How to Automate Targeted Prospecting in HubSpot With Surfe & n8n

TL;DR: Manual prospecting wastes rep time and harms forecasting and pipeline coverage across teams. With Surfe and n8n, teams can automate the entire prospecting workflow and deliver sales leads and accurate contact data straight into HubSpot.

The fastest way to waste a morning? Prospect manually.

Manual prospecting – searching for leads, hunting down their contact data, and copy-pasting it all into the CRM – is painfully time-consuming for sales reps and has a high margin for error. And when reps target the wrong companies or the CRM’s missing key decision-makers, everything that follows suffers.

The solution is automating the entire prospecting process, and the best tools to do just that are Surfe and n8n. Surfe has find and quality rates significantly higher than competitors, and provides consistent global coverage for its users. It’s fast too, delivering results in just seconds. N8n is customizable, connects to your entire tech stack, and gives enterprise-grade control without the price tag. Used together, they can automatically deliver quality leads and their contact details straight into HubSpot, with negligible lift from your team.

Instead, they’ll be left to do what they’re actually good at: selling. Let’s take a closer look.

What We Mean by Targeted Prospecting

Targeted prospecting means finding companies and people that are most likely to buy from you. In other words, finding and reaching out to your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). By focusing on the leads most likely to buy from your business, your team will enjoy higher win rates and shortened sales cycles.

Here’s how ICP-led prospecting works in practice:

1. Finding the right companies

The usual first step is to narrow a list down by specific factors unique to your ICP. This could be:

• Industry
• Revenue
• Employee size
• Geography

For example, your business might target SaaS companies in Germany with 50-250 employees and $5-10M ARR.

2. Identifying the right people inside those companies

Now the company has been identified, it’s time to map out the buying committee. These are seniorities, functions, and roles that influence the decision. For example, a buying committee could be made up of:

• SDR manager

• Head of Sales

• VP of RevOps

• Finance Manager

3. Enriching those leads with verified contact details

Having accurate contact details is an essential part of targeted prospecting. You could have a company that fits your ICP exactly, but if reps are having to guess contact details or rely on generic inboxes, then it’s not fulfilling its purpose.

Done well, ICP-led, targeted prospecting is the most efficient way to fill your pipeline and to cut down time to close. So, why do so many teams not get it right?

Why Salespeople Struggle With Prospecting Today

Prospecting is supposed to be finding the right people to sell to, but often that’s only half the battle. Here’s why:

• Manual, clunky workflows: if reps have to jump between LinkedIn, CSV exports, enrichment tools, and HubSpot just to build a single list, they’re not using their time efficiently. Plus, working manually at scale leaves a lot of room for error.
• Bad data: records commonly come with missing email addresses or incorrect phone numbers. This might be a mistake from manually copying details between tools, or a lead enrichment tools with a poor accuracy rate. The less accurate the data, the more the chances of success drop, which in turn impacts forecasting and reporting.
• No scalability: building a full list of 50 leads can take one rep half a day. This lack of scalability is difficult for the rep who needs to make more than 50 calls a day, and also for the manager who needs to increase output as the business grows.
• Constant context switching: if reps are toggling between 4-5 different tools, they’re having to regularly context switch. Each instance of context switching can harm productivity by up to 40%, and leads to less time actually selling.

Fortunately, there’s no reason to manually prospect anymore. Automation cuts down workflows and standardizes inputs so everyone works from the same bar.

Why n8n Is a Game-Changer for Sales & RevOps

It’s 2025. Automation is here to stay – but many teams don’t utilize it. Why? Well, the tech is often expensive, and that’s before we’ve even got onto the engineer time needed to set the function up.

N8n negates both points: it’s an open-source workflow automation tool that lets teams connect apps, databases, and APIs without heavy coding. Sales teams can use it to link their tools and automate repetitive tasks so they spend less time on admin and more time selling.

