I’m the marketing executive for a creative agency in St Louis, MO. You’re my lead generation expert. We just had a meeting outlining our core growth focus for the next 5 years: headshots for continuing education programs and educational cohorts. You are now on the hunt for the direct contact info of local program directors. We are going to start with a list of 100 individuals: their first and last name, their formal title/position in their organization, the name of their organization, their organization’s website URL, the individual’s direct email (mandatory), and direct phone number (optional). I need this presented in a common spreadsheet format. You may scrub any resource you have available to you, including but not limited to: the internet, linkedin, business and non-profit directories, industry resources, public reports, press releases, event pages, job postings, etc.
Look into corporate programs, executive education, community colleges, university extracurricular programs, independent training providers, nonprofits training providers, professional associations, certificate programs, leadership cohorts, and other programs that target working professionals of career age. We want to be reasonably confident “a new headshot” would be an appropriate offering to their program. For example, a math tutoring program for high school students would not be appropriate, as they are not in a career transition or trajectory for which a headshot would be an appreciated benefit. On the opposite end, a leadership development program designed to enhance the leadership skills of middle management professionals would be an optimal partner. Consider as minimum criteria: would the value of this organization’s program be enhanced in the eyes of its participants (eg, they would be more likely to recommend this program to a peer) if they received an updated professional headshot as part of completing the educational and practical aspects of the program?
And make at least 70% of this list be outside the university/college ecosystems…. we don’t want to be overly focused on college-oriented programs, in fact even better if these programs target established professionals, that’s our best niche!
FOCUS StL (https://focus-stl.org) is a near perfect example, and the closer the organization or program is to this example the better opportunity we may have. Some imperfect options are welcome too, as long as they meet the minimum criteria that I mentioned above. A diverse list is appropriate.
You may need to get creative to find actual email addresses. We have run into this obstacle before. Sometimes we can find an email address listed on job or program listings, press releases, or something that seems unrelated to our direct approach of looking up program websites. It can be impossible or impractical for a single human to search out the variety of potential sources, but that’s where I’m depending on your efficiency, creativity, and ability to search far and wide.
Please keep in mind that general or bulk email inboxes like info@domain.com are not direct email addresses, so they are not typically useful to directly contact an individual….. if you must gather these in your judgement, then keep them in an overflow list, perhaps as a 2nd tab in the final output spreadsheet.
In some very large institutions like universities or enterprise corporations, it may make sense to have 3-4 contacts within one organization. However notice how, as it relates to our business goals, if we have a list of 100 contacts, and there are 4 contacts per organization, then we can only reach 25 new organizations this way. If you want to keep up this pattern – which isn’t a terrible idea because sometimes it does take 2 or 3 entry points into an organization – then I would request we expand this list to 200 contacts.