How To Get in Touch With Any Successful Person

I’ve used this method to get on the phone or in the room with people like the CIO of Blackstone, the head of Sequoia Capital, and a few billionaires (one of whom invested in my startup!).

In this article I will show you how to obtain the contact details for any person you’d like to get in touch with, and share some tips on what to write them.

Why should you bother to reach out to people like this anyways?

Don’t take it from me, but from successful billionaire entrepreneurs Ray Dalio and Stephen Schwarzman.

Write or call the people you admire, and ask for advice or a meeting. You never know who will be willing to meet with you. You may end up learning something important or form a connection you can leverage for the rest of your life. Meeting people early in life creates an unusual bond. — Stephen Schwarzman, founder of Blackstone

Remember that you’re looking for the best answer, not simply the best answer you can come up with yourself. — Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater

My perspective is simply this: odds are, if I’m doing something I’m not an expert at, I’m doing something silly. It pays to find an expert and ask them in what way I’m being silly. It might hurt my pride but it will help me get the outcomes I want.

Where to get their contact details

I mainly use two tools to get the emails or phone numbers of people I’d like to get in touch with: Apollo.io and Lusha (links below). Both of these are tools originally built for salespeople looking to prospect for clients.

Say you want to get the contact details for Roelof Botha, the head of Sequoia Capital.

Using apollo.io to get the emails of any partner at Sequoia Capital.

Using the Lusha Chrome plugin to get the email and phone number of the head of Sequoia Capital.

So there you go! Armed with these two tools you should be able to get private phone numbers as well as professional emails for just about anyone out there.

What to write: some tips

Keep it short! Refer to Cialdini’s rules of persuasion. Remember that it’s people’s lizard brain that is going to react to your email, so make it lizard-friendly! If you want advice on a project and you don’t hear back the first time you reach out to someone, try again two weeks later and give them an update on your progress. I know a startup who raised money from the former CEO of Github by doing this.

If you want some fun anecdotes of how I used these tools to haggle with billionaires, check out my article on that here.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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