How to Automate Lead Enrichment in HubSpot With Surfe + n8n
TL;DR: sales teams can’t afford to waste time enriching sales leads manually – or cleaning the CRM up afterwards. The solution? Use Surfe and n8n to automatically turn a simple spreadsheet into a fully enriched, CRM-ready contact list.
Let’s be honest: nobody goes into sales for the joys of manual lead enrichment. Yet many teams still waste hours copying details into spreadsheets and CRMs – hours that should be spent selling. For leadership, that wasted time compounds into slower pipelines and missed revenue, with 63% admitting that poor data quality impacts inefficiency and revenue outcomes.
The solution is to automate enrichment. If you’re a HubSpot user, Surfe and n8n make that possible.
Surfe is a lead enrichment tool trusted by thousands of sales teams for its accuracy and flexibility. With a 93% accuracy rate compared to the 60-70% industry average, bulk enrichment, and complete contact data, Surfe removes the need for manual lead enrichment entirely. Paired with n8n’s AI workflow integration, enriched and validated contacts flow automatically into HubSpot from a simple Google Sheet upload. No admin required.
Manual enrichment belongs in the past. Here’s how to run enrichment in the background, so your team can focus on selling.
The Problem With Manual Lead Enrichment
43% of sales reps report that administrative work occupies between 10 and 20 hours each week. For a VP, that can look like 200 hours a month wasted across your team. Here’s why:
- Manual effort: filling in missing data line by line takes outsized time and effort.
- Reliability: poor lead enrichment tools return incomplete or outdated details, leaving reps to make corrections.
- Hard to scale: 50 leads from one event might be manageable, but 500 or 5,000 becomes impossible to keep up with.
- CRM clutter: when incomplete contacts clog HubSpot, reps lose trust in the data. As a result, they might start working from unofficial spreadsheets, or waste hours checking accuracy.
Why Surfe + n8n Are the Smarter Solution
Lead enrichment is a problem to tackle in two stages.
First is the data itself. It needs to be clean and easy to process; anything else is just going to impact your team’s time as they clean it up or check its accuracy.
Second is the lead enrichment workflow. Clean data is useless if it’s not in the right place, or if it takes hours to pass from one location to another.
Together, Surfe and n8n will get you data that’s clean, accurate, and delivered to your CRM without any manual work required. Here’s how.
Surfe Solves the Data Problem
Not all lead enrichment tools are created equal. It’s important to do your research before you choose one.
Above anything else, the data it returns has to be accurate. Otherwise, you’re adding wasted budget to the problems detailed above. The dataset delivered also has to be comprehensive, which means technographic and firmographic data as well as contact details. If it’s not, you’ll still lose team time to research rather than reaching out.
A lot of enrichment tools don’t meet these standards; they return only a single email address with accuracy rates of around 60% to 70%. Here’s why Surfe is the superior lead enrichment choice:
93%+ Verified Accuracy on Email Addresses and Phone Numbers
Surfe’s Waterfall Enrichment Cascade aggregates the data from over 15 high-quality providers. Relying on multiple sources dramatically increases find rates (from the average 60%-70% of competitors to Surfe’s 93% and above) and makes sure what it delivers is accurate, too. This is also paramount for leaders with teams across multiple regions or countries, as not all databases provide strong coverage across all parts of the globe. Relying on multiple sources allows Surfe to provide quality results across the US, EMEA, APAC, and LATAM, ensuring no team is left behind.
Bulk Enrichment API Built for Scale
Many lead enrichment tools cap exports at 200-500 leads. If your team needs to work at scale, they’ll have to work in batches, which is inefficient and unsustainable long term. Surfe’s Sales API allows users to enrich not only hundreds, but thousands of leads at once, without any impact on accuracy. The faster your team can work at scale, the greater the competitive advantage: they’ll be able to contact more people, faster, without wasting precious time on admin.
Full Flexibility on Input Data
Every sales team lead can think back to the struggle of converting a lead list into the right format for their CRM. Surfe eliminates this manual task by meeting your dataset as it is: whether it’s an event attendee list, a LinkedIn export, a webinar sign-up, a partner referral, or a partially complete CRM record, Surfe can enrich it. All your team members need to do is put it in a spreadsheet. By working with every type of data source, Surfe prevents wasted spend on leads that don’t get used or get lost.
Delivering More Than Just Contact Details
Contact data is important, but it doesn’t show your team when to reach out and what to say. Beyond email address and phone numbers, Surfe taps into its 500M professional profiles and 350M company records to deliver a mix of firmographic and technographic data, like:
- Job titles
- Seniority levels
- Company domains
- Industries
- Revenue ranges
- Headcount
- Tech stack
The more data your team has about every lead, the easier it is to score them – which leads to greater efficiency over time – as well as segment them for effective, personalized outreach.
Designed for HubSpot and Modern CRMs
If your lead enrichment tool doesn’t integrate properly with your CRM, it’s not going to do a good job. Surfe integrates with modern CRMs, like HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, and Copper, for example, and searches for duplicates to avoid rep cleanup.
With Surfe, enrichment becomes a growth driver rather than a bottleneck. When sales teams trust that every record in their CRM is accurate, reachable, and revenue-ready, they can focus on the important part of their job: selling.
n8n solves the workflow problem
Accurate data is only impactful if it’s paired with clean, manageable workflows. That’s where n8n comes in.
