Stop using Apollo for lead enrichment in n8n, use Explorium instead.

What's up guys, in this video we're going to be going through a platform called Explorium that you can use to enrich pretty much any contact or company. It's similar to Apollo in a way, but there's a lot more flexibility with that API and there's a lot more things you can do. And it also gives you access to an MCP server which you can use inside of NAN, which is really, really cool. So in this video I'm going to give you a quick run over of the platform so you can see how it all works, how to set up inside of NAN, and then we're going to go through the MCP server and then we're going to build out a system that you can actually use today. So let's not waste any more time, let's jump into the video. Okay, so this is platform here and this is kind of how it all looks. So you have overview, user management, API key, pricing, integration, and then the documentation and the MCP playground. And because you're going to be using this primarily through the API, there's not much detail actually in the user interface. Like I said, you're not going to be using it much through the user interface, you're going to be doing it all pretty much via API. But if you look here, if you go to integrations, what's really cool is they have all of the integrations that you can just directly integrate this platform with. And you'll see here they have NAN. And if you click on this, it gives you all of these pre-made templates which are really, really cool, and you can just pick one you like. So, enrich company thermographic data in Google Sheets with Explorium MCP, hit go to NAN, and then it will give you this template for a system using Explorium with everything already set up that you can just copy over and import directly into your NAN. So if you wanted to actually use it you can just hit use for free, it'll download the JSON, and then you can just upload that into your N8N. But if we have a look at the API documentation here, you can see everything that you can actually do with the platform. So we're gonna be looking mainly at businesses, prospects, and then the webhooks, which is another cool thing that I wanna show you. So with businesses, the way this kind of works is you first do an API request to match up the business to kind of like the database of all of the businesses that you can enrich. So you send off the information, with the business that you want to match up, and you send over like the business name, and then you'll get back a business ID that you can actually use to enrich this business. Once you've got the business ID, you can go to Business Enrichments down here, and then these are all the different things you can enrich. So firmographic, technographic, uh, social media, ratings by employees, search on websites, uh, funding and acquisitions— all of these different things you can enrich for companies, which is really cool. You can see there's loads of them here. You can just pick whichever ones you want. I recommend if you're doing sort of like a general, um, like, just want to in general enrich a company, just go with the firmographics and it will give you kind of all the relevant data you would need, like the general information on the company. Then of course, if you want to go into a little bit more detail on these companies and search for specific things, something like their business challenges of public companies, and obviously you can put in the company and it'll give you back all of the business challenges, all of the funding and acquisitions, um, anything like that. If you want to go into more detail, then you can use these different endpoints here. And then you can also look up the events type. So if you go to events type these are all the different things that you can have that will just automatically trigger inside of NAN or whatever you're using. But of course we're going to be using NAN. So you can basically set up a webhook and have it so Explorium will just ping that webhook whenever these companies that you're watching out for, one of these events happens. So for example, if they launch a new product, this company that you're watching, as soon as it happens, your webhook will be pinged with all of the relevant information. And you could, for example, generate an email body and reach out to them instantly if you're selling something that might relate to that. So there's all of these different event types here, um, that you can set up for individual companies. And then if we look at the prospects enrichments, same kind of thing, you match up the prospects, but this time you can give it a little bit more data to get more accurate matching. So you can do their name, their email, and the company that they work at. And if you go to prospects enrichments, you can get their contact details, you can get their social media presence, and you can also get their contact and workplace details. So Really cool. Prospects bulk enrichment, you can do the same thing, but of course in bulk with the prospects enrichment of the normal one. This is kind of what you do if it was just for, um, like one individual rather than doing it in bulk. And then events type, same thing. You don't have as many with the, um, people. You have way more with companies, obviously, because it's way easier to track sort of a company's events rather than individuals. But it's still cool that you actually get any with the, um, individual people. So you can have them changing a workplace, a workplace anniversary, or them changing a role at their job. And like the other one, you can have it so it just instantly pings your webhook as soon as this happens with this individual prospect. And then if you want to actually set up these webhooks, you can go here to the webhook receiving real-time events, and you can just add a webhook via API. You can get them, you can delete them, you can check the connectivity. But majority of the time, you're just going to want to be adding a webhook, and you'll get back all the necessary information that you need to set up the webhook inside of NAN. So now we're going to move on to the Explorium MCP, which is really, really cool. So Basically in NAN I've set up just a really, really simple agent that's just a chat message. I think it's linked up to, yeah, 4.1 mini. And I've put down an MCP client node. And then in here, all you do, the SSE endpoint, you put in this URL here, and then you just set up your authentication with Explorium. You can just go to bearer auth and then set up an Explorium credential. And all you do is just put in your API key that you can get from the interface. If you go to API key, you can obviously just copy that in and put it into here, and