[0:00]In this video, I'm going to be breaking down Apollo.io. I'm going to show you exactly how you can generate leads, book more meetings, and close more deals using the data and the tools provided in their platform. For a little bit of context, my name's Matt Lucero. I've scraped hundreds of thousands of leads off of Apollo and use it for a little more than two years at this point to help us book more than 2,000 sales meetings for our customers. And we've used a lot of their data to contribute to the millions of emails we've sent to book those meetings for our customers. So, I know a thing or two about Apollo and hopefully, I'm going to share some of that with you in this video here. So let's just dive straight in. All right, so diving into Apollo, first I'm going to do a quick overview of the platform. If you want to check out their site, it's Apollo.io, or you can check out one of the links in the description. To do a quick overview of what the platform does, basically, you can do almost everything outbound related in one platform. So you can search and find contacts and accounts you want to reach out to. Uh, you can score them, and then you can engage them by doing outbound sequences, email calling, all through their platform. You can track the meetings, track the deals, set the meetings through the platform, and then you can also check the analytics and whatnot. They have a bunch of different features in the platform. If you check out their pricing, it starts at free, which is awesome. Um, you can get a free plan, you get 10 export credits a month, some mobile credits, some basic features, and then as you scale up, um, Apollo builds based on their credit pay system. So if you want more leads, you want to export more leads off the platform, then you upgrade your plans, and then you can also go up to these higher tier organization plans. Now, diving into Apollo, like I said, there's a bunch of different features. What I want to focus a lot of this video on is the prospecting features, so that's their database that has all the people, the companies, building lists through Apollo, and then a little bit of the data enrichment. Now you can see here once you jump into Apollo, you go to this home screen, there's tons of different features. Like I just outlined, you can reach out to leads, you can track the leads, you can do basically everything in this platform. What I think Apollo excels at and what I recommend using Apollo the most for is the actual, um, database. uh, being able to search people, find companies, build lists, and then sequence them in other platforms is my preferred way of doing it. I like using tools like smart lead to do email sequencing, um, use close and other power dialers to do the calling, and then use a a traditional CRM like Hubspot or close to track the meetings, use Calendly for like all these individual things. Point is, is you can use Apollo for almost all of these in one centralized platform, but what I want to focus the bulk of this video on is on the data and how to generate the leads that you can then plug into the sequences so then you can book those in for calls and have that as part as your pipeline. So first I'm going to quickly go over some of the other features, then we're going to spend a a bulk of this video going over building lists and showing you exactly how we use it. Like I said, we've sent millions and millions of emails for our customers at this point. I've used Apollo for a little over two years, so I'm pretty familiar with the platform. On the left hand side here, if you want to like do the sequences, this is where you can build the sequence. They have a feature where you can build sequences with AI like the actual email sequences. If you want to send emails, you can connect mailboxes here, you agree to their terms of service, you can link it and then you can run your sequences on the left hand tab here. If you want to call people, again, you can get a a phone number, run dialers, and then you can track the analytics here. Let's dive into the data feature because I think that is the best part of Apollo and what I use it primarily for. Um, over here on the left hand side, you can see these are all the ways you can, uh, filter leads. You can search names, you can add them to lists or filter out lists you already have. You can, uh, search by email status to make sure they have an email, job titles, company, location, employees, industry, buying intent, SIC codes, tech, revenue, and a bunch more here, like this is all the different filters they have. Um, first, I'm going to start just like a simple overview and then I'll show you an example of a list and how I would build that. So over here on the the top left, you can see, um, whenever you're building a list, you can see these three different boxes here. The first one is the total amount of leads in the search. Since I don't have any search run right now, you can see the total amount of leads in Apollo as of right now is 220 million. Uh, Apollo, I believe sources a bulk of their data from LinkedIn. And LinkedIn is probably the best place to scrape data from, mainly because people self-report data, and, um, you know, not just self-report data, but