Finding your prospects in the French company registry

Before you write, you need to know who to. To target French companies, there’s no need to buy a database: the national company registry, open and free, describes every company with its activity, legal form, head office, size and directors. It’s the source Coldlyne starts from.

What the registry contains

The French government publishes the data from INSEE (the Sirene directory) and INPI (the national company registry) through the annuaire des entreprises (its company directory) and its public API, recherche-entreprises.api.gouv.fr. For each company: its SIREN number, its name, its activity code, its legal form, the address of its head office, its headcount band, its creation date, and its directors, whether people or companies.

The filters that matter

• Activity (NAF code): 64.20Z for holding companies, 69.20Z for accounting firms, 62.01Z for computer programming… The code says what the company does, and therefore whether your offer concerns it.
• Legal form: 5710 for SAS, 5720 for SASU, 5499 for SARL, 5498 for EURL, 6540 for SCI. Useful when your offer depends on how the company is set up.
• Location: a department or a postal code, for local prospecting or to split up a search that’s too broad.
• Size: the employee headcount band, from “no employees” to several thousand.
• Status: only active companies deserve an email.

Directors, and those who run several companies

For each company, the registry lists its directors and their role (president, manager, managing director). A director can also be another company, a holding company that chairs its subsidiary. And you can search for every company the same person runs: invaluable when your offer is aimed at people who manage several businesses at once, such as accounting that consolidates several companies.

What the registry doesn’t give you

It contains no email addresses, and that’s just as well. The work address is usually on the company’s website: on its legal notice (mentions légales), which is mandatory, or on its contact page. Coldlyne looks for it there and offers it to you along with the page where it found it, rather than guessing it.

Two limits to keep in mind: the API returns at most ten thousand results per search (split by department when there are more), and a company may have objected to the use of its data for prospecting. Those companies are excluded automatically.

An example

For an offer aimed at the directors of holding companies in the Rhône: activity 64.20Z, department 69, active companies. For each result, its directors who are individuals, then, for each of them, the number of companies they run. In a few minutes you have a list of directors your offer really speaks to, with a concrete reason to write to each one.