How to find LinkedIn prospects with Crustdata

You find LinkedIn prospects with Crustdata by searching its person database with the same traits you'd use on LinkedIn: job title, seniority, department, location, and the company someone works for. Crustdata's person database covers more than a billion professional profiles, and each result carries the person's name, current title, headline, location, current employer with its website domain, how long they've been there, and a flag that says whether Crustdata has a business email for them. Its company database lets you start from the account instead, with filters for headcount, headcount growth over the last one, three, six, or twelve months, industry, headquarters country, funding stage and date, estimated revenue, and the technologies a company uses.

Most people start this job inside LinkedIn. Regular LinkedIn search lets you filter people by title, company, and location, and Sales Navigator adds lead filters such as seniority, function, company headcount, years in the current role, and whether someone changed jobs in the last 90 days. Both are good for browsing, but they stop at the list on your screen. Sales Navigator doesn't show email addresses and doesn't let you export a lead list as a spreadsheet, so getting the people into a usable list means copying profiles by hand or adding another tool.

Crustdata solves the export problem because it's a data provider, not a social network. You get structured records you can sort, filter, and load anywhere. Its data reaches you mainly through its API, though, so using it directly means writing filter queries in Crustdata's own format, paging through results, and running a separate enrichment request for each person whose email you want. The search also matches exact values, so a seniority filter has to use Crustdata's own labels, such as Director or Vice President, or it quietly returns nothing.

Even a well-built search only gets you candidates. Crustdata refreshes its person database about once a month, so some titles are out of date by the time you read them, and the search has no idea who your customers or competitors are. A good result is a list of people who match your audience today, still hold the role, aren't already your customers, come with a reason they're worth contacting, and have a work email marked by how trustworthy it is.

Kite does that work for you. It turns your audience into a Crustdata search, checks each match, and delivers a scored, sourced prospect list.

Start by describing the audience you want to reach. You can describe it the way you'd set up a LinkedIn search:

"Find 50 heads of marketing and marketing directors at US fintech companies with 50 to 500 employees that have grown headcount this year."

Or you can ask from a goal and let Kite work out the audience:

"We're going to a fintech conference next month. Build me a list of people worth meeting there."

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 lets it propose the titles, seniority levels, company size, and locations to target without a long brief. If you've already built a search in LinkedIn or Sales Navigator, tell Kite the filters you used, and it rebuilds the same search in Crustdata. Confirm the profile or adjust it, and Kite starts.

You don't need a Crustdata account or API key, because Crustdata is built into Kite. You can ask in the Kite web app or in Slack. To have the list saved somewhere other than the conversation, connect that account through OAuth, such as Google Sheets or your CRM.

Building a prospect list is research, so Kite does it and then shows you what it found. It asks before it sends any outreach to the people on the list.

Kite translates your audience into Crustdata filters, and it puts every trait Crustdata can filter on into the search itself rather than sorting through a broad result afterward. For people, those traits include the following:

• Current job title, matched loosely so "Head of Marketing" and "VP Marketing" both count
• Seniority, using Crustdata's own labels, such as Director, Vice President, or CXO
• Department, such as Marketing, Growth, or Product Marketing
• Location
• Current company and how long the person has worked there
• Skills listed on their profile
• Whether they recently changed jobs

When your audience is defined mostly by the kind of company, Kite searches companies first. It filters by headcount, headcount growth, industry, headquarters country, funding stage, the date of the last round, and the technologies a company uses, then searches for people at the companies that match. That order matters when the company is the reason to call. A marketing director at a company that grew its team by a third this year is a different prospect from one at a company that's shrinking.

Kite checks each candidate before it adds them to your list, because a database record is only as current as its last refresh. For each promising match, it reads the person's current profile from their LinkedIn URL, including their current and past employers, title, headline, and location. It drops anyone who has moved to a company or role outside your audience, and it notes anyone who started a new role recently, since a new leader is often looking at new tools.

Next, Kite removes your existing customers, your competitors, and anyone who has asked not to hear from you. Every prospect who passes gets a fit score from one to five, with a one-line reason, such as "Marketing director at a 140-person payments company that grew headcount 30 percent this year." When the list runs past about fifteen people, Kite splits it into primary and secondary groups so you know where to start.

If fewer people qualify than you asked for, Kite widens the search within your original criteria and keeps going. When the audience really is smaller, it tells you how many it found and which filters limited the count. A short list of right people is worth more than a padded one.

Kite looks up contact details only for people who passed every check, so it doesn't spend lookups on prospects you'd never contact. Crustdata's search result says whether it holds a business email for a person, but it doesn't include the address. Kite gets the address from its built-in email sources, which include Crustdata's profile lookup, and moves on to the next source whenever one comes up empty.

Each address keeps the verification status its source returned, such as deliverable, risky, or unverified. A person with no address found stays on the list, marked as not found, rather than given a guessed address. Kite includes only business details, which means it leaves out personal email addresses and phone numbers.

Kite looks for a timely reason to get in touch with each primary prospect, because a message that mentions something real gets more replies. It can read a person's recent public LinkedIn posts and note what they've been writing about. It also checks the company for recent events, such as a funding round, a jump in hiring, or a new leadership hire, and records each one with its date and source.

When the work is done, Kite posts the list in the conversation where you asked, as a table you can scan without opening another tool. It reports how many prospects it delivered against how many you asked for, how many have a work email, and how many it dropped at each check. If you asked for a file, it attaches the list as a CSV. If you named a destination, it also adds the list to your connected Google Sheet or CRM.

From there, Kite can write a short, personalized LinkedIn connection request or message for each primary prospect, drawing on their role, their recent posts, and their company's news. You send those yourself from your own LinkedIn account. Kite can also write an email for each prospect who has a work email and send it from your team's Kite address once you approve. If you want new prospects regularly, ask Kite to run the same search every week, and it will deliver only the people who weren't on an earlier list.

When Kite finishes, you have a list of people who match your LinkedIn audience today, with everything you need to decide who to contact first and what to say.