How to Connect Clearbit to Your B2B Sales Stack

What Is Clearbit Connect and How Does It Work?

Clearbit Connect was originally a free Chrome extension that allowed sales professionals and marketers to find verified email addresses and company information directly from their browser. The tool became popular for its simplicity-you could hover over a company domain or LinkedIn profile and instantly pull contact details, firmographic data, and technographic insights.

However, the Clearbit landscape has changed significantly. In December, HubSpot acquired Clearbit, and the product has been rebranded as "Breeze Intelligence." This means if you're looking to connect Clearbit to your existing sales stack, you're now dealing with a fundamentally different product that's deeply integrated into HubSpot's ecosystem.

The acquisition marked a strategic shift for both companies. HubSpot wanted to enhance its B2B data intelligence capabilities, while Clearbit gained access to HubSpot's massive customer base and resources. For users, this meant the end of standalone Clearbit products and the beginning of a credit-based, HubSpot-dependent pricing model that has fundamentally changed how teams access and pay for data enrichment.

As of April, all free Clearbit tools have been shut down, including the Free Platform, Connect, TAM Calculator, and Weekly Visitor Report. This means teams that relied on Clearbit's free offerings now need to invest in paid solutions or explore alternatives.

Understanding Data Enrichment and Why It Matters

Before diving into the technical details of connecting Clearbit, it's important to understand what data enrichment actually does and why it's become essential for modern B2B teams.

Data enrichment is the process of enhancing your existing customer and prospect data by adding missing information from external sources. When a lead fills out a form with just their name and email, enrichment tools automatically append additional details like job title, company size, industry, technologies used, revenue range, and social profiles.

Poor data quality costs organizations an average of $12.9 million annually, according to IBM research. Each sales rep loses approximately 550 hours and $32,000 yearly due to incomplete or inaccurate data. This isn't just a minor inconvenience-it's a major drain on productivity and revenue.

Enriched data enables several critical capabilities:

• Better Lead Scoring: With complete firmographic and demographic information, you can accurately score leads based on their fit and buying intent, ensuring sales teams focus on the highest-value opportunities.
• Improved Personalization: Detailed prospect information allows for personalized outreach that resonates. Studies show that 71% of buyers expect personalization, and 76% get frustrated when they don't receive it.
• Faster Sales Cycles: When sales reps have context before their first call-company size, tech stack, recent funding-discovery calls move faster and conversion rates improve.
• More Accurate Routing: Enriched data allows for intelligent lead routing based on industry, company size, technology usage, and other criteria that determine which rep is best suited to handle each opportunity.
• Higher Conversion Rates: B2B companies that enrich their firmographic data experience a 12% increase in conversion rates, with some organizations achieving sales productivity improvements of 25% or more.

How to Connect Clearbit (Breeze Intelligence) to Your Tools

If you're already a HubSpot user, connecting Clearbit's capabilities is straightforward-it's now built natively into the platform. Here's what the integration looks like:

For HubSpot Users

• CRM Enrichment: Breeze Intelligence automatically enriches contact and company records in your HubSpot CRM with firmographic, technographic, and demographic data. The system can enrich over 40 attributes across contacts and companies, pulling from more than 250 data sources.
• Form Optimization: Shorten your forms by auto-filling fields with Clearbit data, reducing friction for leads. This feature dynamically hides fields that Breeze can populate automatically, improving form completion rates while still capturing the data you need.
• Buyer Intent Tracking: Identify companies visiting your website and gauge their buying intent based on pages visited, time spent, and visit frequency. This replaces the old Website Visitor Report with more sophisticated intent scoring.
• Salesforce Sync: If you use Salesforce alongside HubSpot, you can configure automatic record creation for identified website visitors, though this integration is less seamless than the native HubSpot experience.
• Ad Audience Building: Use enriched data to create targeted audiences for LinkedIn, Facebook, and Google ads, enabling more precise account-based marketing campaigns.

