How to Scrape Leads From LinkedIn

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TL;DR:

• LinkedIn is a valuable acquisition channel for B2B SaaS companies.
• There are manual and web scraping methods to scrape leads from LinkedIn.
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator and web scraping tools like Phantom Buster and TexAu can be used for lead scraping.
• Web scraping tools require manual input and pose risks of account suspension.
• Letterdrop offers a safe and automated way to get a list of engaged accounts for BDR teams.

If you're in B2B SaaS, your buyers are on LinkedIn — which is a more-than-viable acquisition channel for B2B.

All there is to do now is to ‎organize prospects into a list that your BDRs can go after.

Doing this on your own can add several hours to your workflow. There are tools to help you accelerate the process (although some are safer to use than others.)

Why Scrape LinkedIn for Leads?

LinkedIn is the natural selling channel for B2B.

• Most decision-makers at companies are already on the platform to build teams and recruit
• Professionals are connecting with peers and looking to learn from them
• It's not as saturated as Twitter or Facebook

The platform also lets you search for and find your exact ICP with ease, whether by job title, industry, employment status, and more. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is particularly useful for prospecting (more on that later.)

Once you find accounts to go after, you can create a list for your BDRs.

Companies like Refine Labs are reaping the rewards from leveraging LinkedIn as a lead source — they drove $50M in pipeline in two years.

Ways to Scrape LinkedIn for Leads

1. Manually With LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator has deep searching and advanced filtering features that let you indicate what types of leads you want to see based on region, industry, function, and seniority level.

You can even filter by buyer intent, which increases your chances of targeting warmer leads.

Using these preferences, the platform will begin to surface account and lead recommendations automatically.

Here's how to best use Sales Nav to scrape for leads:

1. Upload your "Book of Business", either through syncing your CRM to Sales Nav or by manually adding current target accounts
2. Hyper-focus on the specifics of who you're targeting using Lead and Account Filters. This helps you zero in on factors like:
   1. annual revenue
   2. buyer intent
   3. headcount growth
   4. recent job changes
   5. seniority
   6. role
   7. industry
   8. location, and more
3. Set up alerts to stay up-to-date on the latest target accounts

Once you've narrowed down your target accounts to a tee, you can export this lead list as a spreadsheet or CSV file to be shared with your BDRs.

Note: Using Sales Nav is still a very manual process. It may recommend relevant accounts, but you're responsible for organizing your lead lists yourself.

2. With Web Scraping Tools

Web scrapers can help you scrape and export data on X amount of specified LinkedIn accounts to go after.

Web scrapers make use of cookies or proxy bots that crawl a specified list of LinkedIn profiles on your behalf — such as according to a LinkedIn search, group, individual URL, or spreadsheet of URLs — and extract every piece of publicly available data for you.

This includes details such as a name, education history, company, role, and contact information.

You can then forward this list to your BDRs.

It's also possible to scrape LinkedIn connections with web scrapers in much the same way.

Two popular web scrapers are Phantom Buster and TextAu.

PhantomBuster's LinkedIn Scrapers

PhantomBuster uses cookies to scrape data and has many "Phantoms" or use cases for scraping LinkedIn in particular.

The most valuable for scraping leads is through the LinkedIn Search Export and Group Members Export:

1. With the LinkedIn Search Export, you can conduct a search, apply custom filters to target your ICP, and give that search URL to Phantom Buster. It will then give you a list of target accounts based on your search.
2. The LinkedIn Group Members Export will pull a list of the most recent 2,500 members of a LinkedIn group you're in.

You can then extract contact details using the LinkedIn Profile Scraper Phantom, which requires you to give over a list of target URLs.

TexAu's LinkedIn Scrapers

TextAu offers more robust scraping capabilities than Phantom Buster, but works in a similar way.

Its Notable LinkedIn scraping abilities include:

• Extracting and compiling a list of accounts that have liked or commented on your posts. This helps you focus on leads that are actually engaging
• Extracting a list of emails based on profile URLs
• Extracting a list of attendees from a LinkedIn event
• Extracting a list of Sales Nav search results, and more

Chrome Extension Web Scrapers

Various Chrome extensions, such as Lusha and Dux-Soup, offer the capability to scrape data from LinkedIn, Salesforce, Gmail, and company websites.

Dux-Soup is not only compatible with LinkedIn but also with Sales Navigator and Recruiter.

2.1 Web Scrapers Are Manual and Risky

While tools like Phantombuster and TexAu are useful, they pose two significant disadvantages:

1. They still require a lot of manual input and configuration on your part — such as the particular URLs or profiles you want to target, the amount of results you want, and whether you want to repeat the scrape. You can lose a couple of hours of week on customizing your web scraper
2. LinkedIn discourages automation tools like these since they override LinkedIn APIs. This could mean your account gets flagged for spam and even suspended
3. LinkedIn also has a rate limit to how many profiles you can scrape within a day to protect from unauthorized scraping

This really isn't worth the risk or the time.

How to Get a List of Engaged Accounts Automatically

The best leads to scrape are accounts that are actually engaging with your content, or accounts that are "in orbit". This means the problems you're talking about online resonate with them and that they have a higher chance of converting.

Letterdrop does this for you automatically and safely using LinkedIn APIs.

You get a full look into the historical engagement of these accounts, so you can score and identify the most engaged accounts for your BDR team to outbound to.

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Some FAQs

How to Scrape Linkedin Data for Free?

To scrape LinkedIn data for free, you can use web scraping tools like Octoparse, Import.io, or OutWit Hub. These tools allow you to extract information from LinkedIn profiles, such as names, job titles, companies, and more. However, it's important to note that scraping LinkedIn data may violate their terms of service, so proceed with caution.

How Does Linkedin Detect Scrapers?

LinkedIn uses models to identify automated profile viewing, a common sign of scraping. These models are regularly updated multiple times a day to swiftly adjust to new scraping techniques.

Get A List of Warm LinkedIn Leads Immediately (And Safely)

Letterdrop makes it easy for you get a list of warm leads without risking your LinkedIn accounts.

This takes you to the right people, at the right time — and one step closer to closing.

We're always thinking of how we can make GTM teams' lives easier. Reach out to us and start streamlining your ops today.