People search · Sourcing · Produces people
Finds people matching a search and feeds them into the workflow. This is the one sourcing step that starts a workflow from people rather than companies.
When to use it
Use it when your workflow is about contacts — for example, find VPs of Sales at a set of companies and enroll them in a sequence.
What it does
Runs a people search with the filters you set and enrolls the results as people records.
Configure it
Filters — build your search from person and company attributes in one list:
- Job title — match by role keywords. - Seniority — VP, C-level, Director, and so on. - Department — Sales, Marketing, and so on. - Sub-department — a level narrower than department, for when department alone is too broad — for example, splitting Engineering into software development or technical support. Sub-departments are grouped under their parent department in the picker. A sub-department that belongs to more than one department can be picked from any of them. - Persona — match against a persona you've saved in Ocean, instead of rebuilding its criteria by hand. - Changed role in the last — people who changed role in the last N months, optionally narrowed by the kind of change. This is the why-now filter: a brand-new VP of Sales is a different conversation from one three years in. - Time in current role — how long someone has been in their current role, as a range in months. - Company filters — narrow by the person's company (industry, size, technologies, location, and so on — the same company filters as Company search). - Lookalike people and Lookalike domain — find people similar to a seed person, a seed domain, or both together. (For a guided, seed-first version of this, use People lookalikes instead.)
People per run — the maximum number of people to bring in per run.
People per company — cap how many people to return from any one company (0 to 5, default 5). Set it to 0 to take as many people per company as the search returns.
Skip people: tick the kinds of people to leave out of the results. All six boxes are ticked by default.
Already in CRM: people who work at a company that is already an account in your connected CRM.
Already in leads: people already in one of your lead lists, and people at companies already in a lead list.
Already exported: people you already exported from Ocean, and people at companies you already exported.
Under From earlier runs of this workflow: Completed, Dropped, and Failed skip people this workflow enrolled on an earlier run that ended that way. Untick Failed to retry failed people on the next run. These three boxes only show on a step that starts the workflow.
People still in progress in this workflow are always skipped.
If the workflow starts with a Webhook trigger, new steps start with Already in CRM and Completed unticked.
Cost
0.2 credits per result. See Credits in workflows.
Gotchas
People search produces people. The steps after it must accept people — see Companies vs people in a workflow.
To get emails, follow it with an Enrich email and phone step.
With the Skip people boxes ticked, a person already in your CRM, an export, or a lead list is left out, and so is one this workflow already handled on an earlier run. A run can enroll nothing even though the search matched real people. That's the skip list working as intended, not a broken search. Untick the boxes to confirm.