You can think of n8n as the link between Surfe and HubSpot. As soon as a rep uploads a new file (spreadsheet) full of leads to Google Drive, it sends them through Surfe for bulk enrichment in batches and filtering out incomplete or duplicate records. It then pushes the results into HubSpot automatically.
Used together, Surfe and n8n eliminate manual admin and make sure only clean, usable contacts flow into your CRM.
How to tell if Surfe and n8n are right for you: if you’re a sales leader who needs to scale output without overwhelming your team or hiring more people, automating lead enrichment with Surfe and n8n is a strong choice. When your team doesn’t have to spend time copy-pasting CSVs in and out of various tools, they can save up to 20 hours per rep per month – which can be redirected into higher-impact efforts like replying to messages, booking calls, and running demos.
Let the robots do the boring bit, and free up your team for skills that can’t be replicated.
What This Workflow Looks Like in Practice
Let’s take a look at the complete Surfe and n8n workflow that delivers clean, accurate data directly into HubSpot.
Here’s what happens step by step, no technical setup required:
- Sales rep uploads a Google Sheet of leads (from any source, like events, marketing, or outbound. As long as it can be put into a spreadsheet, it will work) to Google Drive.
- n8n detects the file automatically.
- Surfe enriches the list in batches using its Bulk API.
- Only leads with both verified email addresses + phone numbers make it through.
- Enriched leads sync directly into HubSpot.
- The rep gets a notification when it’s done, and when they’re ready to start selling.
Next: who’s going to get the most value out of these workflows, and where?
Where This Workflow Makes the Biggest Impact
The Surfe and n8n workflow can impact multiple admin tasks that take up a disproportionate amount of rep time. Let’s take a look:
LinkedIn Lead Enrichment (Daily Prospecting)
If your team is in B2B, it’s likely they spend a lot of time prospecting in LinkedIn and/or LinkedIn Sales Navigator. They can’t source mobile phone numbers or email addresses directly from these sources, though, which is where Surfe and n8n come in.
Drop these exports into Google Drive, and the workflow will deliver fully enriched, CRM-ready leads automatically; eliminating an entire manual workflow and freeing up significant rep time.
Best for: teams that source the majority of their leads from LinkedIn, or have a strong outbound sales motion.
CRM Clean-Up And Backfill
Unless a team’s been stringent about CRM data hygiene from the get-go, it’s likely that their records have their fair share of incomplete or outdated contacts – missing emails, generic phone numbers, or no company domain, for example.
These records can be exported into a spreadsheet, dropped into Google Drive, and Surfe will enrich and validate them before pushing the updated data back into HubSpot. This makes sure no lead goes to waste and strengthens rep trust in the CRM.
Best for: teams with historic CRM data, or teams looking to update their lead enrichment process.
Partner Lead Lists
Partnerships are a great source of leads, but their spreadsheets are rarely CRM-ready. One partner might share company names, another job titles, and another a LinkedIn link.
Surfe’s ability to provide multiple data types, like technographic and firmographic data alongside email addresses and phone numbers, makes sure that every lead enters the CRM in exactly the same format. It standardizes, enriches, and validates partner-provided leads so they’re always clean and consistent.
Best for: teams with a strong partnerships ecosystem.
RevOps Data Hygiene Projects
An event such as a sequence roll-out or CRM migration requires auditing lead data at scale. With the Surfe API, RevOps teams can do just that without significant time or effort investment.
At the end of the process, every contact has a valid email address and phone number, which reduces bounce rates and boosts trust in CRM data.
Best for: RevOps teams that need to audit data at scale.
Post-Event Enrichment
Trade shows and conferences are often brimming full of leads – but lead capture is another matter. Badge scans often lack direct contact info and can be awkward to do in practice, while asking for details or handing out business cards risks incomplete data entry.
An easier approach is to simply drop the raw attendee list into Google Drive and have Surfe enrich every record with verified emails and phone numbers. By the time your team returns from the event, HubSpot data will be enriched and outreach-ready.
Best for: teams that rely on regular events as part of their lead generation strategy.
The ROI of Automating Lead Enrichment
We’ve covered how automating lead enrichment can save time and boost team efficiency, but how does this actually impact the bottom line?
According to HubSpot, reps spend an hour or more every day entering data into their CRM or sales tools. That’s 20 hours per rep, per month. Across a team of 10 reps, that’s 200 hours/month spent on admin.
Charge that time at $100/hour, and you’re looking at $20,000 per month or $240,000 a year. $20,000 per month spent on admin is a line no VP wants to deliver in a board meeting.
Side note: Surfe pricing starts at $17,400 for the year. Compared to time and money saved, it pays for itself many times over.
When HubSpot is only filled with verified contact data, reps will save time on wasted outreach, get connections faster, and reclaim wasted hours at scale. Plus, you’ll avoid wasting budget on credits and duplicate contacts.
Why Automating Lead Enrichment in HubSpot with Surfe + n8n Is The Best Choice
Manual enrichment shouldn’t be a part of any modern-day sales workflow. With Surfe and n8n, it doesn’t have to. Any Google Sheet or Spreadsheet can be turned into a fully enriched, validated list in HubSpot without any rep time or effort being spent.
In turn, sales teams stop wasting hours, RevOps stop cleaning up bad data, and every lead gets worked faster.
Set up the workflow today and reclaim 20 hours per rep per month. Now that’s hard to argue with.
