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If you’re familiar with prospecting on LinkedIn, you’re bound to have heard of scraping, a technique that involves harvesting data via the social platform. Among the data you can scrape is your leads’ phone number!
Why retrieve your lead’s phone number from LinkedIn? And above all, how do you go about it?
In this article, I explain how to retrieve your lead’s phone number in a few key steps.
Is it really possible to recover the phone number of a LinkedIn lead?
The answer is yes… But not all the time.
In fact, tests carried out by our colleagues have shown that the method works for around 1/3 of all leads.
“That’s not a lot” you might say, and in a way yes, but not really, let me show you why:
1. On a large lead base, that’s a lot of people to contact by phone.
2. If you’re doing multi-channel prospecting with an automation tool like La Growth Machine, you can imagine sequences with conditions such as “if I have the phone number, then I’ll call” ➡️“if not, I’ll send a voice message on LinkedIn.”
3. Even if you don’t have the phone number, there are alternatives. For example, you can send a LinkedIn message with a link to your calendar to suggest a video chat, or even offer to call them directly if they’re interested.
Why get phone numbers from LinkedIn?
There are several advantages:
- It doesn’t cost much: I don’t want to spoil the method, but finding a phone number will either be free, or a small investment that will quickly pay for itself.
- It’s reliable: phone numbers on LinkedIn are declarative data, meaning that your leads are the source of this type of data. Normally, there’s little wastage.
- It’s easy: as you’ll see later, finding a phone number on LinkedIn isn’t complicated. What is complicated is doing it industrially, but with my method, you’ll see how to reduce this time to almost nothing.
- It can pay off: in prospecting, the number of an ultra-qualified lead that matches 100% with your persona is gold. Be careful not to become intrusive, as this is sensitive data, but if you manage it well and include the call in a multi-channel sequence, it can quickly become terribly effective and profitable. Plus, you can craft mutlichannel using LinkedIn hooks followed by cold calling.
But how do you go about it? 🤯
The answer is in the next paragraph!
How do I find phone numbers on LinkedIn?
Now, let’s get to the heart of the matter and figure out how to find phone numbers on LinkedIn.
It’s just like searching for email adresses with LinkedIn.
The first thing to bear in mind is that you have two methods for acquiring phone numbers on LinkedIn:
- The free method: This is the manual method, I’ll show you how to do it in the next section.
- The paid method(s): I believe this is what interests you in this article. This is the more reliable method, also the automatable method wherein you can find numbers in bulk. Premium LinkedIn Plans can help as well.
Let’s find out exactly how you can find your LinkedIn leads’ phone numbers! ☎️
Option 1 – Free LinkedIn phone number lookup:
Put simply, once you’re connected to anyone you gain access to all the information they’ve chosen to share with their LinkedIn network.
This means that for a portion of your network, you’ll have access to all their personal details -including their phone number.
It’s straightforward:
- Go on LinkedIn.com ➡️ My Network or Search for the profile whose phone number you want to find.
- Click on the desired profile.
- Click on Contact Info:
- And voilà! You’ll find the lead’s phone number right here:
Here’s a GIF showing you how to do it through LinkedIn Search:
Notably, this is exactly how La Growth Machine manages to enrich your lead’s phone numbers.
When you use LGM and you send a LinkedIn connection request, once the lead has accepted you, LGM visits their profile and retrieves their information.
So, the good news is that you’ll get some of the phone numbers supplied by LGM totally free of charge and included in your LGM subscription..
Depending on the audience, La Growth Machine will automatically enrich and verify about 28% of phone numbers.
Option 2 – Paid LinkedIn phone number lookup:
As you may know, it’s not easy finding a phone number on LinkedIn, the vast majority of people simply do not share it.
So if I’m looking to call a specific lead, there are tools that will help you do just that! For the sake of this article, I will only be sharing 4 of the most known and LGM-verified tools:
- Kaspr
- Datagma
- Lusha
- ContactOut
Let’s see how each of them works:
1. Kaspr:
Kaspr is a Chrome extension that allows you to enrich your leads‘ contact information directly from their LinkedIn profile.
