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From my perspective, I use Apollo.io to get and run simultaneous campaigns including LinkedIn outreach, email outreach, and cold calling.

When it comes to cold calling, we find contact numbers. For email outreach, we find verified email IDs, and for LinkedIn outreach, we find LinkedIn URLs.

We sometimes run campaigns using Apollo.io email automation, where we can set up sequences and multiple follow-ups. The first follow-up will be an email, the second follow-up will be a call outreach task, and the third will be another task sending a connect message through LinkedIn.

I was using workflows to automate tasks rather than doing manual day-to-day tasks. We can easily create automated workflows in Apollo.io to save time on manual tasks.

In one of my recent campaigns, I was targeting EdTech startups. The ICP focused on companies with 10 to 20 employees in the USA within the EdTech industry. We initially targeted them through Apollo.io using cold calls, emails, and LinkedIn outreach.

What stands out is the Apollo.io extension. When we use the extension, we can directly view LinkedIn profiles, and it automatically provides LinkedIn IDs and contact numbers. If contact numbers are available on LinkedIn, it displays them and gives an option to add to existing lists.

The extension works effectively with Sales Navigator as. Since Sales Navigator doesn't have an export tool, Apollo.io's extension allows us to easily export data into CSV files.

When it comes to USA contacts, it can be challenging. Some Apollo.io numbers are incorrect, especially when cold calling. The numbers often go unanswered, and when someone does answer, it's frequently not the correct person.

We encountered these issues mainly in the USA and UK regions, particularly when targeting EdTech companies. However, when running a campaign in Australia, most of our cold calls were answered successfully.

I believe they need to update their data in the USA and UK regions. Some of the data is outdated, and updating it would significantly improve the service. We can't afford to target the wrong person with incorrect information.

The interface is very easy to use, and they normally update it twice a month, which is good. However, they should focus on updating their data instantly rather than maintaining outdated information.

I have been using Apollo.io for maximum two years.

The cost of Apollo.io is acceptable and helps in saving costs compared to using multiple tools. Instead of having separate tools for email campaigns and cold calling campaigns, Apollo.io provides all three functionalities on one platform.

Creating workflows saves us considerable time rather than hiring interns for manual tasks. When it comes to cost savings, this is significant. Many companies hire people for manual tasks, but with Apollo.io, we can easily create workflows to save time and reduce hiring costs.

Due to some outdated data, we considered looking at competitors related to Apollo.io because we cannot target prospects with incorrect information. We initially looked at competitors such as Lusha.

My main use case for Apollo.io is to source and verify B2B prospect data that we ultimately put to use on behalf of our clients in the form of outbound marketing campaigns. It might be for email outreach or LinkedIn outreach or cold calling or warm calling projects.

We have used Apollo.io for hundreds if not thousands of campaigns over the years, and the types of filters we often use would be the technographic filters or the intent filters, along with in combination with the most common filters around job roles and industries and company sizes and whether companies have been funded recently. We use a combination of all those types of filters to build out the most suitable ICP data for particular client's objectives and targeting.

The best features Apollo.io offers include a huge variety of filters at both the prospect level and company level, which is a big attraction point, particularly quite a number of unique filters that are less available elsewhere, such as their intent-based filters in partnership with Bombora intent data. That's been really useful for us and our clients. A quite new filter that relates to recruitment and what job roles companies are recruiting for is also a great way to determine the right businesses to target. The funding filters are very useful to build out lists of recently funded companies or different stages of seed funding.

Apollo.io has positively impacted our organization because, historically, we have used other competitors and sources of B2B data such as Cognism and a few others over the years, but we found Apollo.io to be more accurate, better priced, and just as many, if not more, features and filters available.

We have certainly seen an increase in accuracy in terms of deliverability rates for email campaigns compared to the Cognism data we used previously. Overall, Apollo.io has increased the accuracy in our targeting, be it using the LinkedIn URLs, the work email addresses, or the mobile and direct dial numbers that are available. It's heightened our accuracy in our targeting.

The pricing structure is a little bit too complex with the credit system. It could be simplified and made more inclusive. However, the pricing competitiveness is good; it's just the structure of how the costs work that could be simplified.

I have been using Apollo.io for around four years.

Apollo.io is stable.

Apollo.io's scalability is very good. We use it across a multitude of clients and will continue to do so.

The customer support is very good. On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate the customer support as a nine.

Positive

I previously used Cognism, and we switched because it was getting too expensive, it didn't have all the features and adaptability we were looking for, and the tests we did with Apollo.io showed it was going to be a better choice.

I have seen a return on investment with Apollo.io because it is helping us drive ROI for the campaigns that we run for ourselves and on behalf of our clients. Definitely compared to using Cognism previously, which was more expensive and less accurate, it's been a vast improvement. Many campaigns that we have run and are running deliver significant ROI thanks to the quality of the data and the options to build out very tight audiences using a wide variety of targeting filters.

Before choosing Apollo.io, I evaluated other options such as ZoomInfo, Dun & Bradstreet, and Seamless.ai.

We usually decide which filters to use for a specific campaign by always using a combination of filters together to get down to the most relevant audience possible.

My advice for others looking into using Apollo.io is to watch up on all the training videos, the YouTube videos around the best features and use cases. There are so many options and so many filters available. It's important to choose the right ones by learning and upskilling and getting the maximum out of the onboarding process and human support that Apollo.io provides during the setup and onboarding.

On a scale of 1-10, I would rate Apollo.io an 8 overall.

My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. I found this interview good, but it would be helpful to have a progress bar to know how many questions there are going to be and how close to completion I am.