Web scrapers are an ideal tool for getting sales leads. If you know of a website with sources of contact information for people in your target market, the rest is easy. It doesn’t matter how niche your area is. In my work with sales clients, I’ve scraped lists of youth sports team coaches, fitness gym owners, skin care vendors, and many other types of target audiences for sales purposes.
The recruiting industry (which I think of as a subset of sales) often takes advantage of web scrapers on both sides. Both candidate profiles and job listings are scraped. Because of LinkedIn’s strong anti-scraping policies, plug-ins, such as Instant Data Scraper or Dux-Soup, are often used to scrape candidate profiles as they’re manually visited in a browser. This gives recruiters the advantage of being able to give candidates a quick glance to make sure they’re suitable for the job description before scraping the page.
Directories like Yelp can help tailor searches of brick-and-mortar businesses on attributes like “expensiveness,” whether or not they accept credit cards, offer delivery or catering, or serve alcohol. Although Yelp is mostly known for its restaurant reviews, it also has detailed information about local carpenters, retail stores, accountants, auto repair shops, and more.
Sites like Yelp do more than just advertise the businesses to customers—the contact information can also be used to make a sales introduction. Again, the detailed filtering tools will help tailor your target market.
Scraping employee directories or career sites can also be a valuable source of employee names and contact information that will help make more personal sales introductions. Checking for Google’s structured data tags (see the next section, “SERP Scraping”) is a good strategy for building a broad web scraper that can target many websites while scraping reliable, well-formatted contact information.
Nearly all the examples in this book are about scraping the “content” of websites—the human-readable information they present. However, even the underlying code of the website can be revealing. What content management system is it using? Are there any clues about what server-side stack it might have? What kind of customer chatbot or analytics system, if any, is present?
Knowing what technologies a potential customer might already have, or might need, can be valuable for sales and marketing.
If you’re interested in streamlining your sales process with web scraping, ScraperWiz can help you extract the right contact information and valuable insights from various websites, making it easier to target potential clients.
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