When we mention lead generation, the single department that most closely relates to it most is sales and marketing. Lead generation is a huge headache for people in sales and marketing. There are many channels for finding potential prospects, but approaching quality prospects and getting good responses is the hard part. Not to mention the amount of work needed to set up your lead generation structure, follow-up, and tracking.
This is where Proxycurl's APIs and datasets used to come into play. Proxycurl helped automate large parts of the lead generation process from start to end, and many of the workflows below are based on how customers used it in practice. This post does exactly that: laying out the few ways our clients used our products that could inspire you for your business. Where Proxycurl has since been sunset, I have appended the closest NinjaPear alternative so you can still execute the same playbook today.
Step 1: Get Leads & Identify Buying Signals
This is part 1 of 2 of this blog post, with 4 automated ways of getting leads. Within this section is a bonus section with some out-of-the-box, creative ways of lead generation using our products.
1. Get Direct Quality Leads
This is the most straightforward way: to get direct leads from our APIs and LinkedIn datasets. Most importantly, quality leads. How? Filter and shortlist the specific profiles of leads that you are looking for, down to the company, experience level, employment role, locations and more using our API stack. You can also get thousands if not millions of leads immediately with LinkDB, which had more than 401M people and company profiles.
Proxycurl sunset note
Proxycurl API has been sunset. I founded Proxycurl, and I now work on NinjaPear. If you were previously using Proxycurl for top-of-funnel sourcing, the closest NinjaPear alternatives today are the Customer API to see who a company sells to, the Competitor API to map adjacent accounts, and the Employee Search plus Person Profile endpoints for turning companies into reachable people.
With NinjaPear, the workflow is slightly different but honestly cleaner for many B2B teams:
- Start with a company you want to learn from or sell into.
- Use Customer Listing to see likely customers, investors, and partner platforms.
- Use Competitor Listing to expand the account universe sideways.
- Use Employee Search or Person Profile to turn those accounts into actual people.
- Use Work Email Lookup to get a verified work email.
That approach is more account-first than old-school list buying. In my experience, that usually means fewer leads but better ones.
2. Find The Right Decision Makers or Teams In A Company
Straight away, with Proxycurl's old Role Lookup API, you could identify the right people in a company to reach out to, instead of spamming non-relevant people and hoping to land somewhere, wasting resources and effort. For example, a developer-focused SaaS company could identify all software engineers as leads.
If you are a B2B business, the same logic still holds. Use company intelligence to find a list of B2B clients, and then find the right decision makers or teams in those companies to reach out to.
Today on NinjaPear, the practical replacement is:
- Use Company API to resolve the company and pull its details.
- Use the Employee Search endpoint to find people by employer and role.
- Use the Person Profile endpoint when you have partial identity data and need the full professional profile.
- Use the Work Email endpoint when you are ready to contact them.
Current NinjaPear pricing is straightforward enough to plan around:
| Endpoint | What it does | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Employee Search | Find people at a company | 2 credits/call + 1 credit/person returned |
| Person Profile | Pull full person profile | 3 credits/call |
| Work Email Lookup | Find verified work email | 2 credits on hit, 0.5 on miss |
| Company Details | Pull company intel | 3 credits/call |
That matters because a lot of lead gen content hand-waves the economics. I don't like that. Unit economics decide whether an outbound workflow survives contact with reality.
3. Track Customers When They Leave Or Join New Team
If you are in sales, you already know that building a network is crucial to long-term success. Once a customer, always a customer. This still applies even if that customer leaves to join another company in a similar industry. Instead of losing the relationship that was built over months or years, or finding out much later that the customer has moved, you can automate the tracking and get notified quickly.
With Proxycurl's People Profile API, you could track job changes of your customers. Don't lose these valuable relationships.
Now that Proxycurl is sunset, the NinjaPear equivalent is to use Person Profile for point-in-time profile enrichment and combine it with Company Monitor or Company Updates for account-level signals around the company they joined. It is not a 1:1 clone of the old flow, but it gets you something more useful in practice: not just where they moved, but what changed at the new company.
