Customer.io Skyrockets Sales Qualified Leads by 70% After Implementing Apollo

Discover how Customer.io enhanced their outbound strategy, boosted SQLs, and doubled their sales team size using our comprehensive end-to-end tool.

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About Customer.io

Customer.io is a customer engagement platform that enables businesses to create personalized, automated messaging across multiple channels to drive customer interactions and improve conversion rates.

What sets Customer.io apart?

Customer.io, a leading messaging automation platform, empowers companies like Notion, Shutterstock, and IMAX to create and send data-driven emails with exceptional control and flexibility.

“We’re a completely new and purpose-built solution,” says Kaleb.

Indeed, Customer.io is unique. At Apollo, our growth team relies on Customer.io to scale our user engagement, streamlining and personalizing email broadcasts and product onboarding messages for over 1 million users.

Customer.io’s impressive track record includes over 50% year-over-year growth in the past two years. To sustain this momentum, their sales team needed a reliable source of data to forge new relationships and build trust with prospects. They required a B2B lead database with verified emails and phone numbers and the capability to engage prospects through multi-channel sequences—all from a single platform.

Going-to-Market with Outdated Tools

When Customer.io aimed to enhance their sales performance, Kaleb, then an SDR, used Close CRM and ZoomInfo. However, the process was entirely manual. The sequences they used lacked customization and required manual data entry for each call, email, and social interaction.

“It just wasn’t scalable,” he said.

In response, Customer.io sought a solution that combined high-quality data with efficient engagement features to deliver relevant content to the right audience at the right time. That’s when Apollo was introduced.

A solution built for scale

Suddenly, Kaleb and his team had a database of 250m contacts at their fingertips.

“What I saw was this huge, brand new platform that had the capabilities of Salesloft and Outreach, plus ZoomInfo. Apollo is two platforms in one in a way that could save us clicks, save us time, and allow us to create sequences for the first time.”

Kaleb, at this point one of the company’s most seasoned and successful SDRs, stepped into a manager position, tasked with training, leading, and coaching a team of SDRs to success in Apollo.

Apollo was there to help him do it.

What can a Customer Success Manager do for you?

Throughout our interview, Charissa couldn’t help but rave over their team’s experience with Rich, Slingshot Group’s dedicated Customer Success Manager.

“Rich has been fantastic to work with! We have been very happy with Recruitee, we love it. You are constantly improving the user experience through regular updates and you really listen to what your customers need. When I give Rich feedback, he’s responsive and works to get us a quick resolution.”

It’s so valuable for Charissa, and Slingshot Group as a whole, to have one person who understands how they operate and can help them in achieving their own goals. Whether it’s helping set up automation in their pipeline to suggesting new features that will help speed up their processes, Rich is always one step ahead when thinking of ways to help Slingshot Group.

“Since the very beginning Recruitee’s customer support has been absolutely amazing.”

Charissa also mentioned that as a company, Recruitee really listens to the customer and is always making the system better.

That’s why we are transparent when it comes to features we are working on and our public roadmap. Customers can go in, take a look at what features have been requested, and even request their own.

Using Apollo to Create a Better Way to Work

Kaleb recalls telling his team, “This tool offers extensive functionality. You can search for a vast number of people and companies, layer on intent, explore various technologies, and generate reports.”

Together with Customer.io’s sales leadership, Kaleb focused on training and developing the team, imparting crucial sales development skills such as automation best practices, filtering for ideal customer profiles, personalizing outreach, and creating effective sequences.

By leveraging Apollo, they designed, tested, and implemented playbooks that matched their ideal sales motion, enabling reps to deliver the right message at the right time with ease.

In a nutshell

Customer.io enhanced its engagement strategies by evolving from enrichment to split testing and insights to boost the effectiveness of its outbound sales efforts. For every sales challenge, Apollo provided a solution.

As time went on, the team identified new ideal customer profiles, organically expanded their template and sequence libraries, and improved both the quantity and quality of cold calls, tailoring talk tracks to address objections in real-time.

“We increased lead flow and had team members consistently hitting their quotas and accelerators.”

With Apollo’s end-to-end platform, which integrated verified data with outreach capabilities, Customer.io saw a remarkable 70% increase in sales qualified leads and grew their sales team from 12 to 29 members.

Given their drive for excellence, Customer.io’s impressive growth is just the beginning. As Alex Heurich, Director of Sales Operations at Customer.io, noted, “We’ve seen significant improvements since using Apollo.”

Start Growing With Apollo.io Today

Apollo.io offers a comprehensive suite of tools, including lead generation, data enrichment, and multi-channel engagement, to streamline your sales process and drive business growth.