The decision maker is the person who owns the problem you solve and controls the budget to fix it — which is usually not the most senior person you can find. On LinkedIn you locate them through the company’s People tab, filtered by function rather than seniority, then verify the role is current and the company is the size where that title carries real authority. The rest of this guide is how to do that quickly and how to map the people around them who can also kill the deal.
Start with the function, not the title
The most common mistake is sorting the People tab by seniority and messaging whoever is at the top. Titles inflate wildly with company size. A “Head of Growth” at a fifteen-person startup signs their own contracts. The same title at a 3,000-person company runs a team of four and asks a VP, who asks a CFO.
Work backwards from your product instead:
- Selling a security tool → the person who owns security, which at smaller companies is often the CTO or a platform lead, not a CISO who does not exist yet.
- Selling a recruiting service → the Head of Talent, or the hiring manager for the role in question.
- Selling a sales tool → the VP of Sales or the RevOps lead, rarely the CRO at a large company.
Find the title that owns the problem. Authority follows ownership more reliably than it follows seniority.
The five-step search
- Open the company page and click People. This is the fastest complete view of who works there, and it updates faster than individual profiles do.
- Filter by title keyword. Search the function word — “security”, “talent”, “revenue operations” — rather than a full title string, which misses variants.
- Sanity-check headcount. Under 50 employees, expect the founder or a single functional lead to decide. 50 to 500, expect a director or VP with real budget. Over 500, expect a committee and a procurement process.
- Open the profile and check tenure. Someone three weeks into a role has no budget yet but often has a mandate to change things. Someone eight years in has budget and no appetite to change anything. Both are useful to know; they need different messages.
- Check recent activity. Posts and comments in the last month tell you the person is reachable on LinkedIn at all, and give you something specific to open with.
Map the buying committee, not just one name
B2B purchases stall because someone nobody talked to said no. Before you reach out, identify four roles — they are often four different people, and occasionally two of them are the same person:
| Role | What they care about | Where to find them |
|---|---|---|
| Champion | The problem, and looking good for solving it | The team that feels the pain daily |
| Economic buyer | Budget and priorities | One or two levels above the champion |
| Technical or security reviewer | Risk, integration, compliance | IT, security, or engineering |
| Blocker | Whatever they own that your product touches | Procurement, legal, or an adjacent team lead |
You do not need to contact all four in week one. You do need to know they exist, because “I’ll take this to the team” is where unqualified deals go to die.
Verify before you write
Two checks worth thirty seconds each:
- Is the role current? LinkedIn profiles lag reality by months. If the company People tab still lists them and the role has no end date, that is reasonable evidence. If the person posted about a new job last week, that is better evidence.
- Is the company in a position to buy? A perfect decision maker at a company that just froze hiring is a wasted email. Recent funding, active hiring in the relevant function, and a new leader in the target department all point the other way.
That second check is the one most people skip, because it means opening the company page, the jobs tab, and a news search before writing a single line.
Doing it in one click
This is the part LinkedIntel automates. On a LinkedIn company page it returns the decision makers with their titles and seniority alongside the account context — funding, hiring signals, leadership changes, red flags like layoffs or cost cutting, and a buying-signal score of IMMEDIATE, MODERATE, or COLD. The manual version above takes about five minutes an account. The extension version takes about ten seconds, which is the difference between researching ten accounts a week and researching all of them.
It does not find email addresses or phone numbers. Once you know who to contact, a tool like Hunter.io, RocketReach or Lusha handles that half.
Where to go next
Once you have the name, the next question is whether the timing is right. What are buying signals in B2B sales covers how to read and score that, and how to research a company before a sales call covers the wider account picture. If you are doing this without a paid seat, LinkedIn prospecting without Sales Navigator walks through the free workflow, and LinkedIntel for SDRs shows what the automated version looks like in a daily queue.