Setting Up Breeze Intelligence in HubSpot

To activate Breeze Intelligence, you'll need a paid HubSpot subscription (Starter, Professional, or Enterprise tier) plus the Breeze Intelligence add-on. Here's the setup process:

1. Purchase Credits: Start by selecting a credit pack-100, 1,000, or 10,000 credits per month. The base pack starts at $45/month with an annual commitment or $50/month for monthly billing.
2. Configure Field Mappings: Map Clearbit's enrichment attributes to your HubSpot properties. You'll decide which fields should be enriched and whether Breeze should overwrite existing data or only fill in missing information.
3. Set Enrichment Rules: Choose whether enrichment happens automatically for all new records, manually on-demand, or continuously for existing records (available only with larger credit packs).
4. Define Target Markets: Set up your ideal customer profile parameters-industry, employee count, revenue range, location-so Breeze can focus enrichment efforts on your best-fit accounts.
5. Enable Form Shortening: Activate this feature on specific forms where you want to reduce friction. Breeze will automatically hide fields it can populate based on an email address alone.

For Non-HubSpot Users

Here's where things get complicated. Since the acquisition, Clearbit's services are now primarily optimized for HubSpot users. If you're running Salesforce, Pipedrive, or another CRM as your primary system, you'll find the integration less seamless than before.

Your options include:

• Using Third-Party Integration Platforms: Tools like Zapier, Make (formerly Integromat), or Workato can bridge Clearbit/Breeze data to other CRMs, though this adds complexity and potential points of failure.
• API Access: For larger organizations, custom API integration may be available, though HubSpot has deprecated many of the standalone Clearbit APIs. The Logo API was officially shut down in December, and direct API access now requires enterprise HubSpot contracts often exceeding six figures.
• Middleware Solutions: Platforms like Segment or Hull can help orchestrate data flows between HubSpot/Breeze and your primary CRM, though this adds cost and complexity.
• Considering Alternative Tools: Many teams have shifted to data enrichment tools that offer native integrations with their existing stack rather than forcing a migration to HubSpot.

The reality is that Clearbit's post-acquisition trajectory strongly favors HubSpot's ecosystem. If you're committed to Salesforce or another CRM, you're essentially receiving a second-class experience, and it may be time to explore alternatives that prioritize your platform.

Understanding Clearbit Pricing After the HubSpot Acquisition

One of the biggest pain points with Clearbit has always been pricing transparency-or the lack thereof. Post-acquisition, the pricing structure has become even more complex and potentially more expensive.

Breeze Intelligence now operates on a credit-based system that sits on top of your existing HubSpot subscription. Here's what you need to understand:

The Base Pricing Structure

Starting prices are around $45-50 per month for 100 credits, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Every enrichment action, form submission, or buyer intent identification consumes credits from a monthly pool that resets each cycle.

Here's what the pricing landscape looks like:

• Entry Point: $45/month (annual) or $50/month (monthly) for 100 credits
• Mid-Tier: Estimated $450/month for 1,000 credits (exact pricing not publicly disclosed)
• High-Volume: Estimated $4,500/month for 10,000 credits
• Enterprise: Custom quotes, with reports of contracts ranging from $17,000 to over $80,000 annually for large organizations

Remember that these costs sit on top of your HubSpot subscription. Depending on your HubSpot tier (Professional or Enterprise Customer Platform), you could be paying between $1,184 and $4,135 per month annually just for the base HubSpot access before adding Breeze Intelligence credits.

What Consumes Credits?

Understanding credit consumption is crucial for budgeting. One credit is consumed when:

• You manually enrich an individual contact or company record
• A form submission triggers automatic enrichment
• Bulk enrichment processes a record
• Continuous enrichment refreshes an existing record (only available with 1,000+ credit packs)
• Buyer intent features identify and score website visitors

Notably, credits do NOT roll over month-to-month. Unused credits expire, which creates a "use it or lose it" pressure that many teams find frustrating. Additionally, if you exceed your monthly allocation, HubSpot automatically upgrades you to the next tier-often without advance warning-leading to billing surprises.

