The Internet is full of digital information that can help you better segment your product or service and provide personalized solutions to your target customers. One of the best ways to find relevant business opportunities is to get contact information from sites like Yellowpages.com, Google Maps, and LinkedIn. Sometimes it is more effective and useful to talk to people in the field over the phone (or Zoom, Skype) than just sending an email or letter. A phone call can help you better deliver a more personalized message to your prospects.
In the following parts, you can learn the tips and tricks about finding business phone calls, and the easy tools to extract phone numbers in bulk from any website without coding.
How to Make Effective Business Phone Calls
Phone numbers are relatively sensitive and not-easy-to-get data. So you should definitely use them wisely. How can you make an effective business call?
First, always get yourself prepared before the phone call. It would be best if you could gather enough information about the person you’re going to connect with. For example, if you can address his/her title, name, and possible business concerns (how your product or service can help them solve the problem) correctly and concisely. This way, calls are less likely to be rejected.
To achieve your goal in one call, you also have to think about the messages you are going to deliver, the goal you’d like to achieve, the way you’d like to be “asked” when exchanging ideas, when is an appropriate time to call, how long should the call be, etc. Check this guide to learn more marketing-calling tips.
How to Find Accurate Phone Numbers
Before you can start collecting any phone numbers for your marketing campaigns, you should know where to find this information, i.e. data sources for the particular customer groups you are interested in.
Today, personal data can be quite sensitive. It is suggested to gather public web data to minimize any possible illegal consequences. As for phone numbers, business phone numbers are usually deemed less private and safer to collect.
Here are some popular online business data sources for various business categories. These data sources have already gathered extensive business information. All you need to do is to come up with the right keywords to search with, such as the type of business and location, so to find the business info you need effectively.
| Business Data Sources | Intro |
| www.google.com/maps/ | (Global) A good source for finding business listings with a physical location. |
| www.cbinsights.com | Offers insights on startups, venture capital funding, and emerging technologies to help businesses stay informed about market trends. |
| www.yellowpages.com | The original source is to find and connect with local plumbers, handymen, mechanics, attorneys, dentists, and more. It has emails and phone contacts. Yellow Pages also have pages for different countries in different domains, such as yell.com for the UK, yellowpages.ca for Canada, etc. |
| https://www.brownbook.net/businesses/search | Brownbook is the crowdsourced global business listings’ database, with more than 35 million businesses listed in over 200 countries |
| https://www.bbb.org/ | Better Business Bureau helps United States, Canada, and Mexico consumers find businesses and charities they can trust. |
| https://clutch.co/ | The original source is to find and connect with local plumbers, handymen, mechanics, attorneys, dentists, and more. |
| https://www.spoke.com/ | Spoke.com is a tool that anyone can use to create custom streams of business information. |
| https://www.superpages.com/sitemap | The original source to find and connect with local plumbers, handymen, mechanics, attorneys, dentists, and more. |
How to Extract Phone Numbers
Now, you have known how to find prospective customers from online directories. The next step is how you can get all of these phone numbers downloaded from the webpage quickly and effectively.
Generally speaking, there are many options you can choose from, including:
- Buy data directly from website owner, but high cost.
- Manually copy and paste from the webpage, tedious and slow.
- Web scraping and data extraction tools, bulk extraction supported.
- Using regular expressions in programming languages.
- Google Sheets add-ons, limited support.
- Online phone number extractor, limited support.
In the next parts, you can learn how to extract phone numbers with web scraping tools. It’s easy to learn and asks for non-coding knowledge, both online and desktop solutions are available.
Extract phone numbers online
The easiest way to extract phone numbers from websites is to use online web scraping templates. You can get all the phone numbers, emails, addresses, or other leads that you’re interested in by entering only a few parameters. A data sample can be previewed, and then, click the link below to use it directly without downloading anything. Finally, the extracted phone number data can be downloaded as Excel or other file formats.
https://www.octoparse.com/template/contact-details-scraper
Bulk scraping phone numbers without coding
If the phone number scraping template cannot meet your needs, you can try Octoparse, the best web scraping tool, to help you get more accurate data. Octoparse has an AI-based auto-detecting function and an easy interface, so you can build a web crawler without any coding skills. Advanced functions like cloud scraping, pagination, xpath, loop, etc., are also supported.
Turn website data into structured Excel, CSV, Google Sheets, and your database directly.
Scrape data easily with auto-detecting functions, no coding skills are required.
Preset scraping templates for hot websites to get data in clicks.
Never get blocked with IP proxies and advanced API.
Cloud service to schedule data scraping at any time you want.
Steps to bulk scrape phone numbers from websites
Here is a specific example of how to use Octoparse to collect phone numbers of companies.
Step 1: Open the website and find the companies in Dallas, TX. Then copy the search result URL into the clipboard.
Step 2: Quick start a new task (Advanced Mode) and drag the Open Page icon to the Workflow Designer. Paste the URL into the PageUrl box and click Start. Open the web page.
Step 3: Scroll to the bottom of the web page in the built-in browser, then click the “Next” link to create a pagination action to extract data from multiple pages.
Then choose “Loop click Next Page”, and we have created a pagination action.
Step 4: We will extract the names and phone numbers of these companies.
Click the company name “Dallas Movers Pro” and choose the “Extract text” option. Same way to extract the phone number. Then rename the fields as “Company” and “Phone number”.
Step 5: Before executing the extraction rules, we check the order of each action. Because we want to extract all the data needed before turning to the next page, we drag the Extract Data action in front of the “Click to Paginate” action in the Workflow Designer. Then click Next > Next (both in the top right corner of the interface) to proceed to the next step.
Step 6: Finally, click “Run on your device” to run the task. Now, you can wait for the data to come out. In the data output window, you will see that all the phone numbers have been extracted.
If you still have any questions about using Octoparse, you can read the tutorial about extracting phone numbers to learn more details.
Final Thoughts
Now that you have learned the easy steps for extracting phone numbers from any website easily, choose the one that is suitable for you to help you get more business leads. Octoparse will always be your best choice if you want to save time and energy but have no coding knowledge.
