Sales Development Tool To Check Out: Kimono Labs

We’re big fans of Kimono Labs at RevBoss. We use it semi-regularly to augment the sales prospecting programs we build for our clients.

Kimono is basically a web crawler in a box.  It turns web data into dynamic APIs that you can feed into other systems…or data that you can download as JSON or .csv files.  And it has a super-simple bookmarklet that helps you visually select the data that you want to scrape…or “borrow” or whatever.  You can watch the demo video here to get a quick overview.

So how does this relate to sales development?

Prospect data is all over the place if you know where and how to look for it…particularly if you have a sales development tool like the RevBot (or friends like RevBoss) that will help you turn semi-structured data into work-able prospect lists.

We use Kimono to aggregate prospect building blocks (firstName, lastName, companyName, companyDomain) and then we use the RevBot to put the pieces together and build accurate sales prospect lists by building, guessing, and verifying prospect email addresses.

Kimono is an amazingly effective sales development tool in instances that your prospects hang out on a single site that has consistent user profile structure pages that are paginated and easily search-able.  LinkedIn is actually the perfect example of this — all of your prospects are there, their profiles are all more or less the same, and you can easily search for and scroll through pages and pages of your prospects…except that scraping LinkedIn violates the site’s TOS.  Kimono (obviously) doesn’t allow its users to crawl LinkedIn.

However — with LinkedIn as the example — you can probably think of other sites fit the bill that you might want to prospect:

• Crunchbase / Angel.co
• Houzz
• Job Board Sites

If you can get first/last name data, then you’re more than halfway there.  Feed your Kimono data into the RevBot and you’ll have email addresses in no time.

If you can only get company data, then you’ve at least got a head start — having a list of target companies is way better than wandering aimlessly through LinkedIn saving profiles.  You can use a list of companies to feed another resource, to staff out the work to an intern/freelancer, or to queue up your own prospecting work.

Any other ideas of how you might use a web crawler like Kimono to power your sales development efforts?