The Hidden Costs

The challenge with credit-based pricing is that costs scale unpredictably. A team that signs up expecting to spend a few hundred dollars per month can quickly find their bill climbing into thousands as usage increases. Common scenarios that burn through credits faster than anticipated:

• Form Traffic Spikes: A successful marketing campaign that drives high form submission volume can consume your entire monthly allocation in days
• Bulk Enrichment: Cleaning up your existing database by enriching thousands of legacy records
• Continuous Refresh: Keeping data fresh requires re-enriching records periodically, multiplying credit consumption
• Multi-Product Usage: Teams using enrichment, form shortening, and buyer intent simultaneously burn credits across multiple features

According to customer reports, renewal quotes often jump 20-50% from initial contracts once HubSpot sees actual usage patterns. The lack of pricing transparency makes it difficult to budget accurately or compare costs against alternatives.

Cancellation Policies and Contract Terms

Most Clearbit/Breeze Intelligence contracts run annually. You typically can't cancel mid-year-you'll need to wait until renewal and provide at least 30 days' notice. Early termination usually comes with penalties, and unused credits won't be refunded. This rigidity is challenging for growing companies whose needs and priorities shift quarterly.

You can only cancel or downgrade your Breeze Intelligence credit packs at the end of your contractual commitment period. If your HubSpot account has a paid subscription, you have the option to disable automatic renewal, which will cancel your subscription at the end of your commitment period.

The Reality of Data Decay and Why Regular Enrichment Matters

Even with perfect data enrichment at the moment of capture, your database is constantly degrading. Understanding data decay is critical to appreciating why ongoing enrichment matters-and why credit-based pricing can become expensive quickly.

B2B contact data decays at approximately 22.5% annually-or about 2.1% per month. This means if you start with 10,000 contacts, over 2,000 will have outdated or incorrect information within a year. Recent data suggests decay rates may be accelerating, with some organizations reporting monthly decay rates as high as 3.6%.

The primary drivers of data decay include:

• Job Changes: Approximately 30% of professionals change jobs annually. In high-growth sectors like technology and healthcare, this number can reach 40% or higher.
• Email Address Changes: When someone changes roles, their email typically becomes invalid. About 37.3% of email addresses decay from job changes alone.
• Phone Number Updates: Mobile and office numbers change at roughly 1-2% per month, disrupting calling campaigns and lowering connect rates.
• Company Changes: Companies merge, rebrand, relocate, or shut down entirely-invalidating firmographic data and contact information.
• Title and Function Changes: Even when employees stay at the same company, 65.8% experience changes in job titles or functions, affecting targeting accuracy.

The consequences of data decay are significant. Sales teams waste hours weekly calling people who left their jobs months ago, while high bounce rates from invalid emails damage sender reputation and can lead to blacklisting by email service providers. Marketing campaigns fail to reach their intended audience, squandering budgets and opportunities for engagement.

This is why continuous data enrichment is essential-but it's also why credit-based models can become expensive. Keeping a 10,000-contact database fresh requires enriching 2,250+ records annually just to maintain baseline accuracy, not counting new lead acquisition.

Data Enrichment Best Practices for B2B Teams

Whether you're using Clearbit or an alternative solution, following data enrichment best practices ensures you get maximum value from your investment while avoiding common pitfalls.

Define Clear Objectives Before Enriching

Don't enrich data just because you can. Start by identifying specific business goals: Are you trying to improve lead scoring accuracy? Enable more personalized outreach? Build better target account lists? Your objectives should guide which data points matter most.

For example, if your goal is to improve lead qualification, focus on enriching firmographic data like company size, industry, and revenue. If you're optimizing cold outreach, prioritize direct dial numbers and accurate job titles. Enriching irrelevant fields like Twitter follower counts for B2B manufacturing prospects wastes resources and clutters your CRM.

Implement Continuous Data Maintenance

Data decay is a constant threat. People change jobs, companies get acquired, email addresses become invalid, and phone numbers change. Industry research shows that B2B data degrades at approximately 22.5-30% per year, meaning nearly a third of your database becomes outdated annually.

