How to build a LinkedIn prospect list with PhantomBuster

The usual way to build a LinkedIn prospect list with PhantomBuster is to run a search export phantom on a LinkedIn search. A phantom is one of PhantomBuster's ready-made automations, and it runs in PhantomBuster's cloud with the LinkedIn account you connect to it. You start by running a search in LinkedIn or Sales Navigator with the filters that describe your buyers, such as job title, industry, company size, and location. Then you copy the search's URL, open the LinkedIn Search Export phantom in PhantomBuster (or the Sales Navigator Search Export phantom for a Sales Navigator search), and paste it in. You choose how many profiles the phantom collects on each launch and when it runs. Each run adds people to a results file with their name, headline, job title, company, location, and LinkedIn profile URL, and you can download that file as a CSV.

A search isn't the only place a list can start. Other phantoms collect the people who commented on a LinkedIn post or the guests of a LinkedIn event. Those lists come from what people did, which often tells you more about their interest than a job title does.

Every one of these phantoms collects whoever is there. A search for heads of marketing at software companies with 50 to 200 employees returns people whose profiles are out of date, consultants who list a client as their employer, your current customers, and people who work for your competitors. The results file has one row per person, so five people from the same company show up as five unrelated rows. Nothing in the file tells a salesperson why any of them was chosen.

That's where the real work in this job happens. A good LinkedIn prospect list starts from a search that matches your ideal customer profile closely. It contains only people who fit and still hold the role, it's organized by company, and it says why each person is on it.

Kite does that work for you. It chooses what the phantom collects, qualifies the people it finds, and organizes the ones worth contacting into a list your team can use.

Start by telling Kite who you want on the list. You can describe the people you're after:

"Build a LinkedIn prospect list of heads of growth at US software companies with 50 to 500 employees."

Or you can point Kite at a phantom your team already runs:

"Our Sales Navigator export phantom ran last night. Tell me which of those people are worth contacting."

Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. By the time you ask, it already knows your ideal customer profile, your current customers, and your competitors from that research. That means it can propose the titles, seniority, industries, company sizes, and locations to search for without a long brief. It brings back the plan, including the search, the phantom it will use, and how often the phantom runs, and you confirm or adjust it before Kite sets anything up.

You'll need to connect your PhantomBuster workspace to Kite with an API key. PhantomBuster isn't one of Kite's built-in tools, so you need your own PhantomBuster account. Your phantoms keep running under your PhantomBuster plan, with the LinkedIn account you've connected in PhantomBuster. You don't need any other data provider, because Kite confirms roles and adds emails and company details with its own built-in research sources, including Apollo.

Kite settles the search before anything is collected, because the search decides who can possibly end up on the list. It turns your ideal customer profile into the filters LinkedIn and Sales Navigator offer: job title, seniority, function, industry, company headcount, and location. Kite puts every part of your profile that LinkedIn can filter on into the search itself, so the phantom doesn't spend time collecting people who were never a fit.

You run the search in LinkedIn or Sales Navigator and share its URL with Kite, or Kite works from a search your phantom already uses. When your buyers gather somewhere more specific, Kite suggests starting there instead. The commenters on a competitor's post about a problem you solve, or the guests of a LinkedIn event your buyers are attending, make a smaller list with a clearer reason to reach out.

Kite reads every phantom in your PhantomBuster workspace before it creates anything, along with each phantom's settings and launch schedule. If your team already has a search export phantom, Kite updates it to work from the new search instead of building a duplicate. Otherwise it creates a new phantom.

Kite also decides how much the phantom collects and when. It reads your workspace's remaining resources, including execution time, which is the running time your PhantomBuster plan allows. It then sets how many profiles the phantom collects on each launch and when it runs, so one broad search doesn't use up the time your other phantoms need. Once the list is complete, Kite stops the phantom or takes it off its schedule.

Kite follows each run until its results are ready, then reads the people the phantom found. It checks each run's status, progress, console output, and messages, so it knows when a run has finished and whether it stopped early. It reads the leads and companies saved in your PhantomBuster workspace, and it reads the results of earlier runs as well as new ones, which means a phantom your team set up months ago still contributes.

Kite decides who belongs on the list by checking each person against your ideal customer profile. First it confirms that the person still holds the role at that company, using their public professional profile, and it drops anyone who has moved on. Next it removes your existing customers, your competitors, and anyone who has asked not to hear from you.

Everyone who passes gets a fit score from one to five with a one-line reason, such as "Head of growth at a 140-person analytics company that's hiring two demand-generation roles." When the list runs past about fifteen people, Kite splits it into primary and secondary groups so your team knows where to start.

If fewer people qualify than you hoped, Kite tells you how many it kept and why the rest fell short. It also says what would widen the list, such as adding a second title or a neighboring industry to the search.

Kite adds the details your team needs to reach each qualified person and to understand the account. Its built-in sources supply a professional email address when one is available. When none is found, the record says so, so nobody mistakes a guess for a real address.

Company details explain why the account fits. Kite fills in each company's website, industry, employee count, and location, and it looks for funding, hiring, leadership changes, and other recent news. It also reads each person's recent public posts. A recent funding round or a post about the problem you solve gives your team a timely reason to get in touch.

Kite saves the qualified people and their companies back into PhantomBuster, so the list lives where your team already works. Before it saves anything, it searches your saved leads and companies. A person collected by two different phantoms therefore ends up as one record.

Each company is saved with its LinkedIn company data and custom properties, such as its fit and the reason it fits. Each person is saved with their LinkedIn profile data, the email and company details Kite found, and custom properties for the fit score and its reason. Kite saves up to twenty records at a time. It then creates a list in PhantomBuster's lead storage, defined by a filter such as every person who scored four or five, and the list stays current as new people are added.

When the work is done, Kite posts a summary in the conversation where you asked. It says how many people the phantom collected, how many Kite kept, and who it dropped and why. The full list comes with it as a table grouped by company, so you can scan it without opening PhantomBuster.

From there, Kite can save the list to your connected CRM or spreadsheet. It can write a LinkedIn connection note or an email for each primary prospect, using what the person posted or what changed at their company. If you want new prospects every week, Kite keeps the phantom on a weekly schedule and processes each new batch the same way, then reports the new names in the same place.

When Kite finishes, your PhantomBuster workspace holds a qualified, organized prospect list, and your conversation with Kite holds the record of how it was built.