One of the biggest part of being in B2B services is finding clients. Digging into Linkedin, building your own lead magnets and generally curating an email list is something that takes time. And that’s why lead gen, or lead generation tools, is such a big industry right now.
There are some really useful tools out there, and one of these, ContactOut, offers a useful way to scrape details from Linkedin. But is it worth your money? Or is it just another tool that you’ll pay for and probably never use?
Let’s take a look in our ContactOut review.
What is ContactOut?
ContactOut is a browser extension for Chrome which allows you to access contact details from Linkedin profiles. This means that if you’re looking for clients on Linkedin, you can build either an email list to send outreach such as cold emails, or you can reach out right there on Linkedin.
The cool thing about ContactOut is that you can also, from your dashboard, run a general search for types of users based on factors such as job title, job level (e.g; c-suite, founder, HR etc) or even location.
Being a browser extension, ContactOut takes up minimal storage on your device and is accessible on demand if you decide to check out a users profile.
As you can see from the example below, the extension is built for Chrome. I use Brave, which is a privacy focused browser built on Chrome, which means it works fine (although it shows the warning below).
What B2B lead gen can you do with ContactOut?
ContactOut also allows you to build custom lists within the tool where you can save emails for future outreach.
For example, lets say you’re targeting hiring managers in San Francisco. You might set up a folder called ‘SFO hiring managers’ and then each time you find a contact that you want to save, you can easily add them to that folder.
Although you might decide to search on Linkedin itself for people in a specific area, which can be useful for browsing potential contacts, the cool thing about ContactOut is that you can generate a bulk email list without even having to go to Linkedin.
Let’s say you’re running an aggressive cold email campaign and you want to get a big list of 2000 startup founders across the USA.
You could go into the ContactOut dashboard, search for your desired contact location, job role or industry sector, or even business revenue, and run a search.
You’ll then have a list that looks much like this:
As you see from the example above, you have lots of detail available within the dashboard. From here, I can either reach out to them directly on Linkedin, or export my email list to CSV.
When you do go to export, you can choose how many contacts you export, or you can simply export those on the page.
Another cool thing is that you can also search by company.
Run a search by location, revenue, industry or company size, get a list of businesses in your target region and then find the decision makers in that company.
In short, you can run a lot of B2B lead gen research using ContactOut in a very short amount of time.
Read our guide about writing Linkedin connection requests that don’t suck.
How much does ContactOut cost?
You can actually access ContactOut for free, and access up to 40 emails from Linkedin profiles.
Paid subscriptions start from $99 per month, with access to 6000 emails per year. If you’re a prolific searcher then the $199 per month package gives you 12,000 email contacts per year, which will likely be ideal for recruiters, small business owners or smaller lead generation professionals.
Who is ContactOut for?
Anyone running lead generation campaigns, for example building a B2B business service, will find ContactOut perfect for their needs. The obvious target user is recruiters, HR professionals, or sales teams. However, anyone looking to build their email lists will find ContactOut a user friendly option with plenty of filters to find exactly what you’re looking for.
Although it doesn’t allow you to run email campaigns from inside their own dashboard, like Apollo does, it is a great tool to find Linkedin leads and contact details.
In our review of ContactOut, we think it’s a solid 4 star tool. Very easy to use, with great usability. The missing star is because some other lead gen email scraping tools offer more flexible pricing, with a lower entry point, for example Snov.
Or Apollo which offers lead gen/lead sourcing with the ability to send campaigns within the tool.
Saying that, we love using ContactOut and highly recommend to anyone looking for a Linkedin email scraping tool and B2B lead gen partner.
There are other ways to get B2B leads, but ContactOut certainly makes it a lot easier.
