In the fast-paced world of sales, you can’t afford to have rudimentary prospecting tools that slow you down. Apollo. io has blossomed into sophisticated, heavyweight sales intelligence software, but the average user barely taps in to its potential. Power users who harness Apollo’s advanced features are outperforming their peers 3-5x in lead generation and pipeline progression. This ultimate guide will share those advanced tactics that will distinguish the “okay” Apollo users from the great sales prospectors. Whether you’re doing complex enterprise sequences or you’re having to write multi-touch sequences, just keep this in mind – a big part of the modern sales development process is to realise you need to change your tactics around what it is that you’ve got provided the support to make it work. The gap between rudimentary Apollo usage and advanced power user knowledge can mean the difference between a sales team making quota or blowing it away by larges margins.
Why Power Users Should Learn to Master Apollo
Most of Apollo’s customers just use search filters and a few basic email sequences and they aren’t using the platform for what it is capable of doing AMAZING things for your business. And with Advanced Apollo capabilities (like predictive scoring and intent data integration) in-depth automation workflows have the potential to increase qualified leads generated by 400% over basic usage. After all, power users of Apollo know that Apollo isn’t just your run-of-the-mill contact database, it’s a sales intelligence network which connects the dots across numerous touchpoints to provide a full picture of any given prospect. Algorithms and machine-learning This is a no-brainer: the algorithms that are used by the platform are X times better when organisations set advanced configurations with custom scoring. Businesses who invest in advanced Apollo training have their sales teams close 40% more deals and decrease time to close by an average of 23 days. By learning to effectively wrangle Apollo’s powerful tools, you’re not only increasing your prospecting prowess, you’re developing an edge that snowballs over time from judicious automation and data-guided choices.
Advanced Lead Scoring & Segmentation Techniques
More advanced Apollo users build more complex scoring models, where things like a prospect’s industry, the product they are interested in, and ideal customer profile manifest into the weight of each attribute. Instead of using Apollo’s scoring out of the box, power users build algorithms that highlight other qualities they care about, such as growth rate, current technology stack, recent fundraising and changes in employee count. Behavioral scoring monitors interaction across various touchpoints such as email opens, link clicks, content downloads and website visits to build rich prospect profiles. More sophisticated users use negative scoring factors which automatically score low-intent behaviors, or those that don’t match ideal customer profiles, further away from sales ready prospects. time decay scoring to have recent activities weighted heavier than older interactions and bringing prospect priorities up-to-date. These bespoke models will usually increase the accuracy of lead qualification by 60-80% compared to standard scoring methods, enabling sales teams to spend their time dealing with prospects most likely to become qualified opportunities.
Power users use Apollo’s dynamic list functionality to build self-updating prospect segments that change based off conditional logic and real-time data. And advanced trigger conditions trigger different workflow off of particular mixes of firmographic, technographic and behavioral signals. Smart list management also features exclude rules to prevent being over-targeted by campaigns and make sure prospects aren’t reached through more than one campaign at a time. Power users build nested list logic to isolate prospects into complex buckets based on several criteria and engagement scores. Triggered Workflows Trigger-based workflows let you automatically transition prospects from sequence to sequence based on how they reply, how engaged they are or when they move companies. Such active ecosystems of systems help to keep the prospect conversation fresh and timely, dramatically increasing response rates, decreasing unsubscribe requests and perpetuating the right brand experience over long-term nurture campaigns.
Leveraging ‘Sequences’ and A/B Testing with Emails
Power users of Apollo utilize conditional branching in email sequences that let Apollo dynamically adapt messaging based on prospect responses, engagements, and demographic information. And that’s when smart sequencing logic can recognize positive responses and automatically stop outreach while alerting sales reps about the warm leads that should be followed up with in person. That allows for distinct messaging strategies based on the type of persona, relevant and at the same time automated at a large scale. Power users develop backups for those who remain unresponsive, transitioning their messaging incrementally from value-oriented (product benefits) toward hard(er) selling (time limited offer). Engagement Branching Allow the system to automatically add highly engaged prospects to accelerated sequences and downgrade low-engagement prospects to longer-term nurture campaigns. These advanced workflows tend to increase overall sequence performance 40-60% by decreasing manual sequence management time up to 80% so Sales can focus on high-value tasks of closing deals and relationship building.
