How Apollo Tripled Meetings Booked Using Its Own Platform
Casey Krebs, a RevOps leader at Apollo, was responsible for scaling the sales development (SDR) team’s outreach efforts. Here’s how he leveraged the Apollo platform to generate 1,800 additional meetings and boost the win rate from sales-qualified opportunities (SQO).
About Apollo
Apollo.io is a comprehensive sales engagement and lead generation platform that integrates data insights, automation, and outreach tools to enhance sales efficiency and drive business growth.
- Industry: Sales engagement and lead generation
- Company Size:60 employees
- Location: United States
- Products:
Building a new product-led sales motion (PLSM)
Before Casey, Apollo’s SDR team resembled many others, relying heavily on cold outreach, which proved largely ineffective. With the overwhelming volume of users across various workspaces and accounts, the SDR team struggled to focus their efforts, leading to reduced effectiveness.
The breakthrough came with the strategic use of event-triggered data to target the right customers more precisely.
“We had multiple product signals that could be leveraged to refine our pre- and post-sale messaging,” said Casey. “The aim of the PLSM initiative at Apollo was to optimize outreach without overwhelming prospects and customers.”
Casey began by collaborating with the team to identify existing event-triggered account-level and contact-level data, such as “webinar attended” or “usage limit exceeded.” Apollo was set up as a centralized hub to consolidate this data, utilizing strategic Account/Contact fields and custom field mapping.
With access to event-triggered data, Casey could implement data-driven strategies, like targeting customers who visited the demo request page but didn’t book a demo.
“With Apollo’s event-triggered data, we were able to create high-intent audiences and deliver the right message to our prospects at the most crucial moments,” he noted.
With Apollo's event-triggered data, we could create high-intent audiences and deliver the perfect message to our prospects.
Once the data was integrated, Casey set about creating outreach campaigns using Apollo Sequences—multi-step outbound campaigns that deliver personalized messaging across various channels.
Casey used AI to generate persona-specific messaging and conducted A/B testing on different taglines, messaging, and channels to determine what resonated best with prospects.
“We typically test 2-3 variants for each step and subject line to see what performs well and what doesn’t. This helps us refine future messaging and eliminate underperforming variants,” he explained.
Additionally, Casey developed Apollo Plays to automatically enroll prospects in sequences based on predefined rules. This allowed him to direct the right individuals to highly relevant sequences based on their actions or specific triggers.
“Plays are the core of our ABSM program,” Casey said. “We use industry-standard Plays, like reaching out to no-shows, but also create custom Plays from scratch. For example, we can trigger sequences for people who’ve met certain product thresholds or opened an email. The flexibility is key.”
Once he activates a Play, Casey monitors the success of his Sequences and is constantly tweaking based on rapid experimentation, which in turn facilitates more successful outbound and internal knowledge building.
“We’ve automated a significant portion of our messaging to reach prospects and accounts without the need for a large SDR team. The capabilities of the Apollo platform have enabled us to optimize handoffs to the Sales team, allowing them to concentrate on delivering demos and engaging in sales conversations, rather than being overly concerned with outbound efforts or cold calling.”
Ready, set, meeting booked!
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Apollo.io is a comprehensive sales engagement and lead generation platform that integrates data insights, automation, and outreach tools to enhance sales efficiency and drive business growth.
