How to find email addresses without LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Sales Nav is $100/month. Here are 5 ways to find contact emails without it.
Why Sales Nav isn't actually required
Sales Nav's value is filtering + signals, not the email addresses themselves (LinkedIn doesn't show emails directly). For pure email-finding, free LinkedIn + a directory + a finder tool gets you 90% of what Sales Nav delivers, at $0-30/month total.
1. Free LinkedIn search + SMBs.com
Find the company on free LinkedIn. Click "People" tab. Identify the title you want. Then look that person up on SMBs.com — if we have them, the verified email is one click away (free, 3 unlocks/day).
2. Hunter.io free tier
50 free email-finder lookups per month. Type the person's name + company domain → get the likely email + a verification score. Works on roughly 60% of B2B contacts.
3. Email pattern + free verifier
Find ANY publicly-known email at the company (the "Contact us" page, a customer-support reply, a job posting). Note the pattern. Apply it to your target name. Verify with Hunter free or NeverBounce free.
4. Apollo free tier (use sparingly)
Apollo gives 5 credits/month free. Save them for the lookups that the others miss. The Chrome extension is the most useful free feature.
5. Direct ask in DM
For the highest-value targets, send a LinkedIn DM asking "what's the best email for you?" before sending the cold email. ~30% will reply with their actual address. The other 70% you target via methods 1-4.
What you give up vs Sales Nav
- Saved searches with real-time alerts (good news: SMBs.com saved searches coming Pro)
- Boolean search filters on titles/seniority (workaround: filter on company first, then manually scan)
- InMail credits — but InMail conversion is mediocre anyway
For most use cases, the workaround is worth saving $100/month.
Building SMBs.com — the free directory of every small business worldwide. Previously: founder + operator at FIH Inc, focused on small-business M&A advisory.