Power users adhere to A/B testing processes, which means more than just testing different subject lines — but also trying different messaging structures, value props, or methods for the ask. Sophisticated testing includes timing tests that determine the best send days and times for different verticals, all sizes of company, and different geographic regions. Message length testing allows you to tell if your prospects convert at a higher rate when they receive a shorter personal message versus a longer piece that makes it all about the value they can derive. Testing personalization level juxtaposes broad-based messaging against targeted messaging to determine how far you can push specificity and still achieve efficiency of scale. Power users will split test email formats such as plain text vs HTML, with image and without, and no signature or light and heavy signature to determine the best deliverability and engagement rate. Statistical significance testing helps make certain findings are reliable and actionable instead of jumping the gun on making assumptions with too little data and getting it wrong with campaign performance.
Adding Integrations to Your CRM via Apollo
Power user feature alert: Advanced Apollo users dive in and build complex field-mapping strategies to push custom data points from Apollo back to their CRM to improve targeting and personalization. This would also include syncing custom fields such as technographic data, intent scores, engagement history, and other behavioral indicators that standard CRM set ups don’t support. Intelligent mapping policies maintain the integrity of the data on each system, so you never have to worry about duplicate, or out-of-sync data which can otherwise undermine the success of a campaign. Power users even establish field validation rules to keep their data clean and to ensure that incomplete or incorrect details of a prospect don’t make way into their sales pipeline. Field updates are automatically pushed so that your prospecting information is up to date across all applications, providing sales reps with the latest intelligence when reaching out. These integrations generally boost lead qualification accuracy by 50-70% and decrease the time spent on manual data entry by around 90% (ideal if you want a chaos-free workflow to maximise efficiency and effectiveness).
Power users see the benefits from doing this with Apollo’s built in integrations with Salesforce and HubSpot and form very simple workflows that help enrich an existing prospect and leads records with good looking intelligence data. More sophisticated integrations offer features such as automatically updating lead scores, moving opportunities through stages based on engagement metrics and creating tasks for sales reps based on prospect activity. Bi-directional sync ensures that CRM updates feed back to Apollo in real-time. This makes sure the data is kept consistent and you’re not sending new outreach to prospects who’ve already converted or been disqualified. Custom object mapping enables users to map their Apollo specific metrics into their CRM reporting dashboards, for a holistic view of campaign performance. More advanced users would develop automated workflows based on triggers with Apollo data, updating prospect status, assigning territories, and alerting teammates. These unified solutions have historically equaled 60-80% increase in sales and marketing collaboration while eradicating data siloes and manual synchronization overheads that are common at-developing sales departments.
Using AI & Intent Data from Apollo
Sophisticated Apollo users interpret and execute on buyer intent scores meaning understanding the data sources, scoring algorithms, and the best threshold configuration for their market segments. Interpreting intent score Interpretation of the intent score must be done in the context of how various online behaviors, content consumption patterns and search activities all roll up to prospect readiness indicators. Heavy users break prospects into sections based on intent score ranges and develop separate campaign strategies that can meet messaging intensity with established interest. Sophisticated analysis evaluates the intentscore, firmographics, and technographics of your prospects to identify companies that demonstrate both interest and fit, and can convert at the highest potential. Trending intent scores make it easy to recognize prospects that show a growing or declining signal to purchase over time, so you can adapt the timing and sequence of your outreach. These advanced strategies generally drive 2-3x higher conversion rates than generic outreach that is blind to intent data signals, allowing the sales team to focus on prospects at the right stage of the buying journey.
