In the hypercompetitive world of business today, the ability to generate quality leads has become the lifeblood for a sustainable business for any size of firm. Companies that are great at recognising, acquiring and converting these best prospects always outperform their competitors in just about every industry vertical there is. And usually, it’s not the quality lead generation that makes a business great, but the tools and techniques used by pro-active sales and marketing teams. Apollo is #1 Top Rated source in B2B Prospecting space, allowing users to add complex search functionality to their applications despite not being a search expert. Though most people use the basic functions of Apollo, there are many features that are available but still only a few people use them. When you use them strategically, these advanced tools can drastically change the effectiveness of your outreach, conversion rates, and your growth curve of the business overall. This exhaustive guide will cover the advanced Apollo features that help top performing sales teams stand out from the pack and get you implementing tools today that will reinvent the way you generate leads
Why Apollo Is a Lead Generation Standout
Apollo has become a sales intelligence powerhouse with a differentiated approach to data sourcing, management, and sales enablement. Unlike competitors like ZoomInfo who are more focused on contact database access, or LinkedIn Sales Navigator who focus on social selling, Apollo is a complete solution that covers the entire prospecting workflow. The platform is powered by a database that includes more than 265 million business professionals and 60 million companies, which delivers a level of contact information diversity and depth that is ideal for industry verticals, regions, and territories. The real value that Apollo brings to the table is our next-level data enrichment, which is continually refreshed and validated to guarantee upwards of 95% accuracy rates on business emails. Just this reliability factor alone puts them in a different category than sales tools like Lusha or Clearbit, which usually have a very hard time keeping this level of verification in their databases. Additionally, Apollo’s standard pricing model usually provides better value than enterprise options, and enterprise-class features can be had for a fraction of what you’d pay with competition.
Key Advanced Features for Campaign Specific Outreach
Dynamic Lead Scoring
Apollo’s dynamic lead scoring feature is one of its most robust, and most underutilized, capabilities for sales teams that need to effectively prioritize their outreach. Unlike traditional lead scoring models based on static attributes, Apollo’s process continually updates prospect scores based on real-time engagement signals, buying intent signals, and prospect activity on a variety of channels. The platform offers users the ability to build scoring models tailored to their organization’s unique ideal customer profile dimensions and weighted by factors such as technographic fit, recent funding events, growth signals, and engagement history to align with their specific business priorities and objectives. Sales organizations are also able to set up automated alerts when the leads cross a specific scoring threshold so that sales teams can act on high-scoring leads faster than their competitors. The machine learning algorithms of the system actively fine-tunes the accuracy of scoring by analyzing conversion patterns to inevitably find other signals previously overlooked that correlate with successful customer results in your unique market category. By using strategic lead scoring in Apollo, organizations are seeing an average 30-40% increase in conversion rates with a substantial decrease in sales cycle length throughout their pipeline.
Buyer Persona Filters & Custom Segmentation
Apollo’s sophisticated segmentation allows for hyper-focused targeting that makes outreach truly efficacious, vs. old-school “spray and pray” methods still seeing use with lower-order sales orgs. The application includes automatic filtering across over 200 individual fields – providing users with an opportunity to create super-specific buyer personas that describe their ideal customer with an absurd level of precision. In addition to traditional firmographic thresholders such as industry, company size, and location, Apollo allows targeting off sophisticated technographic data (that an organization uses a particular software solution or technology stack), growth signals (like hiring trends, funding events, or expansion plans), and buyer intent signals derived from the consumption of content and research activities. The platform has a boolean search function that allows complex searches to join multiple conditions, making it possible for sales teams to easily find prospects meeting specific criteria that they could not otherwise target through standard prospecting procedures. Further still, Apollo’s profile mapping tools automatically pinpoint those change-makers and influencers in targeted companies, paving the way for strategic multi-threading among buying committees and powering through roadblocks that would otherwise slow down deal flow.
Sequences with Branches
Apollo’s sequencing is much more than just a basic drip campaign— it offers advanced conditional logic to dynamically respond to how prospects behave and engage in the sales cycle. Users can create dynamic, multichannel sequences that include emails, calls, social touches, and direct mail, adding branches that will automatically adjust based on certain trigger events or prospect responses, among other things. How can sequences be set up to be “aware” of and to “consume” different tracks depending on if a prospect opens an email, clicks a link, responds to a reply with certain keywords, or shows interest in other monitored channels of the platform”? With Apollo’s A/B testing feature, sales reps can test multiple messaging strategies simultaneously, and Apollo automatically sends more prospects down the higher-converting paths as statistically valid performance differences appear during the course of the campaign. The platform’s optimization recommendations, fueled by AI, run perpetual analysis of sequence performance data, shaping recommendations specific to timing, channel and messaging content based on trends that manifest an ever-changing field of play with your one-of-a-kind combination of prospect segments and engagement histories.
LinkedIn Automation Integration
Apollo’s LinkedIn integration features an unprecedented blend of email outreach and social selling – providing a flawlessly integrated multi-channel experience never before achievable with siloed, single-channel solutions. The Opportunity – DetailsThe platform will allow users to insert LinkedIn connection requests, InMail messages and engagement actions as part of wider outreach sequences, then automatically send these social touchpoints when they are most likely to be effective within the prospect journey. Unlike standalone sales automation on LinkedIn, with Apollo’s integration, we keep a holistic view of ALL your interactions across all channels to avoid any “whoops – have we talked to Sarah already?” moments that can turn off a prospect. It can automatically customize LinkedIn messages based on data captured by other engagement channels, enabling rather timely conversations that reference prior discussions, no matter where they took place. What’s more, Apollo allows you to monitor how active prospects are on LinkedIn, and subsequently, their consumption of content and visits to sales reps’ profiles (it also becomes a datapoint in your lead scoring models), enabling your team to act on moments of “interest” in their prospects.