Best practices include:

• Schedule regular data cleaning cycles (quarterly at minimum)
• Verify email addresses before major campaigns using an Email Verifier to protect sender reputation
• Monitor bounce rates and engagement metrics to identify stale records
• Set up automated workflows to flag records that haven't been updated in 6-12 months
• Re-enrich high-value accounts periodically to catch major changes
• Establish real-time or near-real-time updates for your most critical contacts rather than relying solely on quarterly batch enrichment

Train Your Team on Enriched Data Usage

Enriched data only delivers value when your team knows how to use it. Don't just dump 50 new fields into your CRM and expect reps to figure it out. Instead:

• Identify the 5-7 fields that provide the most actionable insights
• Show reps exactly how to leverage each field in their outreach
• Create templates that incorporate enriched data for personalization
• Share success stories where enriched data led to closed deals
• Regularly review which fields are actually being used and which are ignored

Organizations that see a 47% increase in qualified lead conversion rates from data enrichment aren't just collecting data-they're actively using it to inform every customer interaction.

Balance Automation with Human Judgment

Automated lead scoring and routing based on enriched data can dramatically improve efficiency, but shouldn't completely replace human judgment. AI-driven scoring should guide, not dictate, which leads receive attention.

Set up your scoring model to:

• Calculate scores based on both demographic fit (firmographics) and behavioral signals (engagement)
• Flag outliers for manual review rather than auto-rejecting them
• Allow sales reps to override scores when they have additional context
• Regularly retrain your model as market conditions and ICP definitions evolve

Monitor Key Performance Indicators

Track metrics that reveal whether your enrichment strategy is working:

• Data Completeness: The percentage of fully populated records in your database after enrichment
• Lead Conversion Rates: Monitor improvements in conversion from enriched versus non-enriched leads
• Email Deliverability: Bounce rates should stay below 2% to avoid penalties from Gmail and Outlook
• Sales Acceptance Rate: The percentage of enriched leads that sales actually pursues
• Time to Conversion: Whether enriched data shortens your sales cycle
• Marketing ROI: The return on investment from campaigns using enriched data

Lead Scoring and Routing with Enriched Data

One of the most powerful applications of data enrichment is enabling sophisticated lead scoring and intelligent routing workflows that ensure the right leads reach the right sales reps at the right time.

Building an Effective Lead Scoring Model

A well-designed lead scoring model combines explicit data (firmographics and demographics) with implicit data (behavioral signals) to predict conversion likelihood. Companies with advanced lead management systems report 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower costs per opportunity.

Here's how to structure it:

Firmographic Scoring (40% of total score):

• Company size alignment: +15 points for companies in your target employee range
• Industry match: +10 points for priority industries
• Revenue range: +15 points for companies that can afford your solution
• Technology stack: +10 points for using complementary technologies

Demographic Scoring (30% of total score):

• Job title relevance: +15 points for decision-makers, +20 for C-level
• Seniority level: +10 points for director and above
• Department: +5 points for relevant departments

Behavioral Scoring (30% of total score):

• Email opens: +2 points per open in last 30 days
• Link clicks: +5 points per click
• Website visits: +10 points for pricing page, +15 for demo request
• Content downloads: +5 points per asset
• Webinar attendance: +15 points

Your baseline conversion rate should guide your scoring thresholds. Calculate it by dividing the number of new customers you acquire by the number of leads you generate. If your baseline is 14%, leads scoring above 70 points might be routed directly to sales, while those between 40-69 enter nurture sequences, and below 40 receive low-touch email drips or are disqualified entirely.

Intelligent Lead Routing Strategies

Enriched data enables routing rules that go far beyond simple round-robin distribution:

Territory-Based Routing: Automatically assign leads to reps based on geographic location, accounting for time zones and regional expertise.

Industry Specialization: Route leads to reps with specific vertical expertise-healthcare leads to healthcare specialists, SaaS companies to SaaS experts.

Account-Based Routing: For existing customer accounts, route new contacts to the existing account owner rather than treating them as net-new leads.

