One of the most common tasks in B2B lead generation is the need to find contacts at companies from a target list. You have the companies you want to sell to, but you need to identify the right people within your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP), find their email addresses, and build your outreach list.

For many, the go-to solution is Apollo. It’s a powerful platform, but it can be expensive. Furthermore, workarounds like using third-party Apollo scrapers on platforms like Apify are no longer viable as they are being shut down. So, what’s the alternative?

This guide will walk you through a powerful, flexible, and highly cost-effective workflow to find contacts at companies, giving you more control and better results for a fraction of the price.

The Challenge with Standard Contact-Finding Tools

While all-in-one platforms are convenient, they come with significant trade-offs.

Apollo: The main drawback is cost. For businesses that need to build large lists, the price can be a major barrier. The crackdown on scrapers also removes a popular, lower-cost method that many used to leverage its database.
Clay: Clay is an excellent and highly flexible data enrichment platform. It offers a straightforward "Find Contacts" feature. However, in some cases, it may not return the quantity of contacts needed, which can limit the scale of your outreach campaigns.

When faced with high costs or limited results, a more modular approach is the answer.

A Better Way to Find Contacts at Companies

This workflow breaks the process into distinct steps, using specialized, cost-effective tools for each stage. The key is to connect them in an automated sequence.

Step 1: Start with a List of Company Domains

Your starting point is simple: a list of company domains in a CSV file. You don't need anything else. This flexibility means you can use a list scraped from the internet, an old customer list, or any other source.

Step 2: Enrich Companies to Find Their LinkedIn Identity

To accurately find people at a company, you need a unique identifier. The most reliable one is the LinkedIn Company URN. You can get this by enriching your initial list with a cost-effective tool like Company Enrich. Their service takes a domain or company name and returns crucial data, including the essential URN. (Use code DECADEJOURNEY10 for 10% off your first month.)

Step 3: Find and Enrich Contacts at Scale with Icypeas

With the LinkedIn URN for each company, you can now find the right people. This is where Icypeas comes in. Using their API, you can input the URN and your ICP filters (e.g., job titles like "Head of Sales" or "VP of Marketing"). Icypeas will return a much larger list of relevant contacts than many other methods. It also handles email enrichment, giving you a ready-to-use prospect list.

Step 4: Automate the Entire Workflow

The final step is to tie everything together. You can automate this entire sequence using a visual automation platform like n8n. You can build a workflow that:

Reads your company list from a CSV.
Sends each company to Company Enrich to get the URN.
Sends the URN to Icypeas to find contacts.
Saves the final, enriched contact list to another table or CSV.

Why This Method is More Cost-Effective

This multi-tool approach is significantly cheaper than all-in-one platforms. By using specialized, efficient tools for each job, you avoid paying for bundled features you don't need. Based on a direct price comparison, this workflow can be up to 50 times more cost-effective than Apollo for finding and enriching contacts.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What is the main advantage of this method over just using Apollo?

The two main advantages are cost and flexibility. This workflow is dramatically cheaper for building contact lists at scale and allows you to use any list of companies as a starting point, without being locked into a single platform's database.

Is this process very technical to set up?

It is more technical than using a single platform, as it involves connecting different tools via APIs. However, using a visual automation platform like n8n makes it accessible without needing to be a professional developer.

What is a LinkedIn URN and why is it important?

A URN is a unique identifier LinkedIn assigns to every company profile. It's more reliable than a domain name for matching data, as it ensures you are finding contacts from the exact, correct company profile across different databases.

About the Author

Gui Stetelle is the Founder of Decade Journey. He is an engineer and a passionate sales professional with extensive experience across various roles, including SDR, AE, Sales Manager, and Go-to-Market specialist. Before founding Decade Journey, Gui made over 50,000 cold calls and generated 8 figures in pipeline for high-growth companies like Bringg, Tractian, and Versum.

About Decade Journey

Decade Journey helps businesses build a predictable pipeline by focusing on quality and strategy, not just volume. We specialize in identifying unique "buying signals" to find customers who may not appear on traditional platforms like Apollo. Our process begins with a deep discovery to craft a high-converting offer and GTM strategy, followed by targeted list-building and data enrichment to ensure every outreach campaign is built on a foundation of high-quality, verified data.

Finding Contacts at Companies on a Budget