Contact Discovery in DealSignal is a powerful feature designed to help you identify and verify relevant contacts within your target market. This process ensures that you have access to accurate and up-to-date contact information for your sales and marketing campaigns.
Initiate contact discovery
There are a few ways to run a Contact Discovery:
From the Dashboard — From the "Recently Verified Discovery Lists" widget, you can select to create and verify a new discovery list.
From advanced search — Once you run the search and get some results, right from the Advanced Search you can launch the process of Contact Discovery, Verification, and Enrichment.
Directly from the Discovery tab — Go to the Discovery tab and click the Discover & Verify Contacts button
Discovery settings
The regular discovery consists of two steps:
Setting up the Criteria
Verification Settings
Setting up the Discovery Criteria
Step 1: Select data type
You can choose either to "Verify Companies & Contacts" or "Verify Companies Only" at the top of the filters section.
Verify Companies & Contacts: To search for both companies and individual contacts.
Verify Companies Only: To search only for companies.
Step 2: Set up your filters
To target your contacts you need to select and apply DealSignal filters in the left panel
Step 3: Preview results
On the right side, preview the table with examples of up to 10 contacts that match your criteria. In some cases, there will be fewer records for preview because verification is required
The total estimated number of such contacts in the market could be at the top of example records.
Step 4: Continue with the Criteria
Click "Continue With This Criteria" to proceed to the verification settings and complete your search setup.
Setup Verification Settings
In the Verification settings tab, you will find a bunch of settings on the right and a preview of all Verification settings on the left.
Let's go through several steps to set up your Discovery.
Step 1: Review criteria
In the Criteria section, double-check that you haven't forgotten to set up the right target audience criteria.
Step 2: Set limits
Options in the Limits sections are very important. They directly impact how many records you will get in the final result and how many credits will be spent.
There are 3 main limits that could be applied:
Company Limits — how many companies we will find to search for required contacts in them
Contacts Per Company — use this limit if you want to limit the number of contacts we will find per company. For example, there are 50 Product Managers in some companies, but we want to find contacts of max 5 of them as more will be odd for the outreach
Contacts Limit — limits the total number of contacts you will receive in the final result. This is required to not overspend credits at one go
Depending on your needs you could also use 3 combinations of these limits:
Limit contacts per company and the total number of contacts — In this case, all three limits work together and you could easily set up how many companies you want to reach and how many contacts from every company and overall
Limit the total number of contacts only — In this case the Contacts Per Company limit will not be applied. This means that for some company you could find, e.g., 10 contacts for the other only 1.
No contacts limit — when this option is selected, the contacts limit is disabled. This means we will find as many contacts that apply to the criteria from a selected number of companies as possible. Be careful with this option as it could overspend credits
Step 3: Contact enrichment settings
In this mandatory settings group, you need to define which contact data you want to receive after verification.
By default, you will always get the refreshed contact profile: contacts company, position, education, and so on. Additionally, you could define these important details:
Work Email: Discover and verify the work email address
Corporate Phone: contacts corporate phone
Direct & Mobile Phone: direct corporate phone or mobile phone
Personal Email: personal, not related to company email. In some cases, people directly share personal emails in the public data like on LinkedIn so we have a few of these. However, DealSignal is not directly collecting personal emails and we do not recommend using personal emails for any email marketing or sales campaigns.
Discover and collecting work emails or phones will cost you additional credits per every contact for which we will do the verification.
In the additional options for the verification, you could also select the "must have" options:
Must have verified work email — if enabled contacts for which we were not able to find and verify work emails will be excluded from the final results. Even, if their profiles were enriched and verified or had other contact data: phones, etc.
Must have direct or mobile phone — if enabled contacts for which we were not able to find and verify direct or mobile phones will be excluded from the final results. Even, if their profiles were enriched and verified or had other contact data: corporate phones, work emails etc.
Must have personal email — if enabled contacts for which we were not able to find personal emails will be excluded from the final results. Even, if their profiles were enriched and verified or had other contact data: corporate phones, work emails, etc.
Step 4: Company enrichment settings
In this mandatory settings group, you need to define which company data you want to receive after verification. These will be those companies that are associated with contacts that we verified for you.
By default, you will always get the refreshed company profile: company name, LinkedIn URL, size, industry, and so on. Additionally, you could set up getting financial, fundraising, intent, technologies, or job posting data.
Step 5: Setup suppression, duplicate handling, and notification settings
As an option, you could manage additional settings:
Company Suppression: Exclude or add companies to suppression lists after the verification process execution
Contact Suppression: Exclude or add contacts to suppression lists after the verification process execution
Notifications: Enable email notifications upon completion (currently always on).
Flag Duplicates: If duplicates are getting into the result, e.g. same person is in the list twice, it will be marked with a flag.
Launch verification
Before launching the verification, on the right, you could preview how many companies and contacts will be verified or how many credits will be consumed with the current discovery settings.
If everything is right, just click the Launch Verification button, and the discovery process will start immediately.
Depending on the number of contacts that you want to get, the process could take up to 24 hours. You will receive notification emails on the process start and process completion.