HOW TO COLD-EMAIL SOMEONE WHO MAY OR MAY NOT OWN THE COMPANY?
I've started building a pipeline of companies to cold-call/cold-email and realized quickly how difficult it is to confirm that a person is truly the owner of a company. E..g. maybe the closest I can find by google sleuthing is the "president" - this could be the owner, but not guaranteed. Or, I found a company where LinkedIn lists an individual as "VP of Engineering" .... but they've been around since[redacted]the year the company was founded) and a scraping site site lists them as President.
In such cases do you:
a) just assume you are emailing the owner and assume they'll ignore if not
b) start off by asking "are you the right person to talk to? if not, who is?" (could be awkward if they aren't the right person?)
c) dig deeper than I've been able to dig to get the right person's info
Related: if you can only find a public contact phone # or email address that likely goes to customer service or sales... do you just ask "can I be connected to the owner?"
I agree that I definitely wouldn’t call a public number and say that I want to talk to the owner about buying!
In general, if the company seems really attractive/great fit with what I am looking for, I tend to be a bit vague in my email communication so as to be able to back pedal if it turns out that the person is not the owner (I have several times ended up connecting with a hired CEO who would be the person I'd be directly replacing, so high conflict of interest there on their behalf in helping connect with owner). However, I am in a different country so some tactics might work differently than in the US.