they talk about the company, the website, the job title, all this stuff. Uh, and it's accurate because again, people are out there saying, hey, this is my job title, here's where I work and, you know, it's probably the best place you can source data and why Apollo has such high quality data, um, is because they get it a lot from LinkedIn, based on my understanding. Maybe Apollo's team can correct me, but, um, that's where I believe they source a bulk of their data from. And then you can see here the net new, uh, section. These are leads that you don't have saved, and then the save section are the leads you do have saved. You can see I've saved over 600,000 leads in here and there's 219 million that I don't have saved. Um, so let's go ahead and just go through some of these features. So this name feature, this is if you want to look up a specific person. So if you type in Matt Lucero, my name, uh, you can see there's going to be all the Matt Luceros that pop up. I might have to type in Matthew Lucero because I think that's what's on my LinkedIn. And you can see, here's all the Matthew Luceros. I'm sure if I scroll through, I can find myself somewhere here. So that's the name section. Then there's lists. I'll I'm going to go through list and how I like to save leads, um, whenever we get to that section. And then email status. So you can see there's five tabs here. Now, depending, uh, they had um another feature here where it said likely to engage and a bunch of other stuff. I think they might have rolled back that feature or depends on what account you're looking on. But these are the typical, uh, statuses they have. There's verified, guessed, user managed, new data available, and N/A. N/A means that they don't have an email. User managed, I think is when you upload it, uh, a lead into here. And then verified and guest, these are the two boxes I check 90% of the time. This just means Apollo has an email and they either verified it at some point or that's guessed. Now, whenever Apollo says verified, it's not real-time verified. It means it was verified at some point. So if you're going to use this in an email sequencing campaign, then you want to throw this through a third party validator. Um, I like using a tool like Listmint or million verifier. There's never bounce, debounce. There's a million tools that do this. But just keep in mind that when it says verified, that doesn't mean it's real-time verified. My experience is if I pull data off Apollo, probably about 5 to 10% aren't going to be valid. So you're going to again want to clean this up. Um, job titles, very useful. Um, this is where you can plug in and search for job titles. So if I'm doing decision makers at small businesses, I might do CEO, owner, and founder is an example. So I'm going to throw, uh, this in here. The cool thing, again, Apollo does this and I think, um, I take it for granted at this point, but if you're using a a database like Sales Navigator from LinkedIn, and you type CEO, you might also have to type Chief Executive Officer because CEO is just three words and so if someone says they're a Chief Executive Officer, you might have to punch that in. Apollo's smart enough to know that if they, if you put in CEO, they also search people whose job title is Chief Executive Officer. Um, another thing Apollo does is if you're trying to make a search and you want it to be an exact match, you can put it in, uh, quotes. So if I put president in here, then it will only show me people that have the word, you know, exactly president. Um, so this is an example of how you can build out job titles. Um, if you don't want to include, or if you want to include past job titles, which I don't really see the use case here, at least in the campaigns I run, you can tick this box. And then you can exclude job titles for example, um, I don't want to include, let's say Vice President. So I'll put VP and I'll also put Vice. So if they have Vice before President, then it won't show up. So I'm going to throw in that as an example, or I'll just put VP in to keep it simple. Company. So if I want to search for a specific company, so let's say, for example, apple.com. I want the CEO, owner, founder, president of apple.com. Now, there's probably going to be a little bit of junk data because random people on LinkedIn are going to say they're the CEO of Apple, which you can see, uh, not a lot there's a a lot of examples here. Um, and yeah, you can also see another example. We put the word owner and it'll show business owner because we didn't use exact match, but if I wanted to find the CEO, owner, founder, present out of a specific company, I can punch that in. Apollo has another really good feature here where if you have a giant list of, um, companies you want to prospect into, you can just paste that here. And then it'll, again, filter all the people that meet that criteria within that specific list. Location. Uh, you can filter location based on contact or account HQ. So if I want to find decision makers that live in the United States, I can put that here. If I don't care where the decision maker lives, I can just set the account headquarters to the United States, and then I don't care if the contact