Expert Tip 🧠
The power of Kaspr lies in the fact that it’s complete -meaning they will provide more than just the phone number, and they generally keep their databases up-to-date.
However, the downside is that it pumps your data. When you install the extension, they will retrieve your phone number if you’re ever on a LinkedIn profile page so it’s kind of sketchy in that sense.
That said, it’s what we all signed up for. They sell you data but also sneakily take some, which is, well, that’s the game. 🤷♂️
Using Kaspr couldn’t be simpler:
- Download Kaspr Chrome extension.
- Create an account and connect it to your LinkedIn.
- Search for the lead whose phone number you want on LinkedIn.
- Once you’re inside their profile, the extension will automatically pop up.
- Click “Reveal contact details”. This will cost 1 credit per piece of information.
And that’s it! I now have access to my lead’s contact information!
2. Datagma:
If Kaspr doesn’t find the phone number I’m looking for – and this happens more often than you think – then I also have the Datagma extension ready to go, and I do the same thing:
The one advantage Datagma has over the rest of the tools we’ll cover is that it’s probably the least expensive in the list. Otherwise, the same drawbacks apply wherein you will give up your data if you use their extension.
Again, same as Kaspr, this will also use up your Datagma enrichment credits.
1 credit = 1 email
75 credits = 1 mobile phone number
All unused credits roll over to the next month.
Personally, I’d start with Kaspr, then fall back on Datagma in case I don’t find what I’m looking for.
3. Lusha:
If I still don’t find the lead’s phone number, only then do I shift to Lusha, which is by far the most expensive of all!
Expert Tip 🧠
Yes, Lusha is expensive, but it’s also the most comprehensive. Its data sources aren’t limited to just LinkedIn; it has many other sources, making it the most complete.
Unfortunately, technical issues got in the way and I didn’t manage to sign up to Lusha so I couldn’t show you exactly how it works.
Honestly, it’s not that much different from the rest of the tools I mentioned. It still is a Chrom extension that you install and that pops up whenever you’re on a lead’s LinkedIn page.
Instead, here’s a video demo from their own website:
4. ContactOut:
For our last entry, we suggest you try out ContactOut. It’s the exact same process; you sign up, download the extension, and head over to your lead’s LinkedIn profile to reveal their contact details.
The only thing that sets this particular tool apart is its pricing. Along with Datagma, it’s one of the cheapest solutions out there. Nevertheless, the drawbacks remain the same; data siphoning. So just beware of that.
That said, the process remains the same as I’ve explained with the other tools:
Option 3 – Phone Cascading:
I have one more trick up my sleeve -and that’s phone cascading.
What is Phone Cascading? 🤔
What if I told you, you can combine multiple databases using only one single tool?
That’s right! Phone cascading chains together searches across multiple databases sequentially, If one database fails to provide the required information, the search automatically proceeds to the next, and the next, so on and so forth until it find what you need.
And the one tool I recommend for this is FullEnrich. It’s a pretty handy tool because it ultimately allows you to end up with as many phone numbers as you can find, so if I have to recommend one phone cascading tool, this is the one!
Expert Tip 🧠
The lovely thing about FullEnrich is that it doesn’t have a database of its own, they’ll just go into each tool’s database and check to see if they have the phone number.
From that point of view, they’re not necessarily interested to take your data, which makes it the safest solution, and the more complete one!
Contrary to the other extensions, FullEnrich enriches whole lists (CSV), on an individual basis, or directly from Sales Navigator:
Final Thoughts:
You might ask yourself: Why is this guy recommending basically the same thing five different times?
Simply put, because they don’t all have the same databases. What you might not find on Kaspr, you might find on Lusha for instance.
The heart of the matter is that if you add up all four, you’ll find a lot more phone numbers than with only one of them. 😉
That’s why tools like FullEnrich are all the rage right now. Because they simply combine most of the well-known enrichment platforms out there.
So if you’re looking to find your leads’ phone numbers on LinkedIn, think about phone cascading tools and make sure you get yourself one that covers the databases that suit you!
Now that you got yourself the phone number you need, what’s next? All that’s left is to reach out! Learn how to integrate Cold Calling and La Growth Machine right here 👉
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