then it'll be actually connected up. Now it's connected up to your Explorium account, and then you can use this as an MCP server. So you can imagine an AI agent that you can prompt in whichever way you like that's integrated directly with Apollo. Let's say they can get any information you like and you can ask it absolutely anything in natural language. So for this, the agent's prompt is just, you'll be provided with a company information including name and domain. Your task is to research and extract the following key business metrics for this company. Then we've given it some metrics here and then we just told it how to actually use the Explorer MCP. But we're just going to test it out. It's a really, really simple prompt. We're just going to test it out so you can see how it actually works. So we can say something like Ben Francis Gymshark.com. Obviously Ben Francis, CEO of Gymshark. We can see it used the MCP client node and then pretty quickly in 10 seconds it gave us back the website, the annual revenue, the number of employees and the NAICS code, which is absolutely perfect. One of the other cool things you can do with it is you can talk to it as if it's actually a human. So you could say something like, find me a real estate company in the UK with less than 10 employees, and then it can actually do that for you. Um, yeah, like rather than just giving it like a name and a domain and getting to enrich it, you can talk to it as if it's a human and give it these more like dynamic prompts. So it's given us Higher Capital Consulting and their website here, annual revenue range, and then the number of employees. So pretty cool. Also enrich this company further if you wanted to. So you could say something like Has Higher Capital Consulting— the reason I'm having to repeat the name is because I didn't put a memory note down. Otherwise, it's obviously remember the last message, but I forgot to, so that's why I'm having to, like, repeat the name. Has Higher Capital Consulting had any events that I should know about recently? So I said, has Higher Capital Consulting had any events that I should know about recently? And yeah, it pings straight back to us. Hi, Capital Consulting has had a recent event. An employee named Austin Mooney joined the company as an associate in the finance department. This event was recorded January 1st, 2025. Also didn't give it the date. I could have improved this agent, as you could tell, give it a memory, could have given it the date as well. Um, so obviously it didn't know what today's date was, so this isn't too recent. Um, but yeah, if I was to give it the date, it could actually give me some more recent events. But this still just shows you how impressive and how useful this actually is, just being able to talk to it as if it's a human and it can give you all of this kind of data. So now what we're gonna do is we're gonna create a workflow and the workflow I'm gonna be creating is one of the ones that's templated on the Explorian website, but I wanna actually create it for you so you can sort of see how it all works and how the actual building process of it would work. So this is gonna be a lead enrichment process. When you get a new lead in through HubSpot, it's gonna enrich that lead, give you all the relevant data and put the information back in HubSpot. So how we're gonna do it is usually you would have some kind of trigger that's like a HubSpot trigger or a form trigger or something like that. But just for testing, we're going to do trigger manually so we can manually trigger this. And then the next step is going to be HubSpot, and we're just going to get the most recent lead from HubSpot. So if we, uh, look for contact, get recently created updated contacts, set the limit to 1, and then this is just going to get the most recent contact inside of HubSpot. And I just put a demo one, uh, Ben Francis, the company is Gymshark. That's the only information I put in there. So that's going to come back. But like I said, this would be when you actually get a new lead into your HubSpot through a or through booking up a call, through emailing you, whatever it might be, it would trigger this workflow. But for this, we're just going to be triggering it manually. And then now we're going to use an Explorium node. We're going to do an HTTP request, we're going to do, uh, POST, and then the endpoint is going to be prospects match. And basically we're going to put that information into Explorium and get back a prospects ID that we can use to enrich this contact. So the way we do that is we do this endpoint URL, method is POST, and then the headers we're going to send over are just Content-Type: application/json and then our API key. Okay, so we've got Content-Type: application/json. Then there's also another header I forgot about, which is Accept: application/json. And then we just have another one for our API key. Not going to show you my API key, but it's just the name is API key and then the value is just going to be your actual API key. And then we're going to flick on Send Body, do JSON using JSON, and then this is the body that we're actually going to be sending over. So it's just prospects to match, and then we do the full name company name, and email. We get that data from HubSpot here. So you can see we got the names, we get it as first name, last name, but we just merge them together in this variable here. Then we also have the company name, and then we have their email, which is this one here. So then when we execute that, we should get back a prospect ID. So yeah, the correlation ID, and then yeah, the prospect ID. That's what we're looking for. We can now use this ID for Ben Francis to enrich him and his company further. And then after that, we just put down a code node. And the reason I didn't show you, um, me typing out this code node or putting it in, it's because I don't really know how to write JavaScript. So I just copied this over from their actual template. Um, but all this does is it just extracts the prospect IDs that we're working with, just the prospect IDs. So if we execute, it just gives us the prospect ID because there might be multiple coming through here. This is obviously set to just one, but let's say you have 5, for example. Um, this would just separate all of them and just give you the prospect IDs. And then we're actually going to send this off two ways. We're going to do two HTTP requests. So if we just get them down, HTTP, and then just copy that here. So we have two, and what we're going to be doing is we're going to be enriching their contact information and then also just enriching them as a lead. So for this one, we can just name this, uh, enrich contact info. The method is