How to Find Someone’s Phone Number For Cold Call: 4 Ways

Cold calls are still a viable strategy for chasing down leads in B2B marketing.

There’s just something about hearing a human voice on the other end of the line. A phone conversation allows a business to build rapport with and address a client's concerns in real time. A salesperson can also gauge a client’s needs and level of interest in their product as quickly as possible.

Be it a hot call or cold call, you’ll first need their contact information.

Here's how to find someone's phone number on the internet: using public search engines, online directories, social media, and data enrichment tools.

1. Public Search Engines

The first method to find someone's phone number is using public search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo. It's one of the first things most try when searching for contact information.

Simply input a person's name in quotation marks alongside words like "phone number", "telephone" or "contact" and hit enter. The search engine will immediately pull up websites where their names are listed alongside these phrases.

Pros of public search engines

• This method is completely free.
• You can narrow down search results by specifying the location or profession of a person in quotation marks.
• This works best when the person has a distinct presence on the internet.

Cons of public search engines

• It typically only works if the person has a semi-unique name.
• If the person has a very common name like "John Smith," you may end up finding numerous irrelevant results, such as articles about the actor.

• Privacy-focused or offline individuals likely won’t have their numbers posted.
• Small company websites or personal portfolio sites with low traffic may not appear in searches, even with contact info.
• Results may come from outdated sites. For example, someone like "Kylie Brown" found deep in the search results might have changed her number years ago.

2. Online Directories

Online directories are another way to find phone numbers. These come in two types:

• Business directories (Yelp, Google Maps)
• Individual online directories (AnyWho, PeopleFinder, Whitepages)

Business Directories

Some entrepreneurs, freelancers, or business owners use their name as their professional or company name. This allows them to build a brand around their name and link it to their expertise.

If this is the case, then you can find their contact information just by looking up their name on Google Maps.

It’s also possible to find someone’s business phone number if they use part of their name in their listings. However, looking up a person in a business directory won’t work if they have not attached their name to their brand and you don’t know the name of their company.

Online business directories provide an incentive for owners to keep their information up to date as it generates traffic and leads. Therefore the data listed on these sites are usually quite accurate.

Individual Directories

If you’re looking for a personal phone number instead of a business line, you can try using individual directories like WhitePages.com or AnyWho.com.

Some directories require you to input the general location of the person, whereas others make do with a first and last name. One benefit of using these online directories is that they list the age and location of the person, enabling you to narrow down your search considerably.

Although online directories are generally more accurate than using a public search engine, they also run the risk of being outdated if the person or business isn’t tech-savvy enough to update their information, or has moved away from that location.

While business directories are mostly free, personal ones often require a subscription to find private phone numbers.

Pros of online directories

Business directories:

• Listings are usually up-to-date since businesses manage their profiles.
• Yelp and Google vet businesses. So, it reduces the risk of encountering fraudulent or spammy entries.
• Public listings are fully accessible without signups or fees.

Individual directories:

• Useful for finding personal phone numbers
• Some directories also provide access to additional public records like addresses and relatives for verification.
• May also include contacts for smaller businesses or freelancers not found in traditional directories.

Cons of online directories

Business directories:

• Not useful for personal phone numbers.
• Paid listings may overshadow more relevant, unpaid results.

Individual directories:

• Basic info is free, but full reports may be expensive.
• Some directories may show fake results to push premium services.

3. Social Media

Social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are also places where you can find phone numbers. You can head to the search bar and enter a person’s full name to pull up all the relevant profiles.

Facebook and Tiktok offer pages and profiles specifically designed for businesses. When setting up these tools, users are usually prompted to include contact information such as phone numbers or emails so that clients and customers can get in touch as quickly as possible.

Searching on Facebook

If you’re searching on Facebook, one handy trick is to look under ‘Pages’ instead of ‘People’ because most users choose to keep their number private on their personal profiles.

If they have a page, you can hover over the link to see if they have a phone number listed. This can save you a little bit of time.

Searching on Instagram and TikTok

Instagram and TikTok are harder to navigate. When you look up a person’s name, you have to click on each bio to check if they have a number listed there.

This can be extremely time-consuming if the person you are looking for is not using their full name on their social media profile, or if they have a very common name.

Sometimes, if you are lucky, you may hit the jackpot on the first profile and come up with a phone number that you can use.

However, if the person you’re searching for has not attached their business profile to their personal one, or if they’re using their company’s name as a handle instead of their real name, you’ll end up fruitlessly digging through pages and pages of profiles without getting any real results.

Oftentimes, a person’s contact information is only available to a select group of people on social media, such as in the case of Facebook profiles that are “Friends Only”, or locked behind private accounts, making this a more difficult method of finding a phone number.

