[salemh]

When I signed up for my local AMA (American Marketing Association) they sold my data out to a number of lists. I haven't had such a terrible instance of absolute blasting of spam with no regard to audience out of two SFO "lead gen" startups that resulted in several complaints to their CMO's to get me off their lists.

The absolute wrong way to gain customers is to blast lists out to purchased people in a "hammer" fashion vs targeted / personalized informational content pieces.

Your idea on:

Find their emails (yes, using services like LeadGenius) and just simply ask them.

Is fantastic, but this service is being used for lead validation/spam.

If people want actual email addresses, they can typically online google search, or use data.com (formerly JigSaw).

Most larger companies don't do demand generation well, and I think many people on here don't see an issue of batch/blasting for "lead gen".

I'm in Marketing Automation for a living and deal with CANSPAM/compliance quite a bit day to day.