lives abroad or vice versa. You can also select zip code radius. I do use this a lot if I want to run localized campaigns. Um, employee head count, this is very useful if you're running any sort of outbound campaigns. You want to filter out small companies, big companies, or anywhere in between. You can filter by head count. Again, this data is sourced from LinkedIn, I believe, which is pretty accurate, uh, except if you're doing like blue collar type industries. So if you're going into contractors, plumbers, electricians, those types of businesses, your average contractor is not saying, hey, I work for, uh, XYZ plumbing. They're probably not even on LinkedIn at all. So just keep that in mind when you're doing, uh, employee filtering here, but it's typically pretty accurate, especially for white collar businesses. Um, industry and keywords, this is very useful if you want to filter it between a specific industries. Apollo has a very large list of industries you can pull from here, and then you can layer on keywords. So for example, uh, if you want to reach out to SAS companies, you might set the industry to information technology and then put a keyword of software or technology. And then buying intent. I actually don't use this feature inside of Apollo. The reason why is because when you're running outbound campaigns, again, at least how I like to run them, I like to source intent my own ways. So for example, if you're selling a SEO service, I'm not just going to use a tool that says, hey, this person's in market for SEO. I'm going to go and find other, uh, indications myself to see that they're in market for SEO. So for example, if they're following a SEO company, that could be one way that I would source intent, or, um, I could check their website and see how many blogs they have. There's a lot of stuff you can use external tools to do use. Um, this is a feature they have. I haven't really tried it. Um, I wouldn't recommend it because I haven't tried it, but I, I, um, in my experience from peers and colleagues who I've know, who I know have used these types of features, that they get comparable results, uh, from just not using it.
[10:37]And it adds more money, or it adds more cost to the platform, so I, I personally don't use it. SIC codes, if you're going to use SIC codes, they have that. Technologies, again, very useful. So like I was saying earlier, if I want to search for intent for an SEO tool, I might see if they're using an SEO specific tool like Sam, uh, Samrush. I think that's an SEO tool at least. Uh, someone, someone watching this video is probably going to be like, no, that's not an SEO tool, but I think it is. Um, anyways, they also have a revenue filter. Again, I'm just sharing, uh, outside of Apollo's native features, what I personally like to do after sending millions of emails. I found revenue filters not to be very accurate at all. Again, the reason why is because Apollo is making an estimate here. Unless you're reaching out to public companies where that data is public and accurate, if you're trying to say, hey, I work with companies that are doing a million to 5 million a year in revenue, Apollo is just taking an estimated guess because all these companies are private. Um, and I like to use other features like employee head count to make a better judgment, mainly because, um, employee head count is more accurate than, uh, revenue. So I rarely use this feature. Apollo has it. They're estimates at the end of the day. I'm not a big fan of using this and I personally don't recommend it. And then funding. So this is good if you're trying to target companies that have raised a round or, you know, have a specific, uh, type of funding that you want to reach out to. Job posting is another useful one. You can check to see if they're hiring for a specific role. Uh, really good if you're doing any sort of staffing lead campaign. Um, and there's a much more features inside here. The ones I've pinned on the left hand side are the ones I most commonly use, and you can see there's even more. So you can filter based on territories. If you're doing all your prospecting inside of Apollo, you can assign it to specific people. You can, uh, do head count growth. There's there's a million other things, uh, inside this, um, filtering section here. But I'd say the ones that I've pinned on the left hand side are the most useful, at least for my use case and probably for most of the people watching. Um, but yeah, you can assign specific leads to specific people. You can have different lead stages. Again, if you're integrating with Apollo's native features, but this is an example of a search. So, what I'm going to go ahead and do here, uh, is I'm going to show you an example search and how you could potentially leverage this in a campaign. So over in this new tab, I have a search that, uh, I just made an example of. So this is me trying to filter for companies that are managed IT companies or I I can actually filter out the IT consulting firm. So let's again, say that I'm trying to reach out to managed IT companies for the people who are watching who don't know what it is, it's basically the people that set up computer systems, network and