Skip to main content

Building a Lead List from a Business Association Directory

Learn how to extract, verify, and organize member data from business association directories into a spreadsheet for effective outreach.

Michael Bakaic avatar
Written by Michael Bakaic
Updated over 3 months ago

To create a lead list from a Business Association Member Directory, follow these steps:

  1. Access a Member Directory:

    1. Example; visit the ORBA Members Directory or Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce

      Screenshot of the "Our Members" page from the ORBA (Ontario Road Builders' Association) website. The page title reads "Members Directory," with a search bar for "Keyword Search" and a dropdown menu for "Membership Type." Below are member listings, including "3M Canada Company," "APPCO PAVING LTD.," and "Acciona Canada," with addresses, phone numbers, and "Visit Website" buttons for each listing. The navigation menu includes links like "About," "Advocacy," "Education," "Scholarships," "Events," and "Membership," with a "Join" button on the top right.

  2. Navigate the Directory:

    1. Use the table of contents or search function to locate member listings

    2. To get all of the members to return on one page using the search feature, try the City, State/Province or State/Province abbreviation as the search term. This works because all of the members should have that common term in their street address

  3. Extract Member Information:

    1. For each member, record the following details:

      1. Company Name

      2. Address

      3. Phone Number

      4. Website

      5. Key Contacts (if available)

🧙‍♂️ Here's the real magic step

Extracting the data from the entries in the directory does not require hours of tedious copy and pasting, a contractor on Fiverr, or any fancy scraping bots.

Just right click on the page, select Save Page As HTML, Inspect, or View Source to look at the HTML code, and paste the HTML code into ChatGPT. Then ask ChatGPT to reformat the data into a table. 💥 Boom. Done. Save that to a CSV and you're all set.

Here's how I did it for the ORBA Members Directory. Watch the video if you want to see the steps for the Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce:

  1. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the page so that all the member entries are loaded

  2. Right click and select Save Page as to download the page as HTML

    A screenshot showing how to save a member directory as an HTML file

  3. Open the HTML file and if you're lucky you'll see all the data from the directory. Some websites don't store the data in HTML but instead dynamically load it from JavaScript. Most older website frameworks used by Chambers of Commerce store the data in HTML.

    A screenshot of the HTML code of the ORBA Member Directory

  4. Locate the section of the HTML file where the repeating blocks are of the member data. Copy and paste that into ChatGPT. To make it more convenient, you can save the important sections to a fresh HTML file to upload the file into ChatGPT

    A screenshot of a pretty clever sales hacker using ChatGPT to extract the contact data from a member directory

  5. It doesn't get much easier than that. ChatGPT provides the data in a nicely formatted table and you can save it to a spreadsheet

    A screenshot of ChatGPT quickly extracting the member data from a member directory and exporting it as a CSV table

Now you're ready to upload the Company Names and Domains to your Iceberg app to get the Cyber Sales Intel for each company. Login and go to your Dashboard page to create the Campaign.

Happy prospecting 💪

Did this answer your question?