High growth sales teams are using Apollo’s predictive analytics to build complex scoring models to assign scores to prospects based on their potential conversion, potential deal size, and likelihood the sales cycle will take. With sophisticated predictive modeling that takes into consideration historical conversion data, industry trends, and business rule metrics, custom probability algorithms can be generated. Predictive prioritization enables sales teams to zero in on where they should spend their limited time and energy by identifying leads with the highest potential to generate revenue within a certain time frame. Power users use predictive scores in combination with capacity planning to optimize prospect spread to sales team members based on their strengths and territories. As more conversion data accumulates, machine learning algorithms continually refine predictions to provide even more accurate prioritization with the passage of time. On average, these predictive methods drive 40-60% production efficiency for sales teams and improve overall company-wide quota attainment by analyzing the potential for intelligent resource allocation and strategy focus.
Sophisticated Workflow Automation Tips
Power users of Apollo build complex multi-layered campaigns that respond instantly, based on prospect engagement and mood throughout the day. Sophisticated workflow logic establishes branch points, which may guide prospects through various campaign stages according to email opens, link clicks, content downloads and response sentiment analysis. Interest-based advancement will ensure those prospects that are super engaged get a faster response, meanwhile cold prospects are put into longer-term nurture sequences without flooding your active opportunities. Power users take advantage of cross-channel orchestration, which sequences email outreach with LinkedIn connection requests, telephone calls, and direct mail touches based directly on engagement. Smart campaign advancement prevents over communication but enables the right touchpoint frequency to keep you top-of-mind throughout long sales cycles. These more advanced automation techniques (which the concept of 10.13 is built on, just pushed even further) tend to make campaign performance 50-70% stronger while there being 85% less time you need to spend managing sequences manually creating these scalable prospecting machines, sans babysitting.
About The Most Frequent Mistakes Advanced Learners Make
Even the most sophisticated users of Apollo occasionally succumb to the allure of complex automation flows not fully vetted, validated and introduced incrementally in ways that can be carefully monitored. When your workflows get complex, you’ll want to automate sending messages, but advanced bot automation means performing systematic tests of their workflows components, trigger conditions, and branching logic so you don’t accidentally do something with bad consequences or that make prospects unhappy. Overly automated leads to cold, robotic communication that can harm the reputation, decrease response rates and using the most advanced technology is implemented. For power users, it is a juggling act between the efficiency of automation and personalisation and human touch points to preserve the effectiveness of relationship building at every step of the prospect journey. Without monitoring, automation can cause sequence conflicts, or send the wrong message, or continue to reach out to a lead, which should have been excluded, or processed manually.Monitoring aspect and sequence status update in sequence managerWhat we need here is to monitor when the sequence went off. The best power users we’ve seen being to automate a little at a time, to test each step, to leave human oversight in place so that we can know that instead of replacing relationship building fundamentals which help us to be successful in the long run, our technology is enhancing those practices.
Becoming a True Apollo Expert
Real mastery of Apollo takes a dedication to continually experimenting, testing and learning beyond what you are taught in initial platform training or from a certification program. Power users think of each campaign, sequence, and workflow as a chance to learn more about their audience in order to optimize and make strategic decisions in the future. Systematic testing schemes should cover micro-experiments concerning given elements, as well as macro-experiments concerning global strategies, message structures and segmentation strategies. With failure and success there is learning that accumulates and becomes more and more sophisticated, readers and prospects will appreciate. Power users are already proactively learning from other power users and industry publications, ingesting our training content and hunting for case studies or best practices. The best power users have extensive historical records of their test findings, optimization techniques, and performance learnings to achieve institutional knowledge and ongoing improvement that results in competitive advantage over time.
Apollo regularly launches new features, integrations, and functionalities that may have a substantial effect on power-user strategies and performance results. The hard-core users are those who need to be aware of platform updates — both in the core and beta versions of the platform features — and also integration possibilities that match their work flows and business cases. The Apollo user community has been a great place for more advanced users to share, learn, and keep up to date with emerging best practices and creative techniques. Sharing with the community allow power users to learn from others experiencing similar challenges, uncover new use-cases and benchmark one’s own strategy against industry best practices. Most successful power users understand the importance of platform evolution and community involvement in their continuous learning and mastery journey: they can quickly and easily outpace the competition in the ever-growing complex sales technology landscape.