manage that for companies in an outsourced fashion. What I went ahead and did to filter for that is I added, uh, email status, I added the job titles, I filtered out job titles I didn't want. I put the person location, I set a, uh, employee head count arbitrarily for this video. And then under the industry and keyword section, I pasted a few industries that looked relevant, uh, given the people we're trying to reach out to, and, uh, I included a couple keywords that would filter out every IT company in the world to ones that specifically do managed IT by layering in those keywords. This gives us about 500 people. Now, again, for the sake of this video, this is just a sample search. If you want to get really granular, you would have to tweak these filters a little bit more. I'm sure there's keywords I'm excluding that I could include and there's better ways to filter and expand out, um, and get more decision makers at IT companies. So this is just an example. Now, if I want to export this and run this into a campaign, one way of doing this is, uh, I can select all the people here. Again, I can filter by people I don't have saved and people I do have saved and just the total amount. So you can see here, um, this was a campaign. I ran a campaign to manage IT companies in the past and so you can see, um, I've had some that I've saved here. Uh, if I want to scrape all these 500 people, I can simply just select all, press apply, and then, uh, once it pops up here in a second, we can either add these to a list or just directly export these. Or, you know, again, if you're using Apollo's native sequencing function, you can add them to a new sequence and you can run it inside Apollo. Again, I personally like to export these, uh, off to a different platform. So I can add this to a list. Let's call this, um, YouTube sample manage IT list. And then I can save this. And so you can see just like that, it's starting to get the emails of all these people and it's adding them to a list. Now I'm going to refresh this list and you can see now all these leads have converted to saved. And if I go over here to this list section, I can see all the, the people that I just saved in this list. Now, if I want to, um, actually export these people, you can see it takes a second to load. There's only 191, so I'm going to refresh this page really quick. All right, so now that you see, I refreshed the page here. You can see all 491 people that we saved, all in this nice neat little list. And if I go here, select all and press apply and then I export these leads, then I can have this in a CSV that I can then upload into Clay, smart lead, or a million other tools, if I actually, um, want to, uh, run campaigns to these people. Again, if you want to use this natively in Apollo too, you can do that as well here. But yeah, that's a super simple search, showing you how you can scrape leads and export them off of Apollo. Now, going into a little bit more advanced features inside of Apollo, one of them is, uh, this company's feature. Now, this feature in it of itself isn't particularly advanced. This is where you can filter just off of accounts or companies instead of specific people. But this is one feature I like to use in Apollo to make really, really targeted lead lists. What I end up doing here is on the left hand side, if you go to companies, and you want to build a highly targeted list, again, of like managed IT companies, what I would recommend you do is you go into this company's section here, paste in a bunch of ideal companies, press save and search. And then, um, let's imagine here, uh, I'm going to go to this, uh, people list I had before. Give me one second. Okay, so what I went ahead and did here is I took the people list search criteria that I built in the people tab, and then I actually transferred this over to the company's tab. So I can throw on the employee filter here. Basically what I did is I just took the same filters and put it on the company level instead of the people level. Now I have, for example, 700 companies here. Again, this isn't the exact same criteria. I'm just trying to do this quick for the sake of the video, but here's an example list of companies. What I can then do here, if I want to make an ultra targeted list, is I can, uh, save these companies, export them and upload them here, or I can just look here and say, okay, a lot of these look like managed IT companies, and then I can click in and find specific keywords that can help me broaden out my search. So one problem is, is if I say, hey, I'm putting the keywords managed IT and help desk, and I just assume that's going to get me all the managed IT companies. That's likely not true because there's a million other long tail keywords like cyber security, for example, here, that we can then pull in or telephoning or compliance or a million other of these keywords. And so what I like to do whenever I build lists is you can either start off in the people tab or the company's tab, but if you have a idea of the people you want to reach out to, you make a small list of what those people look like, and then use the filters inside of each one of these, uh, company tabs to see what the commonalities were