The Scenario
Your CEO mentioned in the all-hands last week that the business development team should be targeting "engineering managers at European fintech startups." Someone assigned the task to you. There is a blank Excel workbook with a tab called "Prospects" waiting for data. PDL can run this search. You have never written a PDL Elasticsearch query before, and you are not sure what the correct syntax is for filtering by job level, region, company stage, and company size at the same time.
The bad version:
- Read through the PDL person search API documentation for 90 minutes trying to understand the query structure
- Write a query that you think is right, run it, get back results that include VP and Director level people because "engineering manager" in natural language doesn't map cleanly to a single PDL seniority value
- Refine the query twice more, get a usable result, export the JSON, flatten the fields you need into columns, paste them into the Excel Prospects tab
Two hours of API documentation reading to fill a spreadsheet that your CEO described as a "quick starting list."
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads your plain-English description of the target audience, generates the PDL query, runs the person search, and writes the results directly into the workbook.
Use PDL to search for engineering managers at European fintech startups with under 300 employees by first generating the search query, then executing it, and populate my Excel Prospects sheet with name, title, company, and email.
What You Get
- Matching contacts written into the Prospects sheet with name, title, company, and email columns populated
- Results filtered to Engineering Manager level contacts at European fintech companies with under 300 employees per PDL's classification
- The generated Elasticsearch query written into a header cell so you can inspect it, adjust the criteria, and re-run with a different parameter set
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
You want to restrict to contacts with a verified work email address available in PDL
Search PDL for engineering managers at European fintech startups with under 300 employees. Filter to only contacts where PDL has a work email on record. Populate the Prospects sheet with name, title, company, and work email, up to 150 results.
The business development team wants to focus on Germany and France first
Search PDL for engineering managers at fintech startups with under 300 employees based in Germany or France. Generate and run the query, write name, title, company, email, and country to the Prospects sheet, up to 150 results.
You want company founding year to identify the youngest startups
Search PDL for engineering managers at European fintech startups with under 300 employees. Write name, title, company, email, and the company's founded year to the Prospects sheet. Flag companies founded after 2018 in a column as "Early-stage."
Generate the query, run it, remove contacts already in the CRM, and add a country routing label
Search PDL for engineering managers at European fintech startups with under 300 employees. Generate and run the query, pull 200 results. Remove any row where the email matches a contact in the CRM Contacts tab. Write name, title, company, email, and country to the Prospects sheet. Add a Region column: "DACH" for Germany, Austria, Switzerland; "Nordics" for Scandinavian countries; "Western Europe" for France, Netherlands, Belgium, UK; "Other" for the rest.
One prompt builds the prospect list, cleans against the CRM, and applies regional routing — the business development team gets a workbook they can act on without a follow-up data request.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open a blank Excel workbook or an existing prospect table. Describe your target audience in plain English and ask SheetXAI to generate and run the PDL search and write the results in. Then see how to enrich those contacts with seniority and department data or go back to the People Data Labs overview.