I have a manual workflow that I’m looking to automate. At the moment, I am cold emailing a list of people. I retrieve their email address from rocketreach by looking up their names and finding the correct profile provided. If there are multiple people for the same name (ie there are ten john smiths), I must click on each person’s associated linkedin profile (this linkedin comes up on rocketreach’s bio for each person) to see if it corresponds to the intended person. I am having trouble because it requires navigating through rocketreach, clicking several buttons to navigate to linkedin from rocketreach if there are multiple profiles, then scraping linkedin for information, and then cross-referencing that linkedin information with the intended person’s known to see if I have the correct email. I would really appreciate any help or advice on how to figure out this ambiguity. Thank you in advance.
Hi @Danny_IJdo
Yes, if RocketReach or the surrounding system can emit an event, a Webhook trigger would be a clean way to automate it in n8n. If it cannot push events, then a Schedule Trigger plus polling would be the safer fallback.
webhook node
welcome to the n8n community @Danny_IJdo
Instead of trying to click through RocketReach and LinkedIn like a human, I would first collect as many stable identifiers as possible for the intended person, such as company, job title, location, LinkedIn URL, domain, and maybe previous known data from your lead list.
Then in n8n, compare each RocketReach result against those fields and assign a confidence score. For example, exact company match, similar title, same location, and matching LinkedIn profile would increase the score. If only one profile has a high score, continue automatically. If multiple profiles are close or the score is low, send it to manual review instead of emailing the wrong person.
I would also be careful with scraping LinkedIn directly, because it can be fragile and may violate platform rules. A safer workaround is to use data that RocketReach already returns, the official RocketReach API if available for your plan, or another enrichment source that can be queried through an API.
So the automation could be built around enrichment plus scoring, with a human approval step for ambiguous names like “John Smith”.
Hey @Danny_IJdo, welcome! This is actually a great use case and you’ve described the problem really precisely.
Building on @tamy.santos’s excellent scoring approach, I want to highlight one thing that makes this much simpler: if you already have the LinkedIn URL for each target person (which you likely do if you’re cold emailing a curated list), you can skip the name disambiguation entirely.
RocketReach’s API supports lookup by LinkedIn profile URL directly:
GET https://api.rocketreach.co/v2/api/lookupProfile?linkedInUrl=https://linkedin.com/in/john-smith-abc123
This returns the exact profile for that specific LinkedIn URL, no ambiguity. The flow in n8n becomes very clean:
- Start with your prospect list (with LinkedIn URLs)
- HTTP Request node to RocketReach API with the LinkedIn URL
- Get back the email, done
If you don’t have LinkedIn URLs upfront but have name + company, then @tamy.santos’s scoring approach is the right path.
Do you have LinkedIn URLs in your current prospect list, or are you starting from just names?
hey @nguyenthieutoan thank you so much for you recommendation – I will definitely have to check out the LinkedIn url search you’ve mentioned, it definitely sounds like a solution. I get these names off a list, however, that does not provide LinkedIn url’s-- I would have to look up their LinkedIn after getting the name, get the link, and then feed it to my system. However, that is almost as much work as doing it manually (what’s the difference between looking up a person’s email and their LinkedIn url?). Thank you for you guidance, and this sounds like the exact approach I will have to use if I do decide to automate it.
That’s a totally fair point, @Danny_IJdo! You’re right that manually looking up each LinkedIn URL one by one would defeat the purpose.
But here’s the thing: finding the LinkedIn URL can be automated too, as part of the same n8n workflow. The key insight is that if your list already has name + company (which it sounds like it does), that’s actually enough information to reliably find the right LinkedIn profile automatically.
A few ways to do this inside n8n:
Option A: Use a Google Search API (like SerpApi or Serper.dev)
Search query: site:linkedin.com/in "John Smith" "Acme Corp"
The first result is almost always the correct LinkedIn profile. Parse the URL from the result, then pass it to RocketReach.
Option B: Use an AI tool like Perplexity AI
Perplexity has an API and it’s genuinely great at finding LinkedIn profiles from name + company context. You can ask it something like: “Find the LinkedIn URL for John Smith who works at Acme Corp as a Sales Manager” and it will return a confident answer with sources. n8n connects to it via HTTP Request.
Option C: Google Search via HTTP Request (free)
Use https://www.google.com/search?q=site:linkedin.com/in+"Name"+"Company" and parse the first organic result URL.
So the full automated flow becomes:
Google Sheet / CSV > Google Search / Perplexity > Extract LinkedIn URL > RocketReach API > Get email > Output
No manual steps at all. The LinkedIn lookup adds maybe one extra node but saves all the ambiguity.
If this approach works for your use case, feel free to mark it as a Solution so others with the same problem can find it easily!