In this blog, we will discuss how you can web scrape large amounts of B2B business data for your lead generation, starting with data sourcing, to choosing a scraping approach and finally organizing the data exports for your sales department’s usage.

Why does this matter and how is lead generation important? Lead generation is a vital part of any enterprise’s marketing and sales strategy. Outbound lead generation can provide tangible results quickly; much faster than organic inbound marketing. Enterprise web scraping helps to streamline the process even further, collecting targeted customer data which stimulates business growth. By harvesting publicly available information for enterprise use, companies can better understand their leads and tailor outreach campaigns accordingly. Enterprise web scraping further helps to reduce manual effort on behalf of the organization, providing faster, more efficient lead interactions at scale. Lead generation is an essential piece to a sales team, and enterprise web scraping makes it all the more attainable.

Is web scraping legal? Many enterprise businesses scrape large amounts of financial data legally, and even ethically. When working with ParseHub Plus, the managed version of ParseHub, our team will ensure legal compliance.

Ready to learn more about enterprise web scraping for lead generation? Let’s get started!

Identifying Lead Sources Before Web Scraping

Before you begin web scraping for leads, you should know where to scrape. This depends on your business and your ICP (ideal customer profile). Some questions you should ask yourself are:

• Are my target buyers small businesses? Big businesses or individuals?
• Who are the key decision-makers in the target market?
• Where are these business details posted online?

If you’re trying to sell something to a business, chances are you can find their details on websites such as Yelp, YellowPages, or simply on Google. It depends on your sales process, but generally, you would want to also scrape the contact information for key decision-makers in the business. If you just cold email the business’ default address, or call their main line, it may be harder to establish a relationship and close a deal. Oftentimes, you’d want to run a secondary scrape or search to get the email addresses of key contacts within a business, such as C-Suite executives or directors. Many enterprises use web scraping for their lead generation, which allows them to get hyper-targeted leads from directory websites specified earlier.

Choosing Your Lead Generation Scraping Approach

Now that you have found the data sources for your lead generation, it’s time to choose a web scraping strategy. Some companies decide to code their own web scrapers, but there are many downfalls when it comes to custom-coded scraping scripts. Websites change all the time, which causes scripts to break. It’s a frustrating and time-consuming process to create code for web scraping; even AI and ChatGPT cannot provide working web scraping code. Aside from website changes, your script needs to handle parsing through multiple pages, avoid getting blocked, bypassing Captchas and many more obstacles.

Since custom web scraping scripts are not recommended, what should you do? You can choose to use a visual web scraping tool, such as ParseHub. You will still need to learn how to use it with the walkthrough guide, the tutorials on the blog and YouTube, or with live chat support. The best option, however, for an enterprise business is ParseHub Plus. This managed version of ParseHub will take care of all your web scraping and lead sourcing for you.

Cleaning and Organizing Scraped Data For Usage

Clean, organized and validated data is extremely important when it comes to lead generation, and other highly sensitive applications, such as machine learning. For example, if your list of leads comes with duplicates, you will be contacting the same people or businesses multiple times. The data should be validated as well, so you’re not addressing the wrong people in your sales outreach. You may also want to sort or group your data. Finally, irrelevant columns should be deleted to make your data cleaner. Some outreach software will limit the number of fields you can upload, therefore having the least amount of columns possible in your lead list file is recommended.

ParseHub Plus will help you validate your data, with custom scripts, and will clean your data before it’s sent to you. This ensures the highest quality data and leads; free from errors. Adding the leads to your CRM and/or sales software will be seamless, with columns that are ready to be merged into fields.

The ParseHub Plus Advantage

In the end, many corporations use large-scale web scraping for lead generation, market research, price monitoring, SEO, AI, machine learning and other applications that require big data. To begin your lead generation web scraping, you need to find the sources to scrape from. These can be websites like Yelp, YellowPages, and even Google Maps. To get a specific decision-maker’s contact details, you will most likely need to scrape LinkedIn, or their respective websites to get their email or phone number.

Once you know which sources to scrape, you should choose your web scraping strategy. We highly recommend using a free visual web scraper, such as ParseHub, or even better, working with ParseHub Plus on a managed plan. You will require no effort when it comes to ParseHub Plus, as all data sourcing, scraping and validating will be done by our team. This allows you to focus all your time on sales, and less on technical data extraction.

Want to take your lead generation to the next level? Book a call with ParseHub Plus, and get your free sample data export!

Happy Scraping!