.
- Login to your CB Insights account or set up your CB Insights account here
- When you login, you’ll see a People Search menu item in the navigation (see screenshot below with navigation text magnified)
- Click the navigation item, and start searching away
