Developers at Belkins appointment agency have shared a web application for large-scale contact info scraping from LinkedIn. The app, cleverly titled “LinkedIn Email Extractor,” is a web browser extension that allows users to pull contact info from LinkedIn profile search results.
This means that there are no impressions made in the process of pulling the data, so there is no limit to how many times you can use the feature each day. The application can be integrated with popular CRMs like Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive to generate new leads from extracted contacts.
Belkins is a Lead Generation Agency working with clients on “top-of-the-sales-funnel needs, from building targeted sales leads lists to B2B appointment setting with qualified prospects,” according to their website.
Belkins’ mission lends itself naturally to the LinkedIn Email Extractor. The less time a sales representative needs to spend on finding the contact info for new leads, the more time they can spend on actually contacting those leads.
But collecting long lists of emails from search results without getting to know the individuals behind the emails does not lend itself to personalized outreach. Furthermore, scraping swaths of emails from a website raises questions about the ethics of data mining. And even if the app doesn’t violate any LinkedIn privacy policies (I’m sure they thoroughly inspected the fine print of the Terms and Conditions for compliance issues), is this not the most annoying form of outbound marketing?
Belkins developer Vladislav Podolyako, who posted the application on Product Hunt, argues that the publicly available data is fair game. Marketers go through the process of individually reaching out to potential clients in the B2B space via LinkedIn all the time, so why not speed up the process and get to the point?
Podolyako encouraged the Product Hunt community to test the app and provide feedback via 24/7 live chat. Even if you don’t condone the practice of large-scale data extraction, you have to respect the hustle of the sales professionals who still don’t give a you-know-what about padding your inbox.
Heather Buffo is a Cleveland native, a recovering Bostonian, and an Austin newbie. Heather is the Venture Growth & Partnerships Lead at Republic where she works with partners in private investing to democratize access to capital for entrepreneurs. Heather studied neurobiology at Harvard University, and is a City Year Boston AmeriCorps alum. She likes to write for AG, drink Austin beer, and ride around town on her road bicycle. His name is Pippin. Say hello if you see them.
