How to Enrich Buying Groups in HubSpot Automatically With Surfe & n8n
TL;DR: to give a deal the best chances of success, reps need to speak to every member of the buying group. With Surfe and n8n, teams can automatically find members of the buying group, enrich their contact data, and add their details to HubSpot.
Deals rarely stall for lack of effort. They stall for lack of stakeholders.
A deal may begin with a single champion, but by the end reps need a relationship with the adjacent Manager and VP, as well as voices in Ops, Finance, and IT or Engineering.
Without them on board the deal won’t close, but finding out who these figures are and how to contact them is often a challenge in itself – particularly if reps are finding and enriching each person’s details manually.
Automation makes enriching buying groups far easier. If you’re a HubSpot user, the best way to automate it is by pairing Surfe and n8n. Surfe has a comprehensive database that allows users to easily find the rest of the buying group, and a contact data accuracy rate of 93%. It’s trusted by thousands of sales teams worldwide to find contact data they can rely on. Thanks to Surfe, all of this data can be directly synced to HubSpot. Plus, your team can receive an email summary that makes it super easy for them to start multi-threading immediately.
With Surfe and n8n, finding every stakeholder doesn’t have to slow down a deal. Let’s find out more.
What We Mean by “Buying Group”
First of all, what is a buying group?
A buying group is the set of people who genuinely have a say over whether a deal closes or not. In most B2B deals, especially mid-market and enterprise, each buying group has an average of 6-10 people. Miss even one, and your rep risks stalling a deal: frantically trying to build a relationship with the CFO at the eleventh hour doesn’t scream trustworthy or professional.
In practice, a buying group typically includes different departments, seniorities, and geographies across the business.
Departments
Any team that will be touched by the new purchase should be involved. For example, selling to a mid-sized business may include speaking to:
- Sales (end users and leaders)
- RevOps (process + data owners)
- Marketing (budget + alignment)
- Finance (sign-off)
- IT/Security (compliance and technical clearance)
- Procurement (final approval)
Seniorities
Influencers and decision-makers are rarely all at the same level. Across one buying group, there could be:
- VP and C-level executives who approve or block
- Directors/Heads who influence budget and strategy
- Managers who shape daily usage and adoption
- Executives, who actually use the tool day-to-day
Job Titles
Reviewing job titles will help reps figure out who has what influence at target accounts. For example:
- “VP Sales” for revenue alignment
- “Head of Revenue Operations” for system integration
- “Procurement Lead” for negotiation and compliance
Ideally, each business should have a buying group criteria sheet, making it easy to map influence and decision-makers across every single deal in the pipeline. When it comes to automating buying group enrichment, the workflow will use this sheet and apply it consistently.
The beauty of this setup is that there are no more last-minute panics because your rep has forgotten to check in with RevOps for a couple of weeks. Every opportunity is automatically multi-threaded and organized in HubSpot.
Why Reps Miss Stakeholders (and Why It Hurts)
It’s tempting to stick with a single champion throughout the sales process, but putting buying group influence in their hands only is a rookie error. Here’s why, and how these mistakes impact the rest of the sales function:
- Single-threading: if your only contact goes on holiday, changes role, or loses internal influence, the deal stalls. If leadership doesn’t have oversight of rep activity they may not realize a deal will be delayed, which makes forecasting inaccurate and damages trust.
- Manual scavenger hunt: if reps have to manually find and enrich buying groups, they’re quickly going to find themselves buried in LinkedIn, CSV exports, enrichment providers, and spreadsheets, which is repetitive and unscalable.
- Inconsistent enrichment: if reps find the right people but lack verified contact data, their buying group coverage won’t be complete. Relying on more tools, more credits, and more admin to fill the gap can even prevent a sequence from starting.
- Lost momentum: every day spent researching instead of engaging stakeholders is a day the deal isn’t progressing. Competitors who multi-thread faster get the edge, and your champion risks losing internal support.
Working a buying group effectively all comes down to timing. If poor data or clunky workflows get in a rep’s way, they’re not going to be able to progress the deal at the desired pace.
Why Surfe + n8n Are the Smarter Solution
Most enrichment workflows fail in one of two places: the data isn’t good enough, or the process breaks down in delivery. Surfe and n8n solve both problems.