on keywords. So for example, if we're trying to reach out to managed IT company, as I'd make a giant list of IT, managed IT, IT consulting, IT solutions, and then after I have this big list, I can plug these in as additional keywords to broaden my search out and make the most robust list possible, and then do a lot of guessing and checking to get it narrowed down. So, building a perfect list, it's a game of guessing and checking, plugging in sample companies, and then playing around with keywords till you have it nailed. And then once you do, then you can plug it into the people search, uh, grab the decision makers and export them. So those are the main features I like to use on Apollo. Again, there's meeting, there's features here where you can use it like a Calendly, set meetings through, uh, their platform. You can have the conversations, run deals, but these are probably the main ways that I would recommend, uh, you leverage Apollo. And then once you have these leads, uh, I'll show you an example of what it looks like when I've exported them and then how you can integrate that with other tools. Okay, so what I went ahead and did is I exported the Apollo list into a Google sheet. So this is the type of data that Apollo brings you. Now, I also filtered out a bunch of other columns that again, Apollo includes, but I don't really like including that data because it just colors up the sheet and makes it really hard to use. But you can see here, first name, last name, title, company name, email. This is all included the employee size, the industry, their LinkedIn, their website, their company LinkedIn. And then the location of the person or of the company account. So you can then take this data, upload this into a sequencer or, um, any other platform and take it from here. They also include stuff that I don't have included in this export that you can configure here. Whenever you press export, you can press this, uh, export CSV settings and show, uh, all the different things. I'll actually just pull it up for the sake of this video to show you all the different things they're included. You can see you can get their company name, their email status, uh, their seniority, their corporate phone, um, their work direct phone, their home phone, their mobile phone. Again, if you pay for it, the mobile phone is a a separate charge. They don't include that as part of like their their base plan. So if you want to get their direct dial, you can do that separately. Um, you can get their technologies, a million other different things. Again, if I had this all on a sheet, it would be mega, uh, cluttered. But that's one thing you can do. You can pull it out from Apollo, upload it to a sheet, and then you can upload this to a sequencer. And then what I like to do outside of Apollo, this is a tool called Clay. If you want to check out, I have a whole separate video talking about Clay. This is like Google Sheets on steroids. You can then run a multi-step enrichment sequence natively through here. So for example, if I wanted to use AI to summarize, um, what their company does, I can write a little prompt here like visit, uh, website and tell me if they are a managed IT company, if they are, output true. If they aren't, output, um, output false. And so I can run this simple Clay workflow. Again, this is for the sake of this video. Um, that we can verify if the emails that Apollo is giving us are actually accurate, and then we can, again, massage all this data if we want to make it work, uh, well for a specific code email campaign. Uh, so you can run these AR workflows through a tool called Clay. I know this is a Apollo video, but this is what I do on the back end to actually make this successful, uh, for campaigns. If I want to add any other additional data from other data platforms, I can then layer this in. And that's how I, uh, process this data as well. Like I said, you can also throw this data into other platforms like million verifier or listment, uh, listment.io. So this is a platform you can use to then upload the leads, grab the valid ones and use those for email campaigns. Or like I said, you can then, uh, run these through Clay to get all kinds of other data if you want to make this list ready to go for your outreach sequences. And you can see here, based on the the little AI test I did here, it looks like a majority of these companies actually fit the status we're looking for, then these are good to go and then we can run these in campaigns. All right, so that wraps up this video. If you want to check out Apollo, you can use the link in the description below to sign up. And if you want to work with a company to help manage your outbound sales completely end-to-end, run campaigns for you, scrape the data, run the strategy, and do everything basically that I showed you in this video plus a lot more to help you set appointments and grow your business, you can check out our website, anevomarketing.com. You can apply to work with us, we can have a conversation and see if we can help you out. Uh, if you also want to learn more about cold email and lead generation, check out all the other videos on this channel. Uh, appreciate you a ton and have a great day.