Intent Data & Signal Monitoring
Apollo’s intent data infrastructure is one of its strongest competitive advantages, bringing buying signals together from many places to help zero in on prospects searching for solutions in your category. It observes the behaviors of more than 10m domains on the web, tracking content consumption, search and research activity on the web that reveals purchase intent within the B2B buying process. These signals are tied back to Apollo’s company database to track research activity against the organizations and people that make up your target market. The platform is capable of finding prospects who are looking at content based around your competition, challenges they face in your space that your product solves, or even a feature of a product in your category. Users are able to set up custom intent topics around their unique value proposition and competitive differentiation, so alerts are activated when leads show intentions in the most valuable topics to the business. Apollo Signals also provides indicators of signal intensity, recency and relevance so sales teams can better prioritize their outreach and concentrate on prospects exhibiting the strongest buying intent through our digital body language.
Using Data Enrichment & CRM Sync
Apollo’s state of the art data enrichment goes well beyond simple contact data, and we’ll automatically inherit enrich firmographic, technographic, and engagement data directly onto prospects as soon as you add them. The company’s unique data acquisition methodology involves web crawling, public records, user-contributed verified data, and a host of other proprietary methods to create the most accurate, comprehensive database that is constantly growing with the latest data and coverage across markets and territories. Apollo’s two-way CRM sync guarantees that this enriched data gets passed automatically into your existing stack, updating Salesforce, HubSpot, or any other CRM your team uses as new information is learned. The platform’s deduplication algorithms help ensure that there are no conflicting records and no duplicates, so database hygiene is protected even when dealing with multiple sources of data in complex settings. And importantly, that historical view of when things like leadership changes, tech adoptions, and funding events happened to a given company is among the most valuable when it comes to sales people’s ability and need to tell contextual stories or draft sale-ready stories and triggers based on what happened in an account.
Using It in the Real World & Success Stories
If you need a reference for the transformational power of Apollo’s enhancements, turn to the perspective drawn from the experiences of the companies who have adopted it and reaped great benefits. TechVision, a SaaS startup focused on selling into enterprise IT departments, executed on Apollo’s intent signal tracking to pinpoint companies actively looking into other solutions beyond their incumbent competitor. Only targeting those high-intent prospects helped them increase qualified meetings by 217%, and decrease their sales cycle by 38% in the first quarter. Meanwhile, MarketEdge, a growth marketing agency, used Apollo’s sophisticated segmenting to superpower campaigns served to clients in several verticals and has seen average conversion lifts of 65% from their previous prospecting efforts. The company credited that win to — in no small part thanks to technographic filters from Apollo, allowing the company to target organizations leveraging complementary technologies with which integration could produce significant business value. While Moon Doggies focused on a fixed set of lead scoring, the enterprise software company CloudMatrix implemented Apollo’s dynamic lead scoring to help their inside sales team prioritize prospecting activities and saw 41% more pipeline value and 27% less prospecting time from their more efficient resource allocation.
How to use Apollo the Right Way
To gain the greatest ROI with Apollo, you will need to be both disciplined operationally while also harnessing the platform’s sophisticated technical capabilities. Start off with a proper cleanse of the data before inputting the contacts – remove any duplicates, old info and any inappropriate prospects who might spoil your clean slate. Set and enforce strict data governance guidelines such as standardized field formats, field-naming conventions and tagging taxonomies that allow for a consistent information architecture throughout your salesforce. Build a rhythm for reviewing and updating your buyer personas and targeting criteria — based on campaign performance and changing market dynamics. Tie Apollo initiatives to particular sales goals by tracking KPIs more directly, tracking not just activity quantities, but conversion rates at every stage of the pipeline, to find areas of optimization. Use progressive profiling campaigns to collect additional information, in sequence, from prospects throughout the sales cycle, deepening your knowledge of each account without bogging them down in questions early in the sales process. At the end of the day, create a well-documented synchronization between your Apollo actions and the balance of your marketing, so that you deliver a consistent message across branding and value proposition statements for all prospects across all the lines of contact, no matter whose department is responsible, or what channel they’re finding you.
The advanced capabilities you can have in Apollo can be put to use as a revolution for a sales organization that wants to graduate beyond traditional sales development. By combining elements like dynamic lead scoring, ultra-sophisticated segmentation, conditional sequence logic, integrated LinkedIn automation and intent signal tracking, forward-thinking teams can drive dramatic improvements in how effectively and efficiently they’re prospecting. Enhanced by its robust data enrichment and natively embedded CRM integration, Chorus takes these advantages to the next level, enabling sales reps to work with the most up-to-date, accurate, and actionable prospect information available. And as countless case studies prove, companies that master these advanced Apollo capabilities consistently outwit their competitors using simple prospecting approaches. Whether you’re already a customer receiving some benefits from Apollo and want to ramp up the ROI on your investment in it, or looking to solve some sales velocity issues and think Apollo might be a fit, I hope you’ll take a little time to understand some of these advanced capabilities and what they could mean for your ability to drive 2-3X growth over your current trajectory?
