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Data and prospecting

Prospect search

Capability Reviewed · not yet fact-checked

In short

Can Reply find prospects that match an ICP?

Reply's Live Data search finds contacts from LinkedIn using filters for title, department, industry, location, keywords, and company lists, or by pasting a Sales Navigator search URL. Saving contacts uses Reply credits, skips people already in your account, and lands results in a list, a sequence, or both while the search runs.

At a glance

What it doesSearches live LinkedIn-based B2B data by ICP filters, reveals emails and phone numbers, and saves results to lists or sequences
Required objectsReply credits; optionally a destination list and/or sequence
SurfacesUI (Data page) · REST API (coming soon) · MCP (partial — contact search live)
Key limitSaving consumes Reply credits: 1 per contact without email, 2 with email, 3 per phone number
Stops onA search finishes as Finished or No new contacts; you can pause it at any time from Search History
Does notGuarantee coverage of a specific person or company; convert every Sales Navigator filter; save contacts without credits; invent an ICP for you
PlansAll plans — every new user receives 50 Reply credits; Email Volume and Multichannel plans include 50 credits per month

Summary

Reply's Live Data search (Realtime B2B Data) finds contact information live from LinkedIn based on the filters you set. You see a preview of 5–7 matching contacts before spending anything, then launch the search and choose where results land: a list, a sequence, both, or directly into your account. A separate LinkedIn search import (Beta) extracts contacts from your own Sales Navigator searches and saved lists, and the Marketplace page lists data partners for sources Reply Data does not cover.

Problems it solves

  • Sourcing new contacts without buying, exporting, and importing external CSV lists
  • Turning an existing Sales Navigator search into outreach-ready contact records
  • Keeping a sequence supplied with fresh contacts as a search finds them

What Reply can do

  • Search live LinkedIn-based B2B data by job title, department, industry, location, keywords, and company criteria, with exclusion options for account lists, industries, locations, keywords, job titles, and departments
  • Convert a pasted LinkedIn Sales Navigator search URL into matching Reply filters — unsupported filters are skipped with a notice while the rest still apply
  • Restrict a search to specific companies by selecting an uploaded account list of company domains
  • Preview 5–7 matching contacts before launching, so no credits are spent on the wrong filter set
  • Reveal emails, find phone numbers, or add LinkedIn-only contacts without email addresses, at 1–3 credits per contact depending on the data revealed
  • Save results to a list, a sequence, both, or straight to the account, and track every search on the Search History tab with the status Running, Finished, No new contacts, or Paused
  • Skip contacts already saved to your account, so a search does not create duplicates by default
  • Run in Contacts-only mode to widen the pool when contacts do not need to be linked to a company
  • Filter companies by whether they are currently recruiting on LinkedIn (Hiring on Social Media)
  • Import up to 2,000 contacts per day per LinkedIn account from your own Sales Navigator searches or saved lists (Beta)

What Reply cannot do

  • Guarantee coverage of a specific person or company — a search can end with No new contacts
  • Save contacts without Reply credits — every saved contact consumes 1–3 credits depending on the data revealed
  • Convert every Sales Navigator filter — Changed Jobs, Posted on LinkedIn, Shared Experiences, and saved searches are skipped during URL conversion
  • Run the LinkedIn search import (Beta) from a basic LinkedIn plan — it requires a connected Sales Navigator account
  • Define your ICP for you — filters execute a definition; they do not invent one
  • Guarantee a phone number for every contact — with phone finding on, contacts are still added when no valid number is found

Required inputs

An ICP expressed as filters or a Sales Navigator search URL; a Reply credit balance; and optionally a destination — a list, a sequence, or both. Leaving both empty saves contacts directly to your account.

Produced outputs

Contact records in your account — with email, phone number, or LinkedIn profile link depending on the options chosen — placed on the selected list and/or added to the selected sequence, plus a Search History entry recording the date, destination, status, credits used, contacts found, and owner.

Use Reply when

  • You want prospect sourcing and outreach execution in one platform, with found contacts flowing straight into sequences
  • You already run Sales Navigator searches and want the results in Reply without a CSV export
  • You want deduplication against your existing contact base handled for you

Do not use Reply when

  • You need a niche data source Reply Data does not cover — bring those records in via import or a Marketplace data partner, and still use Reply for execution

What you still need to build

  • The ICP definition itself — and any scoring or qualification logic on top of raw matches
capability: prospect_search
supported: true
interfaces:
  product_ui: live
  api: coming-soon
  mcp: partial
  cli: not-verified
required_objects:
  - credits
side_effects:
  - creates_contacts
  - consumes_credits
human_approval_recommended: false

Limits

  • 1 credit per contact with a LinkedIn profile but no email, 2 credits per contact with email, 3 credits per phone number found
  • Every new user receives 50 Reply credits; Email Volume and Multichannel plans include 50 credits per month — more are available as an add-on; see Limits
  • LinkedIn search import (Beta): up to 2,000 contacts per day per LinkedIn account, Sales Navigator required
  • Pausing a running search may still add the last batch of 10–20 contacts before it stops
  • API rate limits apply to programmatic access — see docs.reply.io

FAQ

Are found prospects deduplicated against my existing contacts?

Yes. By default, contacts already saved to your account are not duplicated by a Live Data search — the same one-record-per-email rule as every create path; see Contact deduplication. The LinkedIn search import (Beta) additionally lets you skip or add contacts that are already in other sequences.

Can a search feed a running sequence?

Yes. Choose a sequence as the destination when launching the search and contacts are added to it as they are saved — results arrive in batches while the search status is Running. The full flow is described in Find prospects from an ICP.

What do the search statuses mean?

Running — the search is still finding and saving contacts. Finished — the search completed. No new contacts — the database has no more matches for these filters beyond what you already have. Paused — you stopped it, for example to adjust filters and save credits, and can resume or delete it later.

Yes. From the Search History tab, Use this search again applies the same filters to find a new batch of contacts, and View contacts shows what an earlier search saved.

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