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Finding company phone numbers

I ran into a situation recently at work where I was trying to find the phone number of a company. Checked the company site, including the footer and contact us page, and no phone number was available.

Now, I can see why, as a small startup (which is what this company was), you would not want a phone number available. But we were doing due diligence and I thought a phone call or two would be appropriate.

So, here’s a list of places to go to find a company’s phone number, if it isn’t available on their site:

  • Dun and Bradstreet. Especially useful if the company has an iphone app, because Apple requires DNB registration for a corporate developer account.
  • Facebook often has different information than a corporate website, if they have a facebook page at all.
  • The whois database sometimes has address and phone numbers associated with a domain.
  • The Secretary of State office, for whatever state they are in. This is where business documents are file, and is worth checking.
  • Twitter. Depending on your situation, you can also just tweet them directly: “@foo, I’m looking to call you, do you have a phone number”.
  • LinkedIn, to look for people who know people who work there. This may be more or less useful based on the spheres you run in and where you live.
  • The Wayback Machine, which lets you see how websites appeared at various points in time. This is useful if the company at one point had a phone number on their website, but now does not.
  • Use the above methods on any other names you have turned up during your search, as well.

It is simply amazing what you can find on the internet with some digging. So, if you are looking to find the phone number of that company, because you need to talk to them, don’t give up.