That means you can time the re-introduction better:
- New exec joins and the company posts a new hiring push
- New exec joins and pricing page changes
- New exec joins and recent funding lands
That is a much better outreach window than a stale CRM task that says "check back in 90 days."
4. Identify Newly Promoted Personnel Turned Decision Makers
You can monitor a list of companies and their employees, and identify changes in roles, meaning promotions, then reach out to these contacts. Proxycurl's Employee Listing API used to help with tracking role changes within a company, or you could use the People Profile API to observe promotions of certain prospects who later became decision makers.
Today, NinjaPear's substitute is a combination play:
- Company Updates for fresh company-level movement across blog and X
- Employee Search for mapping the current team
- Person Profile for a deeper read on a newly promoted contact
- Work Email Lookup for actually reaching them
This sounds more manual than a pure "promotion tracker," but in exchange you get context. And context is what makes outreach stop sounding like spam.
Bonus: More Creative Lead Generation Ways
Below are just 3 interesting ways to generate leads. With a large API surface, the sky is the limit in how you can use them for your business purposes, whether that is education, healthcare, or B2B leads. Think of APIs like Lego bricks. Combined properly, they can be used to build many different structures, limited only by creativity and whether the math makes sense.
1. Observe Online Posting Activities For Opportunities & Pain Points
Proxycurl's People Profile API and Company Profile API could be used to track posting activities and status updates of individuals and companies on LinkedIn. Big data is often associated with investing, but it works just as well in sales and marketing when the signal is real. With that data, you could do social listening on online activities and identify unspoken needs.
The current NinjaPear version of this idea is better because it is broader than one network. Use Company Updates to aggregate blog posts and X updates into a single timeline for any company. That endpoint costs 2 credits per call today and returns posts sorted by date.
That gives you outreach hooks like:
- New product launch
- New market expansion
- Hiring surge in a function you sell into
- Fresh technical content that hints at stack changes
Even better, if you already know the person, pair that with Person Profile and Work Email Lookup so your outreach is tied to a real business event instead of a generic sequence.
2. Track Employee Growth: Growing Company = Need For Services
Sometimes, your leads will tell you: "Your product is great, but our team has no need for it at this stage." In other words, their team is too small for your product to make business sense yet. One way to deal with that objection is to track employee growth of your B2B prospects. Keep following up and warming them up, and once they grow to a certain size they may be ready to buy.
One way to do this now is with NinjaPear's Employee Count endpoint. It returns a fresh count via real-time web search, and the product page explicitly suggests polling monthly to build growth trends over time.
That is useful because headcount growth is one of the cleanest cheap signals in B2B:
- A team of 8 rarely buys like a team of 80.
- A company growing from 40 to 120 employees has different workflow pain.
- A hiring ramp often appears before the budget line item becomes obvious to you.
If you sell recruiting software, HR tooling, developer infrastructure, RevOps tooling, or security, this matters a lot.
3. Get Notified When Companies Get Funding = More Budget
Sales roles always involve budget discussions, and often budget will make or break the deal. Instead of being at the receiving end of whatever budget a client says they have, prospect for clients who are more likely to have the right budget for your services.
Proxycurl's Company Profile API used to enrich company profiles with funding-related data such as funding rounds, funding amount, investor count, acquisitions, exits, IPO status and more.
The clean NinjaPear replacement is Company Funding. It returns complete funding history, round details, and investor breakdown for any company. Pricing today is 2 credits per call plus 1 credit per unique investor.
That lets you do a few very practical things:
- Reach out right after a round closes
- Prioritize Series A through C accounts if that is your sweet spot
- Segment by investor if your best customers tend to come from the same firms
- Enrich lead scoring with capital availability instead of guessing
A lot of teams say they do intent-driven outbound. Very few actually attach their prospecting to budget events. They should.
Step 2: Actual Outreach With Contact Info
Now that you have several ways of getting leads creatively and efficiently, this part 2 of 2 is the equally important step in your sales process: actually contacting and reaching out to the leads.
Getting emails and phone numbers is the simple part of the equation. The challenging part is for the contact info to remain accurate and deliverable.