of course going to be POST, and then this is the URL that we're using, so contacts information bulk enrich. And then we're going to send over the same headers as the last one and also send over a body as well. So we just flick them on. Okay, so the headers are the exact same. Again, it contains my API key, so I'm not going to show you, but trust me, they are exactly the same. And then JSON, we're just going to do using JSON. And then for the body, we're just going to be JSON, and we're literally just sending over one variable, which is the prospect ID. So I don't need to do some big JSON body. You can just send over the variable like this and then turn batching off. I don't know why that's on. So if we execute this, you can see this is the information we get. Uh, we get his legitimate email there and we get two emails. It's obviously a professional one and current professional. I don't know what the difference is, but we also get his phone number as well. Um, so yeah, from that we get his professional email address because the one I put in there was just random. I think I just did ben@jimshark.com. Um, it looks like this is his actual legitimate email address. So we get that and then we also get his phone number, which is really cool and really useful, obviously. And then for the second one here, we're going to do what's called enriching their profile. So that just basically means enriching the person, getting more data on them. The way we do that is by using this URL, which is prospects and profile. So again, method is POST. This is the URL, same headers as before. And in fact, this one is the exact same as this one, just with a URL. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to copy this grab our URL from here, paste it into here, and then connect this up. And then when we execute this, this is what we get back. So Ben Francis, United Kingdom, England. This is LinkedIn. This is a website for— obviously this is experience, so this is his past experience. Uh, we can look through there, but I'm pretty sure it's quite big, and the only one we actually care about in this case is Gymshark. So Gymshark, we get a little summary, the start date, he's the founder, which is really cool. Then you can see he's obviously gone through a lot of roles here, so like Chief Marketing Officer, um, CXO, like loads of different things here. We also get all of his skills, which is really cool, and then we get his age group, his degrees, uh, all of his education in fact, gender, company name, company website, company LinkedIn, and job title, which again, really, really cool. And we get both of these pieces of information, so his number is legitimate, email and all of this enriched data. After this, we're just gonna add a merge node, and this is just gonna do exactly what it says, merge these two data streams together. So if we go merge and then just put the input there and then input there, we have to adjust some settings in here. So if we change this from append to combine, and then matching field, it's just gonna be the prospect's ID because both of these outputs here are gonna, or both of these outputs here are gonna output the prospect's ID with that enriched data. And we just want to use that as a key to kind of merge that data together. It's just gonna make it easier when we wanna put it into the CRM. So if we just run this through, it's gonna run that other one. This one's already run, and then it's just gonna give us a merged output that looks like this. So all of this information that we need in one place, in one output, um, you've already seen all of it obviously because we went through both of the outputs here. Then again, we're just gonna add a code node that looks like this, and when we run it, it basically just clears up all of that data for us and sort of removes this stuff at the beginning, removes all the stuff we don't want. And just makes it a lot nicer for us to actually use when we're updating HubSpot. Um, but yeah, this is all of the data that we actually get. If I make this bigger, this is all the data we get, um, just automatically from Explorium when a new lead comes in through our CRM or new contacts added to our CRM. You can see how easy the setup was, um, with the system. And like I said at the beginning, this is one of their free templates. If you want to go grab it, you can just go grab it for free. But I thought it makes sense for me to show you how you actually set this all up and then we can just go to HubSpot. We can go to create/update a contact, and then the email, we're going to do the ben@gymshark.com, and then add properties. We can just add in all of these properties. So save you watching me find all of them, these are the ones we're going to do. We have city, company name, country, region, job title, mobile phone number, phone number, start date, state/region, website URL, and work email. So if we just put all of these in If we find the city— city's here, it's null. It couldn't actually find this, which is, um, kind of annoying. But oh well, I guess I can't find all the information for everyone. But if we find company name next, we're just going to grab this one here. And then country/region, we're just going to say United Kingdom. And then job title, it depends which experience we grab, obviously, because he's been a couple different things when it comes to Gymshark. But we're just gonna grab, um, this first one here, which should be, yeah, Founder. We're just gonna say the Founder. Mobile phone number, that was towards the bottom, I believe. Actually, just search these in if you can't find them. So we can go to Number and then Phone Number, drag that in there. And start date, if we just go to Start— I mean, it depends again which one we want to grab, but we're just going to grab the first one because we did the first one for the other ones with like the Founder. State/region. I mean, in the UK, so it's not really states, but if we just have a look at what we have, maybe we can chuck in— we'll just go England, I guess. And then website URL, we're just going to grab it again from Experience 1 website URL. And then work email, let's just type up email. And professional email, that one. Perfect. Then hit execute step. And then now all that information is just automatically going to be in our CRM. So Very, very cool. That is Explorium. There's lots of other stuff you can do with it. I didn't get a chance to show you the signal things where you can do it so that when a company like hires someone or moves office or that kind of thing, instantly pings your webhook. But I hope this gives you a really good idea of the kind of things you can do with Explorium and how easy it is to set everything like this up.