Surfe As Your Data Engine
There’s no point in automating a buying group workflow if the data input isn’t accurate in the first place. This is where Surfe comes in. Here’s how its features keep data accurate, reliable, and standardized throughout HubSpot:
People Search & Bulk Enrichment
Surfe has a database of 500 million professional profiles and 350 million company profiles. Its powerful 50+ filtering options let reps find the contacts that match the buying group criteria exactly.
Reps can use the Company Search function earlier on in their prospecting workflow to find businesses that exactly match their ICP, and then the People Search function to search each company by person, quickly mapping out the individual profiles making up each buying group.
Bulk enrichment allows reps to process thousands of leads at a time. Most alternative lead enrichment tools are capped at 500, meaning reps have to work in batches. This is slow, inefficient, and leaves room for error.
Verified, Accurate, Email Addresses and Phone Numbers
Surfe’s waterfall enrichment cascade runs every contact provided through over 15+ leading providers, in sequence. Once it finds contact data that looks accurate, it runs email addresses through Zerobounce to verify them before delivering the contact data straight to the CRM.
This technology leads to a 93% accuracy rate, plus, its multiple high-quality providers are chosen to ensure consistent global coverage. Many competitor tools are strong in just one region (Cognism is strong in the US, for example) but fall short in others. Use Surfe, and leaders in charge of multi-region teams will be able to make sure every team is working with the same quality of data.
The more accurate and consistent this contact data is, the less likely missing contact details will hold a deal back and the more likely pipeline and forecasting are to stand firm.
Complete Profiles, Not Half-Data
Many lead enrichment tools stop at delivering a (possibly inaccurate) email address. Not Surfe.
Alongside a verified email address and phone number, Surfe delivers job titles, seniority, company details, industries, revenue, headcount, and more, giving you a full, contextual picture of each stakeholder before you reach out.
The more data teams have on their stakeholders, the more effectively they’re able to segment their contact lists and personalize outreach.
HubSpot Ready, Straight Out of the Box
Surfe checks CRMs (in this case, HubSpot) for duplicates before inputting any new data and makes sure all fields are mapped correctly, too. When reps don’t waste time cleaning data, and RevOps can trust every contact in the CRM, teams can collaborate and report effectively.
N8n Is The Orchestration Layer: Flexible, Customizable, and Invisible
Once reps have verified, accurate data they can trust, n8n makes sure it flows exactly the way they need it to.
Think of it as the orchestration layer that makes Surfe’s data actionable. It automates the entire flow: triggering enrichment when a deal is created, applying your buying group criteria, syncing contacts into HubSpot, and emailing your team a ready-to-use summary.
Here’s how:
- N8n triggers the moment a new deal is created (or when a stage changes).
- It then applies your Google Sheets buying-group criteria consistently across every account.
- Finally, n8n automatically pushes enriched contacts into HubSpot and emails your team a clean summary so they know exactly who to contact, and when.
Together, Surfe and n8n remove the two biggest barriers to multi-threading: bad data and manual admin. Surfe guarantees accuracy; n8n guarantees delivery.
Now that everything is set up, reps can go ahead and reach out
What This Workflow Looks Like in Practice (Plain English)
Let’s put it all together and see how Surfe and n8n work in practice:
- The deal is created in HubSpot, and the workflow starts.
- Company domain is pulled from the deal.
- Buying Group Criteria is read from Google Sheets (ie, departments, seniorities, countries, and job titles). We’d recommend setting this up to have two tabs: reference values and your criteria.
- Surfe People Search finds matching contacts at the company.
- Surfe Bulk Enrichment verifies email addresses and phone numbers.
- The results are filtered, and contacts with at least one valid email address or phone number are kept.
- Data is synced to HubSpot: contacts are created or updated and associated with the deal or company.
- Gmail summary: your team gets a neat table and direct links to each contact or deal in HubSpot.
It’s as simple as that! Now, let’s see some real-world examples of where this workflow can make an impact.
Where This Workflow Makes the Biggest Impact
For sales leaders, the value of Surfe + n8n is just cleaner data, stronger pipeline coverage, faster deal cycles, and more reliable forecasts. By automating enrichment at the right moments, every deal moves forward with the full buying group in play, so momentum doesn’t depend on manual effort or luck.