1. Outreach Via Work Or Personal Email Contact Info
Get emails of leads, send them cold email campaigns, and build relationships from the early stages. Cold email still works when the targeting is good and the timing is not stupid. If they change jobs, you can continue to keep in touch through the new company once you refresh the contact data.
This is another place where the Proxycurl to NinjaPear handoff matters.
Proxycurl sunset note
Proxycurl's contact stack is no longer the active product line. The founder behind Proxycurl is now building NinjaPear. For this exact workflow, the active replacement is NinjaPear's Work Email Lookup endpoint at 2 credits on a hit and 0.5 credit on a miss, paired with Person Profile for identity resolution and Company Details for account context.
You can also use Company Details to enrich the account before outreach. That gives your reps basic but useful context like:
- industry
- founded year
- executive team
- addresses
- public social links
That is enough to stop sending lazy first emails.
2. Outreach Via Phone Numbers Contact Info
If your business involves more B2C relationships and dealings, getting phone numbers of leads can still be useful for call-based outreach.
As of the current NinjaPear documentation and pricing pages, the clear active endpoints surfaced are Work Email Lookup, Person Profile, Employee Search, Company Details, Company Funding, Company Updates, Customer Listing, and Competitor Listing. If your old Proxycurl workflow depended heavily on phone enrichment specifically, you should treat that as a legacy pattern and check NinjaPear's latest docs before rebuilding it. I would not assume a 1:1 phone endpoint replacement unless the docs show it explicitly.
That is the broader lesson here: don't port an old workflow blindly. Port the outcome.
3. Run Facebook Marketing Ad Campaigns With Lookalike Audience
Instead of waiting for ad campaigns to generate enough leads to scale, which might take months, you could use a large curated profile dataset to build seed audiences and then generate lookalike audiences.
The old Proxycurl/LinkDB framing still makes sense conceptually. The NinjaPear way to think about it now is more account-based than profile-dump based:
- build a seed list from Customer Listing
- expand by Competitor Listing
- enrich key accounts with Company Details and Funding
- derive the people inside those accounts with Employee Search
This gives you better source logic for audience building. Less random. More explainable.
4. Reach Out Via Social Media
Finally, you can follow and engage with prospects on social media platforms to build a network. This works better when your engagement is tied to something they or their company actually posted.
Here again, NinjaPear's Company Updates is useful because it discovers blog RSS feeds and X profiles automatically, then returns updates sorted by date. That is more actionable than manually checking a dozen company feeds.
If your reps are doing account-based outreach, give them a short feed of:
- recent company posts
- recent product announcements
- recent hiring pushes
- fresh funding events
That is enough to write a real opening line without pretending to be best friends with the prospect.
Follow Proxycurl & NinjaPear's Footsteps For Effective & Quick Lead Generation From Day 1
Having seen some ways, including some creative ones, that you can generate leads for your business, it is time to try it out.
If you came here from the old Proxycurl world, the important update is simple: Proxycurl has been sunset, but the underlying idea did not die. It just moved. The founder behind Proxycurl is now building NinjaPear, and the active stack now centers on customer intelligence, competitor mapping, company updates, person profiles, employee search, and verified work emails.
NinjaPear currently offers a 3-day free trial with 10 credits included. Paid API endpoints are generally limited to 50 requests per minute, and the docs recommend a 100 second timeout because some enrichments take 30 to 60 seconds to complete. Pay-as-you-go credits are valid for 18 months, which is useful if you are experimenting and do not want a full subscription immediately.
If your use case is sales and marketing lead generation specifically, I would start with this sequence:
- Use Customer Listing to find likely buyers around a target company.
- Use Competitor Listing to expand the account map.
- Use Company Details, Funding, and Updates to score timing.
- Use Employee Search and Person Profile to identify the right people.
- Use Work Email Lookup to actually contact them.
That is a much more durable lead gen workflow than buying a giant CSV and praying. Try the free trial, run a few real accounts through it, and see if the signals are good enough to deserve a place in your pipeline.
