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Writer's pictureTony Paul

Best Alternative For Linkedin Data Scraping

Updated: Feb 12, 2021

When I started my career in sales, one of the things that my VP of sales told me is that “In sales, assumptions are the mother of all f**k ups.” I know the F-word sounds a bit inappropriate, but that is the exact word he used. He was trying to convey the simple point that every prospect is different, so don’t guess, use data to come up with decisions.


I joined Datahut and we are working on a product that helps sales people. I thought I should discuss it with you guys and take your feedback.


Let me tell you how the idea evolved itself. At Datahut, we get to hear a lot of problems customers want to solve. Almost 30 percent of all the inbound leads ask us to help them with lead generation.


Most of them simply ask, “Can you scrape LinkedIn for me”?


Every time, we politely refused.


But not anymore, we figured out a way to solve their problem without scraping LinkedIn.


This should raise some questions in your mind.


1) What problem is he trying to solve? – Most of the time their sales team does not have the accurate data about the prospects. This leads to total chaos. It will end up in a waste of both

time and money by selling the leads that are not sales qualified.


2) Why do they need data specifically from LinkedIn? – LinkedIn is the world’s largest business network. In his view, there is no better place to find leads for his business than LinkedIn. It is right in a way.


3) Ok, then what is wrong in scraping LinkedIn? – Scraping LinkedIn is against its terms and it can lead to legal issues. LinkedIn has an excellent anti-scraping mechanism which can make the scraping costly.


4) How severe is the problem? – The problem has a direct impact on the revenues as the productivity of the sales team is too low. Without enough sales, the company is a joke.


5) Is there a better way? – Of course yes. The people with profiles in LinkedIn are in other sites too. eg. Google plus, CrunchBase etc. If we can mine and correlate the data, we can generate leads with rich information. It will have better quality than scraping LinkedIn.


6) What to do when the machine intelligence fails? – We have to use human intelligence. Period!


Datahut is working on a platform that can help you get leads that match your ideal buyer persona. It will be a complete Business intelligence platform powered by machine and human intelligence for an efficient lead research & discovery. We named it Leadintel. We’ve also established some partnerships that help to enrich the data and saves the trouble of lawsuits.


We are opening our platform for beta users. You can request an invitation using the contact form. What do you think about this? What are your suggestions?


Thanks for reading this blog post. Datahut offers affordable data extraction services (DaaS).

If you need help with your web scraping projects, let us know and we will be glad to help.

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