Swan connected LinkedIn™ directly to HubSpot with Surfe, eliminating repetitive tab-switching and manual CRM updates. Automatic enrichment, activity logging, and one-click syncing now help its sales team maintain cleaner data and spend more time selling.
Supporting a fast-growing European banking infrastructure company operating across six countries.
Data sources searched through Surfe’s live waterfall enrichment process.
Potential time saved per rep by eliminating dozens of daily tab switches and manual updates.
Bastien Roche follows one simple rule when it comes to RevOps: if you have to do something manually more than ten times, it should be automated.
It is a principle that shapes every tool decision, process design, and onboarding experience his RevOps team develops at Swan. His job is to maximise the amount of time Swan’s reps spend in front of customers — building relationships and closing deals.
Everything else, in his words, is “a waste of time.”
Before deploying Surfe, Swan’s reps were losing that time in a very specific place: the gap between public data and their CRM, HubSpot.
Finding a prospect online meant switching to HubSpot, searching for the account to determine whether it already existed, manually creating or updating a profile, copying and pasting new information, and searching for contact details.
It was a time-consuming process. When repeated across twenty or thirty reps, the impact on selling time became significant.
“It may seem like micro-gains,” Bastien says, “but at the end of the day, if it’s like 20, 30, 40 switches that you didn’t have to do, you are saving like 10 minutes per day.”
Beyond the time cost, there was also a data-quality problem.
Contact records became stale. Fields were left blank. Manual entries introduced errors, and duplicate records appeared.
The result was a CRM that could not always be trusted — and a sales team that learned to work around it.
“Today at Swan, Surfe is a no-brainer. It is the thing between LinkedIn™ and our CRM. It helps reps be more efficient, not switching tabs dozens of times per day. It’s an enabler to be more productive.” — Bastien Roche, Senior RevOps Manager, Swan
Swan is a banking infrastructure company. It enables businesses to embed cards, accounts, and money transfers directly into their products through an API.
As a B2B infrastructure business with technically sophisticated buyers and long deal cycles, Swan’s sales motion demands precision.
Its reps engage CIOs, CTOs, and heads of product. The context surrounding every interaction matters.
A missed LinkedIn™ update, an outdated contact record, or a duplicate account is not simply an inconvenience. It can contribute to a lost deal.
“If it’s not in the CRM, it doesn’t exist,” Bastien says.
It is a mantra that drives every decision his team makes about tooling, processes, and data architecture.
With reps spending much of their time online prospecting, researching, and engaging with potential customers, failing to capture that activity inside HubSpot meant the business was operating with incomplete visibility.
“If you don’t collect this information, you don’t know when was the last engagement, you don’t have the context. You are losing tons of value…and you might lose a deal because of that.” — Bastien Roche, Senior RevOps Manager, Swan
Surfe can be added to a sales rep’s browser as a Chrome extension, allowing them to add contacts to HubSpot without leaving the page they are working on.
A single click creates or updates the CRM record, enriches it with a verified email address or phone number, and automatically syncs the information back to HubSpot.
For Bastien’s team, one benefit stands out: Surfe’s waterfall enrichment.
Surfe runs a live waterfall across more than 15 providers when a contact is requested. The result is validated before it reaches the sales rep.
After the contact has entered the CRM, Surfe continues monitoring it. Job and company changes can be detected and surfaced for review, helping prevent HubSpot data from quietly becoming outdated.
“Through the waterfall enrichment, you have the email, you have the company of the person, you have the phone number. And all those are synced to the CRM.”
— Bastien Roche, Senior RevOps Manager, Swan
“It ensures reps are sending emails to the right person, at the right address,” Bastien says. “Not ending up in spam.”
The Surfe onboarding experience is equally valuable.
For RevOps leaders who focus closely on sales-tool adoption, a product that requires minimal configuration and delivers value within minutes removes one of the most common blockers associated with rolling out new software.
“It literally takes less than five minutes to set up. It’s not a complex tool. The UX is good. It gives a great overview of an account. And when you show a new rep how it works, they see the value immediately.”
“CRM data and Surfe — they are our go-to tools on a daily basis.” — Bastien Roche, Senior RevOps Manager, Swan
Swan’s reps now work within a single, connected workflow.
LinkedIn™ is where they find and engage with prospects. Surfe is the layer that instantly and accurately connects those interactions to HubSpot.
The tab-switching, manual data entry, and contact guesswork have been removed.
CRM data quality has improved meaningfully, and adoption across the sales team has been high. Bastien attributes this adoption to Surfe’s simplicity.
“As RevOps, I have all of the data through the dashboard to see who’s using the tool and how much. I can then use it in my enablement and say, ‘Okay guys, are you not using the tool because the setup wasn’t right or you don’t see the value?’ and then I adapt.”
The compounding result of these daily micro-gains is a sales team that spends more time selling and less time performing administrative work.
“If you’re a rep and you’re not using Surfe every day, it means you haven’t connected to LinkedIn™.” — Bastien Roche, Senior RevOps Manager, Swan
Bastien has used Surfe since 2020 — before the product was even called Surfe.
He first encountered it while working at a venture-capital firm and has followed its growth ever since.
His message to RevOps leaders and sales managers who have not yet added Surfe to their technology stack is direct:
“Without kidding — if you’re not using Surfe, I’d ask: how are you tracking everything that happens on LinkedIn™? What are you doing instead?”
“Use Surfe. Connect it to your CRM. It takes literally five minutes. And your reps will be more productive and more efficient.” — Bastien Roche, Senior RevOps Manager, Swan
Regarding AI and the future of sales, Bastien believes business value will come from automating repetitive, high-volume tasks.
“Anything that can be automated through agents, through tooling, through better process — I want to minimize the time spent on it. That includes writing pricing proposals, drafting emails, enriching contacts.”
However, he draws a clear line when it comes to automating complex B2B selling.
For Swan, with its enterprise customer base and long sales cycles, keeping a human in the loop remains critical.
“We have transactional sales, we have B2B sales, we have enterprise sales. Anything related to complex selling…100% we will have a human in the loop because, at the end of the day, it’s two people talking to each other and agreeing on a price.”
For more transactional activities, he expects AI to take on an increasingly important role.
“The AI augmented salesperson will have all of the context of a recorded meeting, agents that prepared everything, a dedicated contract.” — Bastien Roche, Senior RevOps Manager, Swan
Your most pressing questions, answered with clarity.
%201%20(1)%20(1).avif)
