How to automatically enrich new Salesforce contacts with Apollo

Why enrich contacts automatically?

When a new lead enters Salesforce — from a web form, list import, or marketing automation — you typically get a name and email address. That's not enough for routing, scoring, or personalized outreach. Reps spend 3-5 minutes per contact manually looking up job titles on LinkedIn, checking company size on Crunchbase, and searching for phone numbers. At 50-200 new leads per week, that's 2.5-16 hours of research time that should go toward selling.

Automatic enrichment with Apollo fills in the gaps the moment a contact or lead is created:

• Job title, seniority level, and department
• Company name, employee count, revenue, and industry
• LinkedIn profile URL and direct phone number
• Verified work email (if the original is a personal address)

Native integration vs. workflow-based enrichment

Apollo offers a native Salesforce integration that syncs contacts bi-directionally on a 30-minute cadence with automatic deduplication. If you want broad, always-on enrichment with minimal setup, that's the simplest path.

Use the workflow-based approaches in this recipe when you need more control — filtering by ICP criteria before spending Apollo credits, mapping to custom Salesforce fields, or chaining enrichment with other tools like Slack notifications or lead routing logic.

What you'll need

How it works

1. Detect new records — trigger on new Lead/Contact creation in Salesforce, or search for existing records missing key fields
2. Enrich via Apollo — send each record's email to Apollo's People Enrichment API to retrieve title, phone, department, company, LinkedIn URL, and firmographic data
3. Write back to Salesforce — update the Lead or Contact record with enriched fields, plus optionally update the parent Account with organization data (industry, employee count)

Which approach should I use?

• n8n — best for real-time enrichment on new record creation. The Salesforce Trigger polls for new Leads, and the workflow enriches and updates each one within minutes. Self-hosted n8n is free with unlimited executions. Requires configuring a Salesforce Connected App for OAuth.
• Claude Code — best for batch backfill of existing records or ad-hoc enrichment. Tell the agent "enrich the 50 most recent leads missing a title" and it handles the SOQL query, Apollo calls, and Salesforce updates. No Connected App or OAuth setup needed — uses a Salesforce session token directly.

Choose your approach

Select an approach below to see the full step-by-step guide.