Company Size Tiers: Assign enterprise-level prospects to senior AEs while routing SMB leads to inside sales teams.

Technology Stack Matching: If your product integrates with specific tools, route leads using those technologies to reps who understand the integration story.

Intent-Based Prioritization: Leads showing high buying intent (multiple pricing page visits, demo requests) get routed immediately, while research-stage prospects enter nurture workflows.

Research shows that 35-50% of sales go to the vendor who responds first, and intelligent routing ensures leads reach the best-equipped rep in seconds rather than sitting in a queue for manual assignment. Companies where sales and marketing teams collaborate closely on lead routing report a 67% improvement in deal-closing efficiency.

Setting Effective Scoring Thresholds

Not all leads with high scores are ready to buy immediately. Establish clear thresholds for different stages:

• MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead): 40-50 points - Shows initial interest and basic fit, enters nurture workflows
• SAL (Sales Accepted Lead): 60-70 points - Sales agrees to work the lead based on fit and engagement
• SQL (Sales Qualified Lead): 75+ points - Actively evaluating solutions, ready for direct sales engagement

Monitor your SAL-to-SQL conversion rate to determine whether leads are being passed to sales prematurely (indicating a need to raise thresholds) or if delays in handoffs suggest process issues.

Common Challenges When Connecting Clearbit

Before you commit to integrating Clearbit into your workflow, understand these common friction points that teams encounter:

1. HubSpot Lock-In

Post-acquisition, Clearbit functions best within HubSpot's ecosystem. If you're using a different CRM or marketing automation platform, you're essentially getting a second-class experience. Many teams report frustration with being forced to add HubSpot to their stack just to access Breeze Intelligence, creating redundancy and added complexity.

2. Credit Burnout and Budget Unpredictability

The credit-based model creates unpredictable costs that can derail budgets. High-volume teams often find themselves running out of credits mid-month or facing unexpected overages when usage spikes. The lack of credit rollover means you're essentially in a "use it or lose it" situation each month, which incentivizes over-consumption rather than thoughtful, strategic enrichment.

3. Annual Contracts with Limited Flexibility

Most Clearbit/Breeze Intelligence contracts run annually. You typically can't cancel mid-year-you'll need to wait until renewal and provide at least 30 days' notice. Early termination usually comes with penalties, and unused credits won't be refunded. This rigidity is challenging for growing companies whose needs and priorities shift quarterly.

4. Data Accuracy and Coverage Gaps

While Clearbit has a reputation for quality data, some users report issues with duplicates, inconsistent enrichment results, and gaps in coverage-particularly for smaller companies, international markets outside North America and Europe, or emerging industries. Data accuracy ratings from independent reviews average around 81%, meaning nearly one in five records may contain inaccuracies.

5. Limited Phone Number Access

Breeze Intelligence focuses primarily on firmographic data enrichment and doesn't provide phone numbers. For teams that rely on cold calling or multi-channel outreach, this is a significant limitation that requires supplementing with additional tools.

6. Integration Complexity for Non-HubSpot Users

If you're not on HubSpot, connecting Breeze Intelligence to your existing tools requires middleware, custom API work, or accepting a fragmented experience. Many integration options that existed for standalone Clearbit have been deprecated or are no longer supported.

Alternatives to Consider for B2B Targeting

Given the complexity of connecting Clearbit (especially for non-HubSpot users), many teams are exploring alternatives that offer more flexibility, transparent pricing, and platform-agnostic integrations.

For Data Enrichment

Lusha focuses on doing the basics exceptionally well-finding accurate emails and phone numbers quickly with a simple Chrome extension. It's particularly strong for LinkedIn prospecting and offers more straightforward pricing with plans starting around $29/user/month. Lusha excels at direct dial phone numbers, which Clearbit has historically struggled with.

RocketReach provides access to a database of over 700 million professionals with verified contact information. It offers more transparent pricing and doesn't require you to be on a specific CRM platform, making it ideal for teams that want flexibility.