Here’s why n8n is the best automation tool for sales teams looking to save time and scale:

• Visual, open-source builder: in other words, you don’t need to be an engineer to use it. N8n gives you a drag-and-drop workflow builder where you can literally see the flow of your data. If you can map out a sales process on a whiteboard, you can automate it in n8n. No extra coding skills required.
• Connects your full sales stack: n8n integrates with over 300 apps, such as Surfe, HubSpot, Gmail, Slack, and Google Sheets. Instead of reps wasting time and losing focus switching between tools, n8n makes them talk to each other automatically.
• Customizable to your ICP and workflow: every team has different targeting rules, list structures, and outreach styles. n8n lets you adjust filters, triggers, and outputs so the automation fits how your team works.
• Enterprise-grade control, without the price tag: Zapier and Make are great for quick automations, but they get expensive fast and limit flexibility. n8n is open-source, self-hostable, and built for scaling.

N8n is a strong choice for sales teams looking to automate prospecting, but you’ve got to pair it with the right enrichment tool. And that’s where Surfe comes in.

Why Surfe + n8n Together Are the Missing Piece

At the heart of this automated workflow is Surfe, the lead enrichment tool that allows reps to find ICP-fit companies, identify the right decision-makers, and enrich them with verified email addresses and phone numbers.

Surfe is the best lead enrichment tool for automated prospecting. Here’s why:

1. Finding ICP-fit companies and the right people to sell to 

• Surfe has a database of 500 million professional profiles and 350 million company profiles.
• Company and People Search Functions with over 50 powerful filters to build lists unique to your business.

2. Enriching with accurate contact data

• Accurate email addresses: 87% email find rate, and 90% email quality
• Accurate phone numbers: 72% mobile number find rate, and 65% mobile number quality
• Consistent: 15+ high-quality providers located across the world, for consistent global coverage
• Speed: delivering thousands of results in just seconds

Pair Surfe with n8n, and you get the ability to personalize how Surfe’s data flows into your sales stack. For example, you might choose to:

• Have leads land in HubSpot instantly
• Refresh lists weekly
• Receive Slack alerts when a new list is ready

By itself, Surfe eliminates problems with low-quality, hard-to-source data. Add n8n, and suddenly that data moves how you want, on your schedule, without extra admin.

Let’s take an example of how you can use Surfe and n8n to personalize your workflow.

If you run an Enterprise pod in the UK, a Mid-Market pod across DACH, and an SDR pod in North America, you can’t afford uneven coverage. Surfe gives consistently high find and accuracy rates across these regions, so no pod is stuck with a weaker list. With n8n, you can route region-specific lists into the right HubSpot views, owners, and sequences without reps lifting a finger.

What This Workflow Looks Like in Practice

Here’s what a Surfe-n8n workflow actually looks like in practice:

1. A rep uses the Surfe App or LinkedIn Sales Navigator to find companies that match the ICP, and pulls the right contacts from inside those companies (as per your definition).
2. Surfe enriches them with verified emails and phone numbers, and filters out incomplete records so only clean leads go into HubSpot.
3. Leads are then synced automatically to HubSpot.
4. You’re alerted when your list is ready, and reps can move straight onto outreach.

The ROI of Automating ICP Led Prospecting

Automating ICP prospecting saves your reps time and protects pipeline and forecasting. But what does this look like in cold hard cash?

• Sales teams that automate manual tasks save on average about 6 hours per week, per rep. If they don’t automate, that’s 24 hours/month, per rep.
• If you have 10 reps, that’s 240 hours/month wasted.
• At $100/hour loaded cost, that’s $24,000/month wasted on admin work that takes this workflow under 10 minutes.

Automating is he difference between losing $240,000/year and turning rep hours into pipeline-ready, revenue-driving motion.

And that’s even before we’ve mentioned that bad data costs even more money, from wasted enrichment credits to lost time and ineffective outreach. In fact, 60% of reps say poor data disrupts lead handoffs and slows productivity.

Plus it’s difficult to scale, which will impact your business’s growth in the long run.

Automating Targeted Prospecting: Final Thoughts

Manual prospecting only takes teams so far. Surfe and n8n is the tool pairing for sales team leaders looking for reliable, accurate, flexible data – delivered as part of a fully automated process.

After all, your sales team shouldn’t be your data team too.