Automating lead generation from LinkedIn with Appollo.io and PandaFlow
To automate getting leads from LinkedIn we need an API and an automation tool to call the API.
LinkedIn doesn’t offer API for filtering Companies and People. Instead we will use Apollo.io.
For Automation we will use pandaflow.io, a leading automation platform.
Calling Apollo.io API to get Leads
Documenation for Apollo.io API is a bit incomplete. It lists only some of the criteria that you can pass to filter Companies or Persons.
This page above lists several criteria for find people in LinkedIn, but in reality, all filters available in UI can be used in API.
To be able to use any filter on LinkedIn Search, first I need to create a search in Appollo.io, for ex, here is people search with the following criteria:
Job Title: CEO
Org Revenue: 10M to 25M
The URL looks like this:
Based on this URL e same search in API request will look like this:
{
"api_key": "Your API Key",
"person_titles" : ["ceo"],
"revenue_range": {"min":10000000, "max":25000000}
}There are literally 100 of parameters available in Apollo.io, and it is pretty easy to translate the Search Url to API call. Sounds good? Yes?
Ok let’s go to the next step.
Calling Apollo.io API to get Verified Email+Details for Lead
People Search API only returns high level Person information. You may also notice that for “email” field the value is: “email_not_unlocked@domain.com”
To get verified email address, as well as other Person/Org information, we can use Enrich call:
https://api.apollo.io/api/v1/people/match (documented here)
The request looks like this:
{
"api_key": "Your API Key",
"id": "6117486c3950a50001296228"
}Id is appollo’s id for the person in LinkedIn. The result from this request includes person’s email as well as details of employment history, and more info about organization that the person is currently working for.
One thing to note about using enrich API is that each call is worth 1 email credit. The free account gets 1200 email credits/year, but if you pay for a basic account which is $15-$20 per month — you get unlimited credits. That’s a pretty good deal.
Using PandaFlow to insert Apollo.io results into Google Sheet
PandaFlow has nice user interface for creating simple flows.
Here is the flow that does the following:
- Get People from LinkedIn using Criteria that I need
- Enrich each person returned from LinkedIn with Verified email and other details
- Insert both Person and Organization data into Google Sheet
At the end of running this flow we have google sheet with all the info from LinkedIn:
Conclusion
In this post we demonstrated how we can get Person and Organization information from LinkedIn using Appollo.io and PandaFlow. Next we will use some AI magic to generate content for cold emails using the data we collected in Google Sheet.