Apollo.io combines a robust B2B database with sales engagement features, making it ideal for teams that want to consolidate their tech stack. With over 275 million contacts in its database, pricing starts around $49/user/month with transparent tiers and unlimited email credits on higher plans. Apollo is particularly strong for building lists and running multi-channel sequences.

For teams focused on cold email, Findymail specializes in providing highly accurate professional emails with bounce rates below 2%-critical for protecting your sender reputation and maintaining high deliverability rates.

Cognism is a leader in mobile data coverage, offering 2x more mobile numbers than other providers. It includes phone-verified cell phone numbers with verified emails, making it ideal for teams pursuing multi-channel outreach strategies. Cognism has particularly strong data coverage in EMEA markets, making it an excellent choice for companies targeting European prospects.

For Website Visitor Identification

Dealfront (formerly Leadfeeder) takes a different approach by identifying companies visiting your website rather than just enriching existing contacts. It's especially useful for ABM teams working with decent traffic but low form conversion rates. Unlike Breeze Intelligence, Dealfront works independently of your CRM choice.

Demandbase provides unified tools for business intelligence, integrating in-market intent data, firmographics, technographics, and contact data into every step of the buyer journey. It's ideal for enterprise organizations running sophisticated account-based marketing campaigns.

For Comprehensive B2B Targeting

If you're looking for a complete solution to identify and target your ideal customers without the complexity of enterprise pricing or platform lock-in, consider using Galadon's free B2B Targeting Generator. This AI-powered tool helps you define your ideal customer profile and discover companies that match your criteria-without credit limits, annual contracts, or CRM requirements.

Building Your B2B Targeting Stack Without Clearbit

Here's a practical approach to building a complete B2B targeting workflow using more accessible tools that don't require expensive contracts or platform lock-in:

Step 1: Define Your Ideal Customer Profile

Use our B2B Targeting Generator to create a detailed ICP based on industry, company size, technology usage, and buying signals. The AI-powered analysis helps you identify market segments you might have overlooked and provides specific criteria for finding best-fit accounts.

Input your existing customer data, and the tool will analyze patterns to identify common characteristics among your best customers. It considers factors like:

• Industries where you have the highest win rates
• Company size sweet spots (too small = no budget, too large = complex sales cycles)
• Technologies that indicate readiness for your solution
• Geographic concentrations where you have strong product-market fit
• Growth signals like recent funding, hiring sprees, or expansion

Step 2: Build Your Prospect List

Once you've defined your target market, you need contact information. Use a combination of:

Email Finder tools to locate professional email addresses from names and company domains. This is particularly useful when you've identified target accounts and decision-makers but need their contact information.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator for identifying decision-makers within your target accounts. Use the advanced search filters to find people with specific job titles, seniority levels, and responsibilities.

Mobile Number Finder for direct dial access when email outreach isn't cutting it. Phone conversations often convert at higher rates than email for high-value opportunities, especially in complex B2B sales.

Tech Stack Scraper to identify companies using specific technologies that indicate fit for your solution. If your product integrates with Salesforce, for example, you can build lists of companies using Salesforce CRM.

Step 3: Verify Before You Send

Nothing kills your outreach faster than bounced emails. Before launching any campaign, run your list through an Email Verifier to identify invalid, risky, or catch-all addresses. This protects your sender reputation and improves deliverability.

Email verification should be a non-negotiable step in your workflow. High bounce rates (above 2-3%) can damage your domain reputation with email providers, causing your messages to land in spam folders even for valid addresses. Professional tools check:

• Syntax validation (proper email format)
• Domain verification (domain exists and accepts email)
• Mailbox verification (specific mailbox exists)
• Risk assessment (disposable emails, known complainers, spam traps)
• Catch-all detection (domains that accept all addresses whether they exist or not)

Step 4: Enrich and Personalize Your Outreach

Data enrichment is only valuable if you use it. Leverage firmographic and technographic insights to craft personalized messages that resonate with each prospect's specific situation. Avoid generic templates that could apply to anyone.