Pros of social media

• If no phone number is listed, use direct messages features to reach out.
• Verified or official pages are more reliable for accurate contact details.

Cons of social media

• Personal profiles rarely display phone numbers.
• Some users don’t use their real names for usernames. This can make it nearly impossible to find the person you're looking for.
• Need to go through and check each profile manually one by one.
• Some users and small businesses may not keep their contact details up to date.

4. Data Enrichment tools (Sapiengraph)

The previous methods mentioned all require immense patience to dig through search results, directories, and profiles.

However, data enrichment tools like Sapiengraph offer you an easy way out when it comes to looking up someone's phone number, individuals and businesses alike.

Sapiengraph is a growth tooling platform that helps businesses grow fast. For finding phone numbers, you can use two of our tools:

1. Prospector
2. Custom spreadsheet formulas

Prospector

With Sapiengraph's Prospector, you'll not only get phone numbers, but also LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter profiles (if available). Other than that, you'll also get details such as the company they work for, their job title, and personal email address.

With the Prospector, your searches will not cost any credits. You’ll only spend credits when you unlock the profiles you actually want.

Before you unlock any profiles, you’ll see "none found" if the info isn’t available. That way, you won’t get tricked into unlocking something that doesn’t exist! Plus, with the "Has phone numbers" filter, you can avoid wasting credits on profiles that aren't useful.

You can also export the information as a CSV—because, let's be honest, everyone uses spreadsheets!

Here's a quick demo:

Custom spreadsheet formulas

All you need is a LinkedIn profile URL, Google Sheets, and a Sapiengraph account.

Sapiengraph's custom spreadsheet formulas are integrated into Google Sheets, which means there's no need for you to learn any new dashboard interfaces. Most salespeople will know their way around a spreadsheet.

You can also see all the data in one place. This eliminates the need to copy and paste information from various sources, saving you a lot of time and effort.

You can use two methods to find someone’s phone number using Sapiengraph's formula. You can:

1. Create a new Google Sheet and use the Personal Numbers formula to retrieve phone numbers.
2. Use our free Google Sheets CRM template, which automates the process of finding phone numbers for you.

Using Sapiengraph's Personal Numbers formula

Create a new spreadsheet and use the formula:

=SG_PERSONAL_NUMBERS("LINKEDIN_PROFILE_URL")

Simply input your LinkedIn profile URLs in Column A, then input the Sapiengraph formula in Column B. For the attribute "LINKEDIN_PROFILE_URL", use relative cell references to copy the URLs in Column A into the Sapiengraph formula.

For instance, the formula for finding Melanie Perkins' phone number would be: =SG_PERSONAL_NUMBERS("https://www.linkedin.com/in/melanieperkins/")

Finding phone numbers will consume credits from your Sapiengraph account and the amount of credits used will depend on which formula returns a result.

Fret not, every new account gets 100 free credits right off the bat. Since each phone number added will consume 10 credits, you can retrieve up to 10 phone numbers during your free trial.

Using free automated Google Sheets template

If you want a fast and easy way to find more contact information like email addresses, use our free Google Sheets CRM template.

After installing Sapiengraph in Google Sheets, navigate to the sheet named “Add New Lead”, add the person's name and LinkedIn URL, then click the“Add to CRM” button.

After clicking the “Add to CRM” button, the details will show up in the “Leads CRM” sheet. Select the individuals whose phone number and email you want to find, then click the “Enrich” button.

This will find the person’s information, such as emails, phone numbers, locations, roles, companies, websites, industries, and social media profiles from public databases such as LinkedIn and Crunchbase.

Data provided by Sapiengraph is fresh from the last 29 days, you can rest assured that the information is recent and up-to-date.

However, since the Prospector is still in beta, fresh data will only be available for our spreadsheet formulas for now.

If you want to look up more information, Sapiengraph's pricing plans offer different tiers for your specific needs, starting from just $49/month.

Pros of Sapiengraph

• Find many phone numbers all at once
• Over 472 million LinkedIn profiles in our database
• CCPA, GDPR, and SOC2 compliant. We strictly follow legal standards
• Perfect for business purposes such as cold calling
• 40+ filters to narrow down your search
• Fresh profile scraping is available if you want up-to-date information (For spreadsheet formulas only)

Cons of Sapiengraph

• Retrieving phone numbers depends on the person's profile privacy settings

Time is money

Put the days of endlessly searching for someone’s phone number or data in the middle of nowhere behind you and let Sapiengraph do the hard work.

Now that you’ve found all the information you need, you can spend your time on the important stuff, like making calls and connecting with people on a larger scale.

Sign up for a Sapiengraph account to get 100 free credits and explore these time-saving formulas for yourself.

Got a question or want to say hi? Email us at [email protected], and we'll get back to you as soon as possible.

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