Whether you're looking for fresh prospects or trying to recruit top talents, you'll find yourself in a situation where you need to find email addresses.

But you don't want to do it manually, do you?‍

Why you should use Sales Navigator & Hunter.io‍

The answer is quite simple: they are both great industry leaders.

LinkedIn is... well, LinkedIn. I'm not sure we need to cover the subject at length.

300+ million people with highly accurate data points, million of jobs and companies to find/search. But LinkedIn is restrictive - and I guess things won’t change seeing as Microsoft bought them out.

Many data providers have tried to offer a LinkedIn replacement: there are many B2B search engines out there. But I’d say none really compete with LinkedIn - mostly because it’s a social network.

Being a social network gives them the huge advantage of being (almost) sure that users will keep their data up to date. That’s essential when doing outreach, because fresh data gives you so much power, while bad data undermines your operations.

“Hey {{first_name}}, I see you’re working at {{company}} [...]” and your prospect replies saying “Sorry, haven’t been there for a year, please don’t send me [...]”.

That may occasionally happen when using LinkedIn, too, there’s not one “source of truth” for this kind of game 🙈

If you’re serious about prospecting, you need to use Sales Navigator, LinkedIn’s premium subscription. It gives you access to additional filters and other very useful options.

For example you can search only for people that changed jobs in the last 90 days or that posted specific content recently. Again, if you’re looking for small signals and personalization, this is a game changer.

Hunter.io is a bit of a reference in the industry. They’ve been able to gather an impressive database over the past few years.

They are gathering data from various sources, mostly social networks and the open web. News media are an especially great source of information, from which they compute a lot of data.

And most of the time, they can tell you where the data comes from, which is definitely reassuring.‍

The benefits of combining Sales Navigator & Hunter.io

Hunter used to offer a great Chrome extension… but it’s been banned from LinkedIn since 2017 😭

Reddit talked (and cried too) about it.

There’s been much discussion on Quora.

There’s no other way to really replace this feature. And though it was pretty cool, you still had to go through each and every profile one by one.

Hunter works great across the globe, especially in Europe & the US. Alongside its crawling technology (extracting data at scale on the web), they also update a database of patterns.

You can find more information about the patterns on their documentation.

They’ve also recently switched to a more “packaged” solution, meaning they’re offering users the ability to send bulk email sequences, what they call Campaigns.

Hunter is far from perfect, but who is, anyway?

I’d strongly recommend using a tool to validate email addresses like Neverbounce. You do not want your emails to bounce, it would hurt your domain reputation.

Take a look at our blog to find more articles related to B2B sales sequences and more.‍

How it works

Here’s the complete process you need to go through manually:

1. Extract a Sales Navigator people search: you simply extract a list of people from a set of given criteria
2. Visit the Sales Navigator people profile: visit and extract data from a specific profile
3. Extract all profiles-linked Sales Navigator companies: in order to gather a lot more information about the profile and have more context, you’d also extract the entire company, which will get you the industry, the size, most importantly its website and so-on
4. Once the previous steps are done, you’ll need to aggregate the profiles data with the companies data to get, amongst others: first name, last name and website, which are the minimum required data for Hunter to find email addresses
5. Then finally you’ll be able to upload your file to Hunter.io

All in all, if you had to do this manually, you’d spend hours to find a few emails, and maybe days, or an intern (🙈), to find thousands of emails.

Fortunately for you, this process is entirely automated thanks to Captain Data: you can head over to the Sales Navigator People Workflow with Hunter.io by hitting the button “Try this workflow for free”.

You basically just have to:

1. Head over Sales Navigator
2. Copy-paste a search URL
3. Configure your Hunter.io integration in one click
4. Hit launch and wait for your results 🎉

This process has shown amazing results, mostly because you can hyper-personalize each campaign.

Indeed, you know what your target is doing, in what kind of industry, in which company, how long they’ve been there, etc.

This is personalization at scale, and it works great!

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