Lesson Learned - How to Find Company Contact Information

The unit-of-analysis in my survey is senior manager who is in charge of new service development, most probably from marketing and business development functions. Since my databases don’t provide such specific information, I have to handpick contacts from company websites. After days of work, I found that there are several ways to retrieve contacts from the Internet (click the photos to enlarge).

Home >> About us >> Management team. This is the most popular place where company put contact information. Some banks use website as part of business (e.g., online banking). In such case, you can try to locate “About XXX” at the bottom of the webpage and then you will enter the corporation website.

Home >> Management team. This is the second most likely place where you can find what you are looking for.

Home >> Global location >> Regional website. It is possible you will log on MNC’s website in which you have to choose your own region. After that, everything is just the same as when you are searching in a local website.

Home >> Contact us >> People locator. If you are lucky enough to find the people locator, you can probably find managers at any level you want.

Home >> Contact us. This is the most efficient way to find company address, but it doesn't appear to be very effective to find contact information. You still can have a try. There may be surprise waiting for you like the following,

Home >> @#$ >> ^&* >> +%@ >> …. Searching everywhere, you still cannot find any contact information. Don’t be panic. There are website like Businessweek and Google Finance that you can find at least board member names.


After you find company information, you may wish to compile it into a company list. Refer to How to Make a Company List.

Lesson Learned – How to Make a Company List

Finally, it comes the time for my survey mailing. Actually I began preparing this survey more than two months ago, so I would like to share with you some of the experiences and lessons about how to make a company list.

Step 1—Be clear about what you are looking for.

First thing first, you should make a list of the key information you are looking for. What is the focal industry, service or product? What are the company types, private or public, listed or unlisted? What’s the company size, MNC or SME? Who will be your respondents, CEOs or senior managers?

My study is about new service development (NSD) tools in financial service industry, so I am looking for: (1) names and addresses of financial service companies; (2) names of business development managers; (3) company size.

Step 2—Collect existing database.

Rome was not built in one day. You have to resort to existing databases and base your own on them. You can consult with your university librarians or seniors to see which databases are at your disposal.

I collected four databases in total and they supplement one another.

Step 3—Find strength and weakness of each database.

Then you should spend some time familiarizing yourself with each database. What key information do they include? What is missing? Are they up-to-date? Are they easy to organize? Are they specific enough? Do they offer a broad enough coverage of the industry?

I randomly choose some company from different databases and compare them to the information provided in company’s website (most accurate). The following is what I found,

Step 4—Choose main database.

Main database is the one you will do modification on it later on. After choosing on main database, you will be able to focus more easily and do the job more efficiently. It should possess, if not all, most of the key information.

OneSource cover all the three type of information I want so that I chose it as my main database.

Step 5—Supplement main database.

No database is perfect, so you should supplement main database with the missing company entries from other databases. This is the most critical yet time-consuming part of the whole process and be prepared that it will take you days and even weeks. One tricky part is that different database may use different names to indicate the same company, i.e., LTD/Limited/Ltd. So, I suggest you first sorting all the companies by their names and then compare the main database with only one database at a time. It’s better to color entries from different database because you can you will know which items have already been updated.

The following is a screen shot of my main database where I use different colors to indicate different sources, and you can find it’s really a tedious work.

Step 6—Polish final database.

After combining databases, duplicated items will become a big problem. It is very annoying for companies to receive several surveys, so you need to pay more attestation to that. What you can do is to sort in a single column (e.g., company name, company address, and manager name) to find whether there are similar items.

Another issue is incorrectness. You don’t want your survey to be returned due to incorrect address, so you’d better double-check the information which you are not so sure with the company website (How to Find Company Contact Information).

Some footnotes: some very helpful videos about survey implementation.

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