If you sell to small businesses, the person you want is rarely in a contact database. We ran 1,000 local businesses through ListMiner and Apollo to measure where owner emails actually turn up. The named decision maker was the smaller half of the answer.
The test
The same 1,000 local businesses through both tools, with the same rule for counting: an email counts only if it verifies live, and catch-all domains don’t count at all. A “verified” label from months ago is not a verification.
On named decision makers, Apollo returned a verified email at 82 of the 1,000 companies. ListMiner returned one at 144. That is 1.75× more, and it is still only 14% of the list.
Small sites publish inboxes. Big sites publish people.
The reason shows up as soon as you open the websites. A company with a leadership page has names and titles you can search for. A twelve-person paving company has no leadership page. It has one line in the footer: info@, sometimes estimating@, and a phone number.
Databases are built from the first kind of site, so they run thin exactly where most businesses are. Below the mid-market, the people who make the buying decision are not written down anywhere a crawler can index and store.
Adding the website changes the number
So we also counted the emails published on the companies’ own websites, verified live the same way.
| Reachable companies, out of 1,000 | Count |
|---|---|
| Named decision maker, Apollo | 82 |
| Named decision maker, ListMiner | 144 |
| Website emails | 500 |
| Either a decision maker or a website email | 570 |
Website emails alone reached 500 companies. 321 of those had no decision-maker email at all; the site was the only way in. Put the two together and the list goes from 144 reachable companies to 570.
Where the names come from
For the named decision makers, ListMiner looks in four places for every company you give it:
- The website. About pages, team pages and footers, read the way a visitor would read them.
- LinkedIn. Our own dataset of 550M+ profiles, refreshed monthly, matched to the company by its name and its aliases.
- Business registries. Owners, officers and registered agents on the public record.
- The open web. An AI agent that searches for who runs the company and reads what it finds: podcasts, interviews, local press, awards.
The last one is where the small-business owner usually turns up. Their name is not on the site and not on LinkedIn, but they were the guest on an industry podcast, and the show notes say so. From a name and a domain, the agent builds every pattern the email could take, and the mail server tells us which one is real.
What this means for your list
Ask for both kinds of email. In the campaigns we run at our agency, cold.email, roughly 90% of the opportunities from unique companies come from emails found on company websites rather than from our named decision-maker data alone. Using both sources gives us about ten times the opportunities of decision-maker data on its own.
A bigger database would not have changed that. Reading the company did.