B2B: guides & tutorials

The key is not just scraping data — it is building a complete pipeline that goes from raw web data to scored, enriched leads in your CRM, automatically.

This playbook covers the architecture, tool-by-tool setup, cost model, and compliance framework for building an AI lead generation system in 2026.

TL;DR:

Prerequisites:

• Apify account (Starter plan: $29/mo for production use)
• Claude API key or self-hosted Ollama (see Self-Host AI Stack)
• CRM account (HubSpot free, Clay, or Google Sheets)
• n8n or Make.com for orchestration

B2B sales enrichment means turning a bare company name or domain into a complete prospect record: employee count, tech stack, revenue signals, recent job postings, decision-maker names, and contact information.

Traditional data providers (ZoomInfo, Apollo) cost $10,000–$50,000/year. Web scraping builds the same enrichment pipeline for a fraction of the cost — and stays current automatically.

B2B lead gen pulls from company sites, contact pages, LinkedIn, Google Maps, Crunchbase, job boards, and similar public surfaces. Scraping automates the collection step; you still layer enrichment (Hunter.io, Clearbit), scoring (rules or a model), and CRM push (HubSpot, Salesforce). This guide maps sources, GDPR/CCPA basics, pipeline shape, and how Apify compares to Apollo.io and ZoomInfo for that stack.

For the evergreen reference version with field-by-field source tables and a full Apify Store walkthrough, see the B2B lead generation with web scraping use-case guide.

Google Maps is an excellent place to discover local businesses: names, categories, ratings, phone numbers, and websites. Email addresses rarely appear inside the Maps payload itself, so serious lead workflows add a second step: visit each business website (or use an enrichment service) to extract and verify contact data.

Purchased lists go stale fast, overlap with competitors, and bounce. Scraping public business and professional signals—then enriching, validating, and syncing—gives you a pipeline you control.

This article covers what data to collect, where to get it, an automation workflow, enrichment, and CRM integration. For ready-made tools, start with lead generation in the Apify Store.

LinkedIn remains the richest public source for B2B context—titles, employers, skills, and hiring signals. It is also heavily defended: datacenter IPs, headless fingerprints, and aggressive rate limits break naive scrapers quickly.

This tutorial explains what is realistically extractable from public pages, how Apify Actors apply residential proxies and browser automation, and how to wire results into enrichment and CRM workflows—without paying LinkedIn API fees for basic discovery use cases.