A practical guide to HubSpot CRM data enrichment

We’ve all been there. You’re looking at a new contact in your HubSpot CRM, ready to reach out, but the record is practically empty. You have a name and an email, but that’s it. No job title, no company size, nothing to give you any real context. And so it begins: the manual slog through LinkedIn and company websites, just trying to fill in the blanks before you can have a decent conversation.

What if you could skip that whole song and dance? That’s the basic idea behind data enrichment: turning those bare-bones contact records into rich, useful profiles without all the manual labor.

In this guide, we're going to break down HubSpot CRM data enrichment. We’ll look at HubSpot’s own tools like Breeze Intelligence, check out the third-party apps many teams use, and explore how to go beyond just static data to give your support team the actionable AI they really need.

What is HubSpot CRM data enrichment?

Simply put, data enrichment is the process of taking the customer data you have and making it better. You’re adding missing details, confirming that existing information is correct, and layering in helpful context from other sources.

For anyone using HubSpot, this is huge. Clean, complete data is the bedrock of everything you’re trying to do, from smarter lead scoring and personalized marketing campaigns to a better overall customer experience. When you know who your customers are, their industry, their company's size, their role, you can stop making educated guesses and start making real connections.

And this isn't just a nice-to-have. Some estimates suggest over 40% of CRM data goes stale every year. People switch jobs, companies pivot, and information just gets old. HubSpot is well aware of this, which is why it has its own built-in features to help out, mostly through its AI platform, Breeze Intelligence.

How HubSpot's native data enrichment works

HubSpot gives you a data enrichment solution right out of the box, which is a solid starting point for a lot of businesses. Let's dig into how it works and, just as importantly, where it has its limits.

Introducing Breeze Intelligence: HubSpot's AI engine for data enrichment

If you've been in the HubSpot world for a bit, you might remember a feature called HubSpot Insights. That’s been replaced by Breeze Intelligence, a smarter, AI-powered engine that quietly works in the background.

Breeze automatically tries to fill in missing pieces on your contact and company records. When you add a new company with a domain name or a contact with a work email, Breeze checks it against its massive database to pull in firmographic data. This includes key details that can give you a much clearer picture of the person or company you're dealing with.

Here’s a quick rundown of the kind of info Breeze can pull in:

The limitations of HubSpot's native enrichment

While having HubSpot’s native enrichment is handy, it can often feel like a "good enough" fix that falls short for teams that need really accurate or specific data. The truth is, relying only on a built-in tool can lead to some real headaches.

One of the most common complaints is about data accuracy. Users in the HubSpot Community forums have shared stories about how the tool can sometimes create more problems than it solves. For instance, it might change a well-known company name like "Google" to its formal legal entity, "Alphabet LLC." While that’s technically correct, it’s a pain for sales and marketing teams whose automated workflows are built around recognizable brand names.

yeah, we had to disable the Insights so-called 'intelligence' it changed the Associated Company names of thousands of our Companies to random names like for Google it changed it to 'AlphabetLLC', exactly as it is here, with the LLC and no spaces. [...] It did this to literally thousands of our Company names, and HS's response was for us to fix it via export/reimport. And they had ZERO explanation for why it would do this.

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Data also gets old. People change jobs frequently, and while HubSpot does offer continuous enrichment, the updates aren't always immediate. Pitching someone who left their job last month isn't a great look.

But the biggest drawback is that this data is just a static snapshot. It tells you who a customer is, but it doesn't help you answer their questions in real time. Knowing a company's annual revenue won’t help a support agent find a customer's recent order status or troubleshoot a weird bug.

This video explains how to automate data enrichment in HubSpot to save time and improve data quality.

Using third-party tools for HubSpot CRM data enrichment

Because of these gaps, many businesses look to a whole ecosystem of specialized third-party tools to get the job done right.

The ecosystem of sales intelligence tools

Platforms like ZoomInfo, Apollo.io, and Clay are popular picks for teams that need to dig deeper. They’re great for uncovering the kind of detailed prospecting data that HubSpot's native tools often miss, like direct-dial phone numbers, verified personal emails, or even the specific software a company uses. For sales reps building highly targeted outreach lists, this level of detail is gold.

