How to build a prospect list from LinkedIn data

A prospect list is a set of specific people at specific companies who fit your ideal customer profile and are worth contacting. LinkedIn is the best single place to build one, because people keep their own job titles, employers, and locations up to date there, and their posts show what they care about right now.

There are two ways to build the list on LinkedIn itself. The first is LinkedIn's people search, where you filter by current company, location, industry, and keywords in the title. It works for small lists, but a free account limits how many searches you can run each month. The second is Sales Navigator, LinkedIn's paid prospecting tool. It adds filters for seniority, function, company headcount, and years in the role, and it lets you save people to lead lists and companies to account lists. On the higher plans, Sales Navigator can sync those lists with a supported CRM.

Both routes find people well, but they stop at the edge of LinkedIn. LinkedIn doesn't let you export other people's profiles to a spreadsheet, and it doesn't give you their work email addresses. Unless you're on Sales Navigator's top plan with a CRM connected, it can't tell you which of the people you saved already buy from you, and it doesn't flag the ones who work for a competitor. Sales Navigator lets you add a note to each lead, but someone has to write every note by hand, so a teammate who picks up a list often finds no record of why each person was chosen and has to work out the reasoning again.

That's where most of the work in this job sits. A good result is a list you could hand to sales today. Every person on it fits your profile and still holds the role, works at a company you'd want as a customer, has a LinkedIn profile link and a work email where one exists, and carries a short reason they were chosen.

Kite does that work for you. It reads LinkedIn profiles, company pages, and posts through its own data sources, qualifies every person it finds, and delivers the list with the research attached.

Start by telling Kite who you want to reach, in the Kite web app or in Slack:

"Build a list of 50 heads of marketing at B2B software companies in the UK with 50 to 300 employees."

You can also start from what people are saying on LinkedIn:

"Find people who posted on LinkedIn in the last month about switching CRMs, and keep the ones who fit our customer profile."

Or hand Kite profiles you've already collected:

"Here are 30 LinkedIn profile links from our webinar attendees. Check who fits and find their work emails."

Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. Because of that research, it already knows your ideal customer profile, your current customers, and your competitors when you ask. It proposes the titles, seniority, company size, industries, and locations to target, along with how many people to deliver. Confirm the profile or adjust it, and Kite starts.

You don't need to connect a LinkedIn account or pay for Sales Navigator, because Kite reads public LinkedIn data through its built-in sources. If you want the finished list in your CRM, a Google Sheet, or Airtable, connect that account so Kite can write to it. Otherwise Kite delivers the list in the conversation.

Kite finds prospects on LinkedIn in one of three ways, depending on what your request describes. When your profile is about the person, such as a title and seniority, Kite searches professional profiles directly by current title, function, seniority, employer, and location. When your profile is about the company, such as "Series A fintech companies in New York," it searches companies first by industry, headcount, location, and funding, and then finds the right people at the companies that match.

When you care about what people are talking about, Kite searches LinkedIn posts by keyword, by author, or by company. A person who just posted about the problem your product solves is often a better prospect than someone who only matches on title, so Kite treats the post as both a source and a reason to get in touch. When you share a list of LinkedIn profile links or company pages, Kite starts from those and skips the search.

Kite puts every part of your profile that a search can filter on into the search itself, so it isn't sorting through people who were never a fit. It can also read a company's current LinkedIn job listings. A company hiring for the role your product supports has a reason to talk to you now.

Kite checks each candidate against your profile before it spends anything on enrichment. First it reads the person's LinkedIn profile for their current title, current employer, headline, and location, and it drops anyone whose current role no longer matches. When a profile lists more than one current job, Kite goes with the employer the person names in their headline, because that's usually the job they lead with. It also notes recent title changes, since a new head of marketing is often reviewing their tools.

Next, Kite removes your existing customers, your competitors, and anyone who has opted out of hearing from you. When your CRM is connected, it also leaves out people your team is already working.

Every person who passes gets a fit score from one to five, with a one-line reason, such as "Head of growth at a 90-person HR software company, posted last week about rebuilding their outbound process." 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 asked for, Kite tells you how many it found and why the rest fell short. A short list of strong prospects is worth more than a long one padded with weak fits.

Kite adds the details your team needs to reach each person, starting from their LinkedIn profile link. It looks up a work email address for each qualified prospect and prefers the address at the person's current employer. It keeps the verification status exactly as the provider returns it, whether that's deliverable, risky, catch-all, or unverified. A missing email stays marked as not found rather than guessed, so your team knows which addresses are safe to send to.

For the companies, Kite adds the website domain, industry, headcount, location, and funding. It can also pull in a recent event worth mentioning, such as a funding round, a new marketing hire, or a product launch. Kite includes only business details, so personal email addresses and phone numbers stay off the list.

When the list is ready, Kite posts a summary in the conversation where you asked. It reports how many people it delivered against how many you asked for, how many have a work email, and who it dropped and why. The full list comes with it as a table you can scan right away and a file you can download.

If you connected a destination, Kite also saves the list there. It can add the people as contacts or leads in your CRM, linked to their companies, or write them as rows in a Google Sheet or Airtable base. From there, Kite can draft a personalized email for each primary prospect, or a short LinkedIn connection request for you to send from your own account. If you want fresh prospects regularly, ask Kite to run the same search on a schedule, and it will leave out the people it already delivered.

When Kite finishes, you have a qualified list of people your team can contact right away, and a record in the conversation of how the list was built.