Effective personalization includes:

• Referencing the prospect's specific industry challenges
• Mentioning technologies they use and how your solution integrates
• Calling out company growth signals like recent funding or expansion
• Addressing their likely priorities based on role and seniority
• Providing relevant case studies from similar companies

Personalized emails see a 29% higher open rate and significantly stronger engagement compared to generic blasts. Email personalization has been shown to boost conversions by 10% on average.

Step 5: Run Trust and Background Checks for High-Value Prospects

For enterprise deals or high-value opportunities, use our Background Checker to get comprehensive background reports with trust scores. This is particularly valuable when:

• Evaluating potential strategic partners
• Vetting prospects before investing significant resources
• Researching key decision-makers before important meetings
• Conducting due diligence on high-value accounts

When Clearbit Still Makes Sense

Despite the challenges, Clearbit (Breeze Intelligence) remains a solid choice in specific scenarios:

• You're all-in on HubSpot: If HubSpot is your primary CRM and marketing platform, the native integration is seamless and powerful. The data flows naturally into workflows, reports, and automation without middleware or custom development.
• You need real-time website visitor identification: Clearbit's Reveal/Buyer Intent capabilities are strong for identifying anonymous traffic. If a significant portion of your pipeline comes from inbound website visitors who don't fill out forms, this feature provides valuable intelligence.
• Enterprise-scale data needs with budget to match: For large organizations with significant budgets ($50,000+ annually for data), the comprehensive data coverage and API access can justify the investment, especially when integrated into complex, multi-system workflows.
• ABM at scale: If you're running sophisticated account-based marketing campaigns with dedicated ABM platforms, the audience building and targeting capabilities integrate well with advertising platforms for cohesive campaigns.
• You have technical resources: Teams with RevOps specialists or developers who can build custom integrations, optimize credit usage, and troubleshoot issues will get more value than those expecting a plug-and-play solution.

Making the Right Choice for Your Team

The decision to connect Clearbit or choose an alternative ultimately depends on your existing tech stack, budget, team size, and specific use case. Here's a decision framework to guide your evaluation:

Choose Clearbit/Breeze Intelligence if:

• You're already a HubSpot customer on Professional or Enterprise tiers with no plans to switch
• You have budget for $20,000+ annually and can absorb unexpected overages
• Native CRM enrichment with minimal setup is your top priority
• You have RevOps or technical resources to optimize usage and monitor credit consumption
• Your primary need is inbound lead enrichment rather than outbound prospecting
• You're running sophisticated ABM campaigns that benefit from tight HubSpot integration

Consider alternatives if:

• You use Salesforce, Pipedrive, Zoho, or another CRM as your primary system
• You need predictable, transparent pricing that won't surprise you at renewal
• You're a smaller team or startup watching costs carefully
• You want to avoid annual contract lock-in and prefer monthly flexibility
• You need better international coverage outside North America
• You require direct dial phone numbers as a priority (Clearbit's weakness)
• You want tools that work independently rather than requiring a specific platform
• Your primary motion is outbound prospecting rather than inbound enrichment

For most sales professionals, recruiters, and marketers-especially those at small to mid-sized companies-a combination of targeted free tools often delivers better ROI than a single enterprise platform with complex pricing and platform dependencies.

The Future of Data Enrichment and B2B Intelligence

As we look ahead, several trends are reshaping how B2B teams approach data enrichment and sales intelligence:

AI-Powered Enrichment and Insights

Artificial intelligence is moving beyond simple data appending to provide predictive insights. Modern platforms use machine learning to predict conversion likelihood, identify buying signals, and even suggest optimal outreach timing. AI can analyze patterns across millions of data points to surface insights humans would miss. Organizations achieving 64% improvement in conversion rates are leveraging AI-driven insights as a core component of their enrichment strategy.

Real-Time Enrichment and Trigger-Based Outreach

Speed matters more than ever. Advanced platforms now offer real-time enrichment that happens the instant a lead enters your system, enabling immediate, personalized outreach. Trigger-based systems monitor for buying signals like job changes, funding rounds, or technology adoption and automatically initiate outreach sequences. The chances of successfully connecting with a new lead drop more than tenfold if you wait longer than an hour to respond.