But plugging these tools in isn't always smooth sailing. As one person pointed out on the HubSpot Community forums, tools like Apollo can sometimes make a mess of basic data hygiene. If a contact switches jobs, the integration might add their new company but forget to remove the old one, leaving reps to clean up duplicate or confusing records by hand.

when Apollo updates a contact that has moved jobs, it DOES NOT dissociate the former (no longer accurate) Company, so you'd have to manually do this to every contact that got so-called 'enriched'. This seems to be the case with almost all the platforms that tout this 'newly' coined term called 'data enrichment'. How are we becoming richer if the contact is still associated with a Company they no longer work for?

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The problem with disconnected data

Even when these integrations work like a charm, they often create another problem: data silos.

Your sales and marketing teams get these beautiful, detailed profiles inside HubSpot, but that valuable context rarely gets to the people on the front lines. Your support agents, who are likely working out of a helpdesk like Zendesk or Freshdesk, are left completely out of the loop. They can't see all the rich data that could help them give a more personal and helpful response.

It all points to a fundamental disconnect. The data from these enrichment tools is static, company size, industry, revenue. But a support agent’s job is dynamic. They need answers to questions like, "Where's my order?" or "Why am I seeing this error?" Standard data enrichment just wasn't designed to handle that.

Unifying data enrichment with AI to empower your support team

So, what's a better way to approach this? It starts with rethinking what "enrichment" can be. Instead of just adding more static fields to a CRM, what if you could connect all of your company's knowledge and make it instantly available and actionable for your support team?

This is where a unified knowledge layer comes in. A tool like eesel AI doesn't just tweak a contact record; it creates a single source of truth by plugging into all the places your company knowledge lives. Think of an AI that has access to your helpdesk history in Zendesk, your internal wikis in Confluence or Notion, and even your team's conversations in Slack.

This changes things completely. Here’s how:

• Get up and running in minutes, not months. Forget about complicated setups that require a developer. With eesel AI, the experience is completely self-serve. You can connect your helpdesk with a single click and be ready to go in minutes. It’s a huge difference from competitors that often make you sit through a sales call just to get a demo.

• Train on your own past tickets. Instead of pulling from a generic knowledge base, eesel AI learns from your team's actual support history. It analyzes thousands of your past tickets to understand your brand's voice, common customer problems, and what a successful answer looks like. This provides relevant context that static data can never offer.

• Use Custom Actions for live information. This is where the real magic happens. An eesel AI agent can do more than just repeat information; it can take action. It can perform real-time lookups to check an order status in Shopify, pull up account details from an internal database, or create a ticket in Jira. This is actionable enrichment, built for the real-time needs of a support team.

Comparing HubSpot CRM data enrichment pricing and plans

Let's talk about cost, because it's always a factor. Pricing models for data enrichment tools are all over the map, and it’s easy to get locked into a plan that’s either too expensive or totally unpredictable.

HubSpot's Breeze Intelligence uses a credit system. Each record enrichment uses 10 credits, and your plan includes a monthly allowance (Starter gets 500, Professional gets 3,000, and Enterprise gets 5,000). If you burn through them, you can buy more, but those costs can sneak up on you if you have a lot of records to enrich.

Third-party tools are usually a much bigger investment. Providers like ZoomInfo are known for pricey annual contracts that just aren't feasible for smaller companies. Others, like Apollo, have subscription tiers, but you're still managing a separate contract and integration.

eesel AI offers a more straightforward and flexible option. Our pricing is built around a simple, predictable model:

• No per-resolution fees. Our plans are based on a flat number of monthly AI interactions. This means you'll never get a surprise bill after a busy month, which is a common problem with competitors that charge for every ticket their AI resolves.

• Flexible plans. We offer month-to-month plans you can cancel anytime. This gives you the freedom to adjust as your needs change, without getting stuck in a long-term commitment that many other providers push for.

Move from static HubSpot CRM data enrichment to actionable intelligence

The path to better data is an evolution. It usually starts with the basic, built-in tools that come with your CRM. From there, many teams move on to more powerful, but separate, third-party sales tools. But the future isn't about packing more data points into HubSpot.

It's about bringing that data together with all your other business knowledge, from support tickets to internal docs, and making it instantly useful for the teams talking to your customers every day. It’s about shifting from static profiles to dynamic, intelligent automation.

Stop thinking about data as just a list of fields in a CRM. Start seeing it as the fuel for a smarter, faster, and more helpful support experience.

Ready to make your HubSpot data actually work for you? See how eesel AI can unify your knowledge and automate your support in minutes. Try it for free today.