In the competitive world of sales, finding the right tools can make all the difference. Today, we're diving into Apollo.io, an AI sales platform that promises to be the only tool you need to find and engage leads. But does it live up to the hype? Let's break it down, looking at how it helps agencies like Predictable Revenue, Leadium, Sales Team Builder, Pointer Strategy, and The SD Lab achieve significant results, including 5x meetings and 20%+ sales efficiency.

Apollo.io boasts an impressive 4.8 stars out of 5 based on over 7,000 legitimate reviews, indicating high user satisfaction. This platform is designed for any business doing outreach to people, particularly B2B businesses looking for clients, including agencies. It caters to various roles such as Sales Leaders, Account Executives, Sales Development, Revenue Operations, Marketers, and Founders.

Key Benefits and Features

Apollo.io is an end-to-end AI sales platform with a comprehensive suite of features aimed at growing your business. Its most basic function is helping you find leads and then reach out to those leads, automating many tasks using AI.

  • Pipeline Builder & B2B Prospecting Data: This core feature helps you find the right people and book quality meetings by leveraging a vast B2B database and AI assistants for smarter outbound. You can access a B2B database with 210M+ contacts & 35M+ companies, with other sources stating 275 million contacts and 73 million companies or 265M+ contacts used by Predictable Revenue and 270M contacts, 73M companies for Sales Team Builder. Predictable Revenue uses Apollo to build their Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and filter searches to find ideal buyers. It also supports personalisation across every channel.
  • Multichannel Outreach: The platform facilitates outreach across multiple channels. Predictable Revenue leverages Apollo to push new leads into personalized outbound sequences, full of triggered touch points across email, phone, and LinkedIn. This helps them reach thousands of leads in a fraction of the time.
  • AI Assistants: AI is integrated to automate, optimise, and personalise your sales process at scale. This includes an AI email assistant and tools to turn conversations into deals with AI assistance.
  • Call Assistant: Designed to help you close winnable deals with features like call recordings, meeting scheduling, and AI insights. It offers pre-meeting AI insights, instant AI transcription, next steps, automatic follow-up emails, and CRM updates. Apollo can also help you host meetings.
  • Data Enrichment: Keeping your CRM and marketing automation data up-to-date is crucial, and Apollo provides tools for this. It offers CRM Enrichment, Waterfall Enrichment, CSV Enrichment, and an Enrichment API. This ensures richer prospect profiles with over 30 data points. Sales Team Builder's CRM is synced to Apollo's living database of 270M contacts, 73M companies, and 65+ technographic data points, allowing Apollo to auto-update email addresses, mobile numbers, job changes, funding rounds, and acquisitions in the background. This prevents bounced emails and enables more personalized outreach.
  • Go-To-Market Platform: This allows you to run your entire sales cycle on unified customer data. It includes centralised deal management, end-to-end sales execution, and seamless CRM integrations. Apollo also helps with deal management and conversation intelligence.
  • Integrations & Workflow Automation: Apollo connects with your favourite Go-To-Market (GTM) tools for a seamless workflow and offers workflow automation capabilities.
    • Open API: Leadium, a sales agency, manages 80+ client instances and delivers 5x more meetings by uniting their most important tools into one platform through Apollo's open API. Apollo serves as the origin and return point for all data. The API Developer portal provides API keys for Enrichment API, Search API, and building custom integrations.
    • Chrome Extension: Pointer Strategy significantly reduces admin tasks by using Apollo's LinkedIn Chrome Extension. This extension pulls verified data like contact information, technologies used, funding, and revenue directly into LinkedIn profile pages, displaying it in a sidebar without reps having to leave LinkedIn. It also allows reps to view Apollo tasks and activities, drop new leads into personalized Sequences, assign tasks, or leave notes, streamlining engagement and pipeline building.
  • Buying Intent & Lead Scoring: The SD Lab heavily relies on Apollo's Buying Intent and Lead Scoring features to quickly identify purchase-ready leads. Buying Intent identifies companies showing interest in solutions like yours, allowing you to view intent scores, take action in the Chrome Extension, and set alerts for target accounts in buying mode. Lead Scoring provides AI-generated scores based on your CRM and Apollo account history, allowing you to build custom scoring models with weighted demographic, firmographic, and behavioral data points. These scores are viewable directly in your CRM. This helps sales teams prioