Clearbit Enrichment: A Complete Guide for B2B Sales Teams

What Is Clearbit Enrichment?

Clearbit enrichment is a real-time B2B data tool that transforms basic contact information into comprehensive lead profiles. You start with minimal data-an email address or company domain-and Clearbit automatically appends over 100 data points including firmographics like company size, industry, and revenue, along with job titles, locations, and tech stack information.

The platform pulls data from more than 250 public and private sources, including social profiles, company websites, legal filings, job boards, and crowdsourced inputs. Machine learning organizes and matches the data, while human review ensures accuracy. Records are refreshed every 30 days to maintain data quality.

Here's a practical example: when a lead submits their email through your website form, Clearbit instantly enriches that record with their full name, job title, company, company size, industry, annual revenue, technologies used, LinkedIn profile, and dozens of other attributes-all before your sales rep even opens the lead.

This process eliminates the manual research that typically consumes hours of your sales team's time. Instead of toggling between LinkedIn, company websites, and Google searches to understand who a prospect is, enrichment delivers a complete profile automatically within seconds of capture.

The HubSpot Acquisition: What Changed

Clearbit was acquired by HubSpot in December and has since been rebranded as Breeze Intelligence. This acquisition fundamentally changed how the product works and who can access it.

Before the acquisition, Clearbit operated as a standalone enrichment platform that integrated with multiple CRMs. Now, Breeze Intelligence is exclusively integrated into the HubSpot ecosystem, requiring a paid HubSpot subscription to use.

The product uses a credit-based system where each enrichment consumes credits. Credits are sold in packs of 100, 1,000, or 10,000 depending on your plan, and they reset monthly with no rollover option. If you don't use your credits by the end of the billing cycle, they're lost.

Several previous free Clearbit tools-including the Free Platform, Connect, TAM Calculator, and Weekly Visitor Report-were shut down. There's no longer a standalone free tier.

The acquisition also impacted Salesforce users significantly. While Clearbit previously offered robust Salesforce integration, the focus has shifted almost entirely to HubSpot's native ecosystem. Teams using Salesforce now face reduced functionality and must rely on third-party connectors or consider migrating their entire CRM infrastructure.

Clearbit Pricing Breakdown

Clearbit's pricing has always been somewhat opaque, and the HubSpot integration has added complexity. Here's what we know about current costs:

Base requirements: You need a paid HubSpot subscription (minimum $30/month for Starter) plus Breeze Intelligence credits (starting at $45/month annual). This puts the minimum monthly cost at approximately $75.

Credit costs: One enrichment equals 10 HubSpot Credits, and HubSpot sells credits at $10 per 1,000. This means enriching 1,000 leads costs approximately $100. At enterprise scale with 50,000+ leads, you're looking at $4,500-$5,000 per month in credits alone.

API pricing: For API-based enrichment, some sources report pricing starting at $99/month for 275 data enrichment API requests. Clearbit charges per request, not per successful call-an important distinction that can increase costs when lookups fail to return data.

The pricing structure creates challenges for smaller teams. A startup wanting to enrich 5,000 contacts monthly would face costs around $4,500/month when factoring in both HubSpot subscription and credit consumption.

Auto-upgrade traps: One particularly frustrating aspect of the new pricing model is automatic upgrades. When you exceed your credit limit, HubSpot automatically bumps you to the next tier and bills you accordingly. While you receive alerts at 75%, 85%, and 90% usage, teams running multiple workflows simultaneously-form fills, CRM updates, imported lists-can burn through credits faster than expected, triggering surprise billing.

Hidden costs at scale: For mid-market and enterprise teams, the math gets concerning quickly. If you're enriching 20,000 records monthly, that's approximately $2,000 in credits alone. Add the HubSpot subscription fees for multiple seats, and your total enrichment cost can easily exceed $3,000-$4,000 monthly before factoring in implementation and maintenance overhead.

Core Clearbit Enrichment Features

Understanding what Clearbit actually provides helps you evaluate whether it's the right fit for your needs:

Real-time enrichment: Clearbit instantly enriches new leads, contacts, and accounts the moment they enter your system. Whether through form fills, CRM entries, or web tracking, the enrichment process is automatic and fast.

Company data points: Industry, employee count, estimated revenue, location, technology stack, social profiles, and company description. This helps with lead scoring and segmentation.

Contact data points: Job title, seniority level, department, LinkedIn profile, and email verification status. This helps reps personalize outreach.

Form shortening: Clearbit can auto-fill known fields on lead capture forms, reducing friction and improving conversion rates. Users enter their email, and Clearbit pre-populates company and role information.

Website visitor identification: Through the Reveal feature (now part of Buyer Intent), Clearbit uses reverse-IP lookup to identify anonymous website visitors at the company level.

CRM integration: Native integration with HubSpot (obviously), and previously Salesforce integration-though this is becoming less of a priority post-acquisition.

Understanding Reverse IP Lookup Technology

One of Clearbit's most powerful features-website visitor identification-relies on reverse IP lookup technology. This capability deserves deeper explanation because it fundamentally changes how B2B teams can identify buying intent.

Reverse IP lookup translates visitor IP addresses into organizational identities by cross-referencing against databases containing IP range assignments to specific companies. When someone from a company visits your website, their IP address gets captured. Clearbit then queries this address against databases mapping IP ranges to organizations, revealing firmographic intelligence like company name, employee count, industry, and location.

Here's the critical distinction: reverse IP identifies which company visited your site, but not which individual person. You gain account-level visibility without personal identification, which keeps the approach compliant with privacy regulations while still providing actionable intelligence.

For B2B teams, this means you can identify high-value accounts demonstrating intent through website engagement before any form submission occurs. A VP of Sales from a Fortune 500 company might spend 15 minutes exploring your pricing page and case studies without ever filling out a contact form-reverse IP reveals that interest so your team can prioritize outreach.

Match rates vary significantly by geography and audience. Expect 30-40% identification rates for European B2B traffic and 50-70% for US enterprise-focused websites. Factors affecting match rates include corporate IP infrastructure prevalence in your visitor base, remote work percentages, and VPN usage patterns.

Where Clearbit Falls Short

While Clearbit has strong enrichment capabilities, there are consistent pain points users report:

HubSpot dependency: If you use Salesforce, Pipedrive, or another CRM, you're now at a disadvantage. The tight HubSpot integration means non-HubSpot users face complex third-party connectors and reduced functionality.

Limited mobile number coverage: Clearbit focuses more on company enrichment than direct contact data. If your sales motion relies on cold calling, you'll find the mobile number coverage inadequate compared to specialized providers.

Credit expiration: The no-rollover policy on credits creates artificial pressure to use or lose your allocation each month. This feels punitive for teams with variable lead flow.

Opaque pricing: Despite being acquired by a company that generally offers transparent pricing, Clearbit/Breeze Intelligence maintains custom-quoted pricing for larger organizations, making it difficult to budget accurately.

No outbound prospecting: Clearbit enriches existing records-it doesn't help you find new prospects. You need separate tools for list building and prospecting.

Data accuracy concerns: User reviews consistently mention issues with outdated information and duplicate records. Because Clearbit aggregates from third-party sources that update at different frequencies, maintaining accuracy across all 100+ data points remains challenging. Job titles change, people switch companies, and company information evolves-but enrichment data doesn't always keep pace.

Remote work challenges: The shift to remote work has significantly impacted IP-based visitor identification. When employees work from home, coffee shops, or use VPNs, they're often hidden behind consumer ISPs like Comcast rather than corporate IP blocks. This reduces match rates and can lead to incomplete visitor identification, particularly for smaller companies that don't own their own IP ranges.

How Data Enrichment Powers Lead Scoring

Data enrichment isn't valuable in isolation-its power comes from enabling sophisticated lead scoring models that help your team prioritize the right prospects at the right time.

Basic lead scoring uses surface-level signals like form fills or email opens. But when you layer in enriched firmographic, technographic, and intent data, your scores actually predict who's ready to buy. A lead that matches your ideal customer profile, uses complementary tools in their tech stack, and just visited your pricing page three times should score significantly higher than someone who downloaded one ebook six months ago.

Here's how enrichment data transforms scoring:

Firmographic scoring: Enriched company data lets you assign points based on company size, industry, revenue, and location. If your ideal customer is a 100-500 person SaaS company generating $10M-$50M annually, enrichment automatically identifies and scores prospects matching those criteria without requiring them to fill out lengthy forms.

Technographic scoring: Understanding what technologies a prospect already uses is gold for B2B sales. If they're using tools that integrate with or complement your solution, that's a strong buying signal. Enrichment reveals tech stack information that helps you score leads based on technology fit and replacement opportunity.

Behavioral + enrichment combination: The most powerful scoring models combine behavioral data (pages viewed, content downloaded, email engagement) with enriched firmographic data. A lead hitting 60+ points gets routed to your best SDR for same-day outreach. A lead under 30 points goes into a nurture sequence.

Best practices for enrichment-powered lead scoring include: keeping it simple with 5-8 high-impact fields rather than 30+ that create unworkable models; re-enriching and re-scoring regularly to account for data decay; and ensuring scoring criteria align with actual closed deals rather than assumptions about what should matter.

Tools like our B2B Targeting Generator can help you identify which enrichment fields actually correlate with your best customers, ensuring you're scoring on data that matters rather than vanity metrics.

Practical Alternatives to Clearbit Enrichment

Given Clearbit's pricing and HubSpot lock-in, many teams are exploring alternatives. Here's how the landscape breaks down:

For enterprise ABM: ZoomInfo remains the largest player with deep contact databases and intent data, though pricing starts at $14,995 per year. Demandbase and 6sense offer sophisticated ABM orchestration with predictive analytics and buyer intent signals.

For mid-market teams: Apollo.io combines data enrichment with prospecting and sales engagement in one platform, with a database of over 275 million contacts. It's particularly strong for outbound-focused teams and offers more affordable pricing starting at $49/month.

For European data: Cognism has established itself as the leader for EMEA coverage with strong GDPR compliance. Their phone-verified mobile numbers database addresses a key Clearbit weakness.

For budget-conscious teams: Lusha offers a simple Chrome extension approach with plans ranging from $99 to $299 per month. Lead411 provides transparent pricing starting at $75/month with unlimited access options.

Data quality considerations: When evaluating alternatives, independent testing reveals significant variance in accuracy. ZoomInfo claims 95%+ accuracy with less than 5% bounce rates, while Apollo users report bounce rates as high as 30-35% in some segments. For European contacts, Cognism's phone-verified Diamond Data provides connection rates 3x higher than standard contact databases.

The choice between providers often comes down to your primary use case: Are you enriching inbound leads or building outbound lists? Do you need phone numbers or just emails? Is your target market US-focused or global? Different tools excel at different aspects of the data challenge.

Building Your Own Enrichment Stack

Rather than relying on a single enrichment provider, many sophisticated B2B teams are building modular stacks that combine multiple data sources. This approach-often called waterfall enrichment-queries multiple providers in sequence until you get a match.

Tools like Clay have emerged specifically for this use case, allowing you to orchestrate enrichment across dozens of data providers and only pay for successful matches.

The advantage of this approach: you're not locked into any single vendor, you can optimize for cost by using cheaper providers first, and you get better overall coverage since different providers have different strengths.

How waterfall enrichment works: When you need to find a work email, instead of relying solely on one database with 30% coverage, a waterfall checks multiple providers sequentially-starting with the most cost-effective-until valid data is found. If Provider A returns an email, the system stops there and you only pay that provider's credit cost. If Provider A returns nothing, the system automatically queries Provider B, then Provider C, and so on.

This methodology can triple your data coverage compared to single-provider approaches. Testing shows that while individual providers might offer 30-40% coverage on a given list, waterfall enrichment across 10+ providers can achieve 80%+ coverage on the same data set.

Cost optimization through waterfalls: Smart waterfall configuration orders providers from lowest to highest cost. You might structure your waterfall to check a $0.01/credit provider first, then a $0.05/credit provider, then a $0.15/credit provider. This ensures you're always getting the best possible cost-per-enrichment while maximizing coverage.

Clay's marketplace approach is particularly innovative-they negotiate bulk rates with various data providers and pass savings to users, making waterfall enrichment economically viable even for smaller teams. Users report cost-per-enrichment rates 50-75% lower than purchasing multiple standalone subscriptions.

Compliance considerations: One challenge with waterfall enrichment is ensuring all providers in your stack maintain appropriate compliance standards. When using tools like Clay that aggregate multiple sources, verify that each underlying provider adheres to GDPR, CCPA, and other relevant regulations. Some data providers use crowdsourced or user-contributed data that may have different compliance profiles than enterprise providers with strict data collection policies.

Data Enrichment Best Practices for B2B Teams

Successfully implementing enrichment requires more than just selecting the right tool-you need processes and practices that ensure data quality and maximize ROI.

Enrich at the right moment: Timing matters. Some teams enrich immediately upon lead capture to enable real-time routing and personalization. Others batch-enrich weekly to reduce costs. The right approach depends on your sales motion-high-velocity inside sales teams need real-time enrichment, while longer enterprise sales cycles can tolerate batch processing.

Focus on fields that matter: Don't enrich every possible data point just because you can. Identify 8-12 fields that actually drive decisions in your sales process. Common high-value fields include company size, industry, technologies used, job title, and seniority. Enriching 100+ attributes costs more and creates data you'll never use.

Automate the enrichment workflow: Manual enrichment doesn't scale. Configure your CRM or marketing automation platform to trigger enrichment automatically when new records enter specific stages. For example: enrich all form fills immediately, enrich imported lists before first outreach, and re-enrich records every 90 days to catch job changes.

Build quality checks: Not all enrichment results are accurate. Implement validation rules that flag suspicious data-like a 10-person company claiming $500M revenue or a CEO email address at a Gmail domain. Human review of flagged records prevents bad data from polluting your CRM.

Monitor data decay: Enriched data has a shelf life. Job titles change, people switch companies, company information evolves. Studies show contact data decays at roughly 30% annually. Build regular re-enrichment into your data hygiene schedule, prioritizing your most valuable accounts and active opportunities.

Defining Your Ideal Customer Profile First

Before investing in any enrichment tool, you need to know exactly who you're trying to reach. Enrichment data is only valuable if it helps you identify and prioritize the right prospects.

This is where AI-powered targeting tools can help. Our B2B Targeting Generator helps you define your ideal customer profile by analyzing your best customers and generating detailed targeting criteria-industry verticals, company sizes, technologies used, and buying signals to watch for.

Once you have clear targeting criteria, you can evaluate enrichment tools based on how well they provide the specific data points you need, rather than paying for 100+ attributes when you only care about 10.

A well-defined ICP also helps you configure smarter lead scoring models. If you know your best customers are 50-200 person companies in healthcare using Salesforce and HubSpot, you can assign scoring weights that reflect those specific characteristics. Without that clarity, you're scoring on gut feel rather than data-driven patterns.

Verifying Enriched Data Quality

One often-overlooked aspect of enrichment: the data you receive is only as valuable as its accuracy. Job titles change, people switch companies, and email addresses go stale.

After enriching your leads, run critical contact information through verification tools. Our Email Verifier can instantly validate whether enriched email addresses are deliverable, helping you avoid bounce rates that damage sender reputation.

For phone numbers acquired through enrichment, consider cross-referencing with other sources or using verification services before loading them into calling sequences. A 20% bad number rate will destroy your sales team's productivity and morale.

Why verification matters: Email bounce rates above 5% trigger spam filter penalties from major ISPs. Your carefully crafted outreach emails start landing in junk folders or getting blocked entirely. Verifying enriched emails before sending protects your domain reputation and ensures your messages actually reach prospects.

Similarly, with mobile numbers, consider the cost of verification versus the cost of wasted dial time. If your SDRs spend 30% of their calling hours hitting disconnected numbers and voicemails for people who no longer work at that company, the productivity loss quickly exceeds the cost of verification services.

Our Mobile Number Finder can help you locate cell phone numbers for prospects where enrichment providers come up short, and unlike some enrichment tools, you can verify accuracy before committing to use that data in your outreach.

Integrating Enrichment with Your Sales Tech Stack

Enrichment doesn't exist in isolation-it needs to flow seamlessly into your CRM, marketing automation, sales engagement, and analytics tools to deliver value.

CRM integration: Your enrichment tool should write data directly into standard and custom fields in your CRM without manual CSV imports. Real-time API integration ensures enriched data is available to sales reps the moment they open a lead record. Configure field mapping carefully-enriched "company size" needs to populate the exact field your lead scoring model reads.

Marketing automation sync: Enriched firmographic and technographic data should trigger segmentation and personalization in your marketing automation platform. If enrichment reveals a prospect uses Salesforce, they should automatically receive email content tailored to Salesforce users. Build workflows that react to enriched data, not just behavioral signals.

Sales engagement tools: Platforms like Instantly, Smartlead, and Close let your SDRs execute multi-channel sequences. Enriched data should feed these tools with personalization variables-company name, industry, technologies used-that make outreach feel relevant rather than generic.

Analytics and attribution: Connect enriched firmographic data to your analytics stack so you can analyze pipeline by company size, industry, and other enriched attributes. This reveals which market segments convert best and informs both product development and go-to-market strategy.

Using Background Intelligence for Enterprise Sales

For enterprise and strategic accounts, basic firmographic enrichment isn't enough. You need deeper intelligence about decision-makers, company stability, and organizational context that influences buying decisions.

This is where background research becomes valuable. Our Background Checker provides comprehensive background reports with trust scores that help you understand who you're selling to and whether they have the authority and resources to close deals.

Understanding an executive's career trajectory, their previous companies, and how long they've been in their current role provides conversation starters and helps you assess whether they're empowered to make purchasing decisions. A newly hired VP may not have budget authority yet, while a long-tenured executive with successful projects likely does.

When Clearbit Makes Sense

Despite the limitations, Clearbit (Breeze Intelligence) remains a strong choice in specific scenarios:

You're already on HubSpot: If your entire go-to-market stack runs on HubSpot, the native integration is genuinely seamless. Enriched data flows directly into your CRM without connectors or sync issues.

You prioritize inbound over outbound: Clearbit excels at enriching leads that come to you-form fills, trial signups, content downloads. If that's your primary motion, the product fits well.

You need form shortening: The ability to capture complete lead profiles from a single email field can significantly boost conversion rates on high-traffic forms.

Enterprise budget: If you're spending $80,000+ annually on data tools and have a dedicated ops team to manage them, Clearbit/HubSpot integration can reduce complexity.

Strong IP-based visitor identification needs: For companies targeting large enterprises with corporate IP infrastructure, Clearbit's Reveal feature delivers solid company-level visitor identification. If understanding which accounts are researching your solution matters more than enriching individual contact records, this capability justifies the investment.

Identifying Your Tech Stack for Better Targeting

One of the most valuable enrichment data points for B2B sales is understanding what technologies your prospects already use. Tech stack data reveals buying intent, budget availability, and integration opportunities.

If a prospect uses tools that integrate with your solution, that's a natural conversation starter and objection handler. If they use a competing product, you know exactly what you're displacing and can tailor messaging accordingly. If they use complementary tools, you can position yourself as the missing piece of their tech ecosystem.

Our Tech Stack Scraper helps you identify websites using specific technologies, enabling targeted prospecting based on tech stack fit. This is particularly powerful for SaaS companies where technology compatibility directly impacts buying decisions.

Compliance and Privacy Considerations

Data enrichment operates in an increasingly regulated environment. GDPR in Europe, CCPA in California, and emerging privacy regulations worldwide create obligations around how you collect, store, and use enriched data.

Legitimate interest basis: In Europe, reverse IP lookup for company identification typically qualifies as legitimate business interest under GDPR, as it identifies organizations rather than individuals. However, once you enrich individual contact records, you enter personal data territory and must ensure your legal basis is solid-usually consent or legitimate interest with appropriate balancing tests.

Data minimization: Privacy regulations emphasize collecting only data you actually need. Resist the temptation to enrich every possible field. If you enrich 50 data points but only use 10 in your sales process, you're creating unnecessary privacy exposure and compliance burden.

Third-party provider vetting: When using enrichment tools, you're responsible for ensuring they obtain data lawfully. Ask providers: Where does your data come from? How is consent obtained? How frequently is data updated? Are you ISO 1 and SOC 2 certified? Providers with rigorous compliance programs protect you from regulatory risk.

Do-not-contact lists: Enrichment may provide contact information for people who've opted out of marketing communications or added themselves to do-not-call registries. Cross-reference enriched contacts against suppression lists before outreach to avoid compliance violations and reputational damage.

Free Tools to Complement Your Enrichment Strategy

While enterprise enrichment platforms can be expensive, several free tools can fill gaps and enhance your overall data quality:

Our Email Finder locates someone's email from their name and company or LinkedIn profile, providing an alternative when enrichment tools come up empty. The Email Verifier ensures addresses are deliverable before you send, protecting sender reputation.

For teams building lead lists from scratch, the B2B Targeting Generator provides AI-powered target market analysis that helps you identify ideal customer profiles before investing in expensive enrichment tools. Understanding who to target ensures you're enriching the right data, not just random contacts.

These free tools work alongside paid enrichment platforms, filling coverage gaps and adding verification layers that improve overall data quality without additional subscription costs.

Making the Right Choice

The data enrichment landscape has fragmented significantly since Clearbit's acquisition. There's no longer a single "best" solution-the right choice depends on your CRM, your sales motion, your target geography, and your budget.

Start by auditing your actual data needs. Which attributes do you consistently use in lead scoring, routing, and personalization? Which ones sit unused in your CRM? Most teams discover they're paying for far more data than they actually leverage.

Then evaluate providers based on coverage for your specific market. A tool with 275 million contacts is worthless if you sell exclusively to CFOs in European manufacturing-you need depth in your niche, not breadth across all industries.

Consider whether you need a single-vendor solution or whether a waterfall approach with tools like Clay gives you better coverage and cost efficiency. For many mid-market teams, the flexibility and transparency of pay-per-enrichment models beats expensive annual contracts with underutilized data.

Finally, consider the total cost of ownership including integration time, ongoing maintenance, and the opportunity cost of your ops team managing yet another vendor. Sometimes the "cheaper" tool costs more when you factor in everything required to make it work.

Whether you choose Clearbit or an alternative, the goal remains the same: turning anonymous visitors into qualified prospects with the context your sales team needs to have relevant conversations. The tools are just a means to that end.

For teams looking to level up their enrichment strategy without breaking the bank, consider joining Galadon Gold for $497/month. You'll get 4 live group calls per week with sales experts who can guide your data strategy, direct access to proven frameworks for using enrichment data effectively, and a community of 100+ active sales professionals sharing what's working in their enrichment stacks. Learn from practitioners who've tested every major enrichment tool and can help you avoid expensive mistakes.