How to Generate Sales Leads Using Web Scraping

Put it simply, leads are people who have shown interest in your products or service. Every sale starts with a lead. When businesses want to make more profits, chances are they need to keep generating more leads. 

Table of Contents

Web Scraping for Lead Generation

Enter Web Scraping

Lead Generation with Octoparse

Scrape Leads Across Multiple Pages

Scraping Qualified Leads at Scale

Web Scraping for Lead Generation 

The internet has changed the way we do business. In fact, people generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day (IBM, 2016) and more than 150 zettabytes (150 trillion gigabytes) of data will need analysis by 2025. (Forbes, 2019)

Jerry runs a startup company that sells auto parts to auto repair shops. In order to reach out to his prospective customers and makes more sales, he needs to develop a pipeline with sales qualify leads. He needs details, such as the name of the auto repair shop, the street address, the contact number, the emails, and other basic information. Jerry is smart and knows that he could get this information online. He googled "Auto repair shops in the US" and soon found out there are online directories like Yelp and Yellowpage which has exactly the data he needs. 

Enter Web Scraping

Web scraping is the process of fetching web data and turning it into structured data that can be easily used/analyzed. There are many ways to approach web scraping - write a script, hire a scraping service or use a coding-free automatic web scraper. 

Lead Generation with Octoparse

First thing first, download Octoparse and launch it. 

Step 1: Click the plus sign under Advanced Mode to start a new project

Step 2: Find the webpage URL to scrape from

Enter "www.yellowpages.com" in your everyday browser and search for "Auto Repair Shop" near "New York".

Step 3: Copy and paste the URL of the search result page to Octoparse

The webpage should then be loaded in Octoparse's built-in browser.

 

Step 4: Click data you want to scrape

Step 5: Select all data across the list

Step 6: Click into detail pages

Step 7: Select detail data

Step 8: Repeat these steps to get more data

Scrape Leads Across Multiple Pages

Step 1: Go back to the list page by clicking on "Go to webpage" of the workflow

Step 2: Once the list page's loaded, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the next page button

Step 3: Select "Loop click next page" on the "Action Tips" panel

Step 4: Just one last tweak - drag the first loop item to the inside of the newly created pagination loop. This is to make sure we'll loop through all businesses listed on the page before moving on to the next page. 

Step 5: Now we are ready to start getting some data. Click  , select "Local extraction" and Octoparse will collect the information needed into a CSV/Excel spreadsheet.

Scraping Qualified Leads at Scale

• Track your competition
• Create directories
• Scrape event and conference websites
• More...