Net-New Deal Creation
Most HubSpot deals are opened with a single contact attached. This person is often the initial champion; important, yes, but not the whole picture. The Surfe-n8n workflow makes sure reps aren’t single-threaded from day one. The moment a deal is created, Surfe finds and enriches additional VP, Head, or Director-level peers in the right departments. Reps can immediately multi-thread, build momentum quickly, and reduce deal risk.
Best for: teams working a list of brand-new leads.
Stage-Change Triggers
Buying groups expand as deals mature. In Discovery, you may only need Sales and RevOps; by Evaluation, Procurement, IT, and Finance must be at the table. With n8n, you can trigger enrichment automatically at specific deal stages, so the right functions are added at the right time. No rep forgets a crucial buying group member, and approvals have less chance of being blocked at the last minute.
Best for: teams working through multi-stage buying stages or long sales cycles.
Enterprise Pursuits
Larger accounts mean more stakeholders; often spread across regions, business units, and functions. Mapping these manually is inconsistent and time-consuming, which is where the Surfe and n8n workflow comes in to standardize the process. It does this by applying the same buying-group criteria across every enterprise deal so no stakeholder is missed, no matter how complex the org chart.
Best for: enterprise teams with multi-stage buying stages or long sales cycles.
Playbooks by Segment
One-size-fits-all enrichment won’t work for SMB, mid-market, and enterprise deals as they look very different from one another. By maintaining separate Google Sheets for each segment (for example, SMB criteria vs. Enterprise criteria), RevOps can swap in the right playbook seamlessly. Every deal is enriched with the criteria that matches its size and complexity.
Best for: RevOps or sales teams at companies that sell into multiple segments.
RevOps Oversight and Consistency
When they’re working at pace and at scale, reps often might not inform the right functions or enrich contacts at the right time. The summary emails generated by this workflow give RevOps visibility into exactly which stakeholders were added, ensuring consistency and a bird’s-eye view across the team.
Best for: teams working at scale or at pace, or RevOps leaders looking to build out consistent processes.
Across all use cases, the impact of this workflow is the same: no more missed stakeholders, no more manual scavenger hunts, and no more inconsistent enrichment. Every deal moves forward fully multi-threaded, with the right people in HubSpot from the start.
The ROI of Automating Buying-Group Enrichment
For a sales leader, the business case of this Surfe and n8n workflow is simple: it gives your team more time to sell, improves close rates, and keeps costs predictable.
- Time saved: a Forrester study found that the average sales rep spends 14 out of 51 hours per week on administrative tasks. That’s nearly two full days gone to non-selling work. By automating buying-group identification and enrichment, this workflow dramatically cuts down on that time wasted.
- Pipeline quality: engagement with multiple stakeholders increases close rates by 37%. Surfe + n8n make multi-threading the default for every deal by enriching buying groups automatically.
- Cost control: leaders can say goodbye to wasting budget on wasted enrichment credits by only surfacing validated stakeholders who match ICP criteria.
- Scale: whether you’re opening 10 or 100 deals a week, the same high-standard process runs without adding complexity to RevOps workflows.
ROI Example (Conservative Estimate)
Let’s assume that this workflow saves 30 minutes per deal in stakeholder enrichment. That’s a conservative estimate; mapping out a buying group, finding email addresses and phone numbers for up to 10 people, and then transferring it all into the CRM manually would be very impressive work for 30 minutes.
If reps work 100 deals a month, they’re saving 50 hours a month each. Across a team of 5 reps, that’s 250 hours a month reclaimed.
At $100/hour loaded cost, that equates to $25,000/month or $300,000/year redirected from admin work into selling. Because Surfe’s enrichment is verified at 93% accuracy, these ROI numbers aren’t theoretical. They’re based on data your reps can actually use.
The takeaway? Automating buying-group enrichment saves time and credits and systematically improves win rates, cuts operational lag, and turns every new deal into a multi-threaded opportunity from the get-go.
Enriching Buying Groups Automatically: Final Thoughts
Manual buying-group enrichment leaves too much to chance: one missing VP or budget holder, and the whole deal slows or even stops.
Surfe + n8n take the risk off the table by surfacing every stakeholder automatically, with verified data fed straight into HubSpot. It’s a key tool combo for sales leaders and their teams. After all, if your buying groups aren’t complete, neither is your forecast.
