We Checked 200 "Verified" Sales Leads. 81 Had Already Left the Company.
We took 200 sales leaders from a popular lead finder on Apify: VP, Head and Director of Sales in the US, with verified emails only. The tool had checked every address, and every row came back marked deliverable, meaning the mailbox exists.
Then we checked the people behind those emails. Do they still work where the list says they work?
| 200 "deliverable" leads | |
|---|---|
| Still at the company | 84 |
| Already left | 81 |
| Not enough data to tell | 35 |
81 out of 200 had moved on. If you only count the people we could check, that's about half.
Why the verifier said "deliverable"
A verifier asks the mail server one question: does this mailbox exist? When someone leaves, the mailbox often stays. The company forwards it to a manager, or the domain accepts every address. The server says yes, so the verifier says yes.
Your email still goes out. It lands in a mailbox nobody reads, or with the person who replaced your contact.
Where they went
| The list says | Where they are now |
|---|---|
| VP, Regional Sales Director at an insurer | Sales Director at a competing insurer |
| Head of Sales Ops at a payments company | VP of Revenue Operations at a payroll startup |
| Senior Director, Head of Sales at a review platform | SVP of Sales at a production software company |
| VP, Sales Director at a publisher | Retired |
People who moved are good leads
Someone who just changed jobs already knows your category. They have a new budget and want quick wins in the new role. For 44 of the 81 we found their work email at the new company. So the same list also gave us 44 warm leads.
Try it on your own list
Take the emails from last quarter's outreach and run them through our Job Change Detection + Email Verifier on Apify. For each address you'll see whether the person is still at the company. If they left, you get the new company, their title and, when we have it, the new work email.
Pricing: $3 per 1,000 emails checked, plus $20 per 1,000 when we identify the person. Failed checks are free. It's also available through our API and to AI agents via Apify MCP.
How we measured: 200 leads from one search on October 29, 2026, checked again on November 2, 2026. "Left" means the person's current job in our profile data is at a different company. Our profiles refresh monthly and run one to two months behind, so the real share of people who left is likely higher.