3 Ways To Use PhantomBuster To Accelerate PipeGen

LinkedIn - a platform with contact data so real-time and dense, yet an API so cagey - it’s always frustrating for every GTM professional to figure out.

It’s always been hard to automatically extract rich data from LinkedIn and get it into the other tools you are using. LinkedIn is finally starting to take action.

In March, they purged Apollo.io and Seamless.ai company pages from their platform—a clear message about their stance on data extraction tools.

We all know LinkedIn sits on the most valuable B2B data repository in existence (especially contact-level data, as people keep this the most up-to-date in most professions), but they're determined to monetize it through premium subscriptions rather than sharing. Their terms explicitly prohibit scraping, yet this data remains the foundation of effective prospecting.

Enter PhantomBuster—the unofficial API for LinkedIn that operates in that gray area LinkedIn hasn't completely shut down. While not a new tool to many people, it remains the most reliable method for extracting LinkedIn data at scale.

In this piece, I'll outline three prospecting strategies I've deployed both as a seller and GTM consultant that I’ve seen work well. These aren't theoretical—they're practical plays you can implement today to upgrade your prospecting game.

It’s probably a matter of time until PhantomBuster sees a similar fate to that of Apollo and Seamless, but until then, it’s definitely a cheat code.

Use Case 1 - Sending Contacts From LinkedIn To Clay To Other Systems

Clay has a native integration with PhantomBuster, and as we’ve written about before, Clay acts as the centerpiece for all of our GTM workflows. Its strong integration capabilities make it uniquely the tool to win here, and it’s why we’ll use it as a focus for this article, but also for future articles.

Often, we want to scrape contacts for an account (based on title, seniority, etc.) and import them into our CRM and sequencer.

The workflow I like using is the following:

Step 1: Extract From a LI Search:

• As simple as taking any LI Sales Nav search and getting this into a spreadsheet-like format (which is gold to get to so you can manipulate in Clay, see next step)

Step 2: Send Into A Clay Table

• The purpose of why we want to get this into Clay (and not just send from PhantomBuster, which you can do) is because of the enriching and transforming capabilities of Clay, which are the best in the market IMO

• The PhantomBuster data will give you first and last name, company name, and LinkedIn URLs - you can take this data and normalize all of this (to make sure nothing is in all caps, or you aren’t sending messages that say “Hey John S., thanks for connecting!” - we want to remove as much spam vibes as possible

• PhantomBuster x Clay integration docs are here

This video below is 2 years old, but 90% of the field mapping still holds true on how to get leads from PhantomBuster into a Clay table:

Step 3: Enrich/Transform/Clean Data In Clay & Step 4: Send To Sequencer/CRM

See a video here of steps 1 through 4 on how to do this (quick 10 minutes, and can go deeper in future videos

Use Case 2 - Scrape Commenters/Likers Of Competitors’ Posts & Shoot A Message

Because we can gather valuable data from LinkedIn, a good indicator of intent is seeing others comment on your posts (or those of your competitors) and respond accordingly.

Tim does a good job explaining this in a video below on how to do this specific workflow:

And then do steps 3 & 4 above to send the appropriate messaging.

You can also now do this directly in Clay (which is fairly new) - video on how to do that here, where they outline all of this in a “Claybook” for you all.

This is a very common use case that not only came up for us at Metronome, but also with companies I advise for GTM eng work. With the email inbox being tough to penetrate in 2025, you need to find every LI edge you can get.

Use Case 3 - Expand Twitter Following For Growth

This one is a little more company-specific for those who use Twitter for growth.

We recently spun up a Twitter account for GTMBA (throw us a follow!), and have been using PhantomBuster to auto-scrape follower info from fellow tech sales/GTM accounts, and shoot them a message to follow our blog or shoot our account a follow, something like this:

How this looked in action, all automated from PhantomBuster:

Our Twitter account grew from 20 —> ~60 this week doing this, and will continue to do this in the background as a growth channel. We see some folks start to follow the blog as well from Twitter, and we repurpose content from our blog to Twitter using Claude.

Soon, we will do this with Clay with their new (and hopefully growing) X integration! Stoked about this.

For more on how to do this, PhantomBuster has great videos walking through it here.

At GTMBA, we’re ramping up our AI/Clay consulting practice (as there has been a bunch of demand on how to use/implement these tools). Should you want to have an intro chat, shoot us a message here or email us at [email protected].