Privacy-First Data Collection

With GDPR, CCPA, and evolving privacy regulations, data enrichment providers must balance comprehensive data with compliance. The future belongs to platforms that can provide valuable insights while respecting data protection requirements and consumer privacy expectations. Look for providers that use real-time algorithms and zero-party data collection rather than relying solely on scraped third-party databases.

Intent Data Integration

Beyond static firmographics, modern enrichment incorporates behavioral intent signals-which companies are actively researching solutions like yours, which topics they're engaging with, and where they are in the buying journey. Intent data can improve targeting effectiveness by 2.5x and boost click-through rates by 220%.

Unified Data Platforms

Rather than juggling multiple point solutions for enrichment, verification, prospecting, and outreach, teams are consolidating onto unified platforms that handle the entire data lifecycle. This reduces integration complexity, ensures data consistency, and provides better visibility into what's working. Companies that successfully unify their data platforms report 25% increases in sales productivity and 15% improvements in marketing ROI.

Getting Started: Next Steps

Ready to build or optimize your B2B targeting workflow? Here's how to get started:

If you're evaluating Clearbit: Request a demo from HubSpot and ask detailed questions about credit consumption, overage policies, contract terms, and what happens if you exceed your allocation mid-month. Get everything in writing and run the numbers carefully based on your expected volume. Ask specifically about:

• Real-world examples of credit consumption patterns for companies similar to yours
• The process for upgrading or downgrading credit tiers mid-contract
• Whether unused credits can be rolled over (they typically can't)
• What data coverage looks like for your specific target markets
• Integration requirements and technical resources needed for implementation

If you're looking for alternatives: Start by defining your ideal customer profile with our free B2B Targeting Generator. It's completely free, requires no credit card, and gives you actionable targeting insights in minutes-no complex integrations or credit systems required.

Once you have your ICP defined, use our suite of free tools to:

• Find contact information with our Email Finder
• Verify email addresses with our Email Verifier
• Locate direct dial numbers with our Mobile Number Finder
• Identify companies using specific technologies with our Tech Stack Scraper
• Research high-value prospects with our Background Checker

If you want expert guidance: Consider joining Galadon Gold for $497/month. You'll get access to 4 live group calls per week with sales experts who can help you optimize your data strategy, review your tech stack, and troubleshoot challenges. Plus, you'll join a community of 100+ active sales professionals who share what's working in real-world environments.

The direct access to proven cold email frameworks alone can transform your outreach effectiveness, helping you craft messages that cut through inbox noise and drive responses. Priority support ensures you get answers fast when you need them.

Conclusion: Data Quality Drives Revenue Quality

Connecting Clearbit to your sales stack can provide powerful enrichment capabilities-if you're already committed to HubSpot and have the budget for enterprise-level data solutions. The platform's 250+ data sources and sophisticated intelligence features make it a leader in the space.

However, for many teams-especially those on other CRM platforms, operating with tighter budgets, or requiring more flexibility-the post-acquisition Clearbit landscape presents significant challenges. HubSpot lock-in, opaque pricing, credit limitations, and annual contracts create friction that outweighs the benefits.

The good news is that building an effective B2B targeting and enrichment workflow doesn't require expensive enterprise contracts or platform lock-in. By combining strategic free tools, focused paid solutions for specific needs, and clear processes for data management, you can achieve excellent results at a fraction of the cost.

Remember: data enrichment isn't about collecting every possible data point. It's about having the right information at the right time to make better decisions, personalize your outreach, and focus your team's efforts on the opportunities most likely to convert.

Start with clear ICP definition, build targeted prospect lists, verify your data before outreach, and use enrichment strategically rather than indiscriminately. This approach delivers better results than blindly enriching every record that enters your system. Organizations that follow this strategic approach report conversion rate improvements of 12% or more, with some achieving gains exceeding 45%.

Ready to take control of your B2B targeting strategy? Start by defining your ideal customer profile with our free B2B Targeting Generator and discover how the right data foundation transforms your entire go-to-market motion.