How to Use Surfe's New Side Panel to Prospect and Find Leads

Surfe's new Side Panel brings everything together in one clean, dedicated space: your contact data, CRM syncing and data enrichment, all of Surfe's best features in a single panel that lives alongside your browser. Up until now, Surfe has lived directly inside your browser alongside your prospecting workflow, and the Side Panel is now ready for new users to try.

Click the small Surfe icon that appears in the top right-hand side of your browser once you have signed up, and the Side Panel opens on the right-hand side of your screen. If you are already on your business social page, a blue tab appears on the right-hand side of your screen instead, and clicking that opens the panel for you. The panel sits neatly alongside whatever else you have open in your browser, so you can keep your workflow going without having to jump between tabs.

Open the Side Panel and click the three-lined menu button in the right-hand corner, scroll down, and you will find the option 'auto open Surfe side panel'. For new users this is switched on by default, so opening or closing the Side Panel in one tab automatically does the same across all of your other open tabs. This can save you a lot of time, especially if you have lots of tabs open while prospecting across different web pages.

If you would prefer the panel to only open when you choose to open it, switch the 'auto open Surfe side panel' feature off. Each tab then operates independently and the panel stays out of your way until you need it. Both options work, it just comes down to your preference.

Opening the Side Panel on a contact's profile on your business social means Surfe instantly pulls in all of the existing key information about them: their name, job title, company and location, all surfaced immediately in the panel. Having this data already at your fingertips saves you a bunch of time because there is no manual searching, no copying and pasting. This is the foundation of the Side Panel: it pulls and enriches the data you need so you can focus, as a salesperson, on what to do with it. From here there are two core actions: syncing a contact to your CRM and enriching their contact details.

If the contact you are looking at is not already in your CRM, click the 'sync as contact' button in the Side Panel. Surfe then gives you two options: sync them as a contact or as a lead. Choose whichever matches how your CRM is set up. Alex uses HubSpot as his CRM and adds the person as a contact. Surfe will sometimes ask you to confirm the position of the person you are adding. This can happen if they hold multiple positions or have different roles listed on their business social page and it is not quite clear. To ensure good accurate records are uploaded to your CRM, select the role that best fits your requirements and confirm your choice to start the sync process. Within a matter of seconds the Side Panel updates to confirm the sync has been completed. This step is important to do before enrichment, because once a contact is in your CRM, any data you enrich is saved directly against their record.

Once your contact is synced, enrich their details by choosing to find an email address, find a mobile number, or click 'find both' if you want both at once. Surfe then runs its waterfall enrichment process, searching up to 15 databases concurrently, and once the data has been found the results are uploaded directly to the panel. This process only works if you have a Surfe account and the necessary credits.

Occasionally you may be looking for someone that Surfe just can't find the contact information for, and the Side Panel shows what is called an empty state. Rather than hitting a dead end, Surfe gives you the option to fill in the contact details manually right there in the panel and then push that record through to your CRM, without switching tabs or disrupting your flow.

You can now manage and edit all of your CRM fields right inside the Side Panel. This gives you proper ownership of your data and the flexibility to change it, which is vital for things like reporting, automation and good data management.

You can add contacts to deals from the Side Panel, so if you want to create a new opportunity linked to a specific contact and their company you can do that directly from the panel, with no need to go into your CRM separately.

You can create and manage tasks from the Side Panel, so if you want to log a follow-up or set a reminder, it is all handled inside the panel. For those of you who use Pipedrive, Salesforce, HubSpot, or Copper, CRM event tracking is also supported, so your activity is logged automatically. To access any of these options, click the three-lined menu button in the top right-hand corner of the Side Panel, where you will find the full menu of actions available to you.

Click the Surfe logo at the top of the panel and you are taken straight through to your full Surfe dashboard, without opening a new tab or Googling surfe.com. You can also use the shortcut tabs to jump directly to a specific section: your account, your settings, your field mapping, or your integrations. From the panel you can check your remaining enrichment credits under 'my account', and access the Surfe app, where you can continue your prospecting.

Surfe's new Side Panel is a clean, dedicated space in your browser for viewing contact and company data, syncing to your CRM effortlessly, enriching emails and mobile numbers, and managing tasks and deals. If Surfe can't find the contact for you, you have the tools to add them manually. If you want to dig into any of the features in more detail, head over to surfe.com, where you will find the full documentation and support guides. You can start a free two-week trial using the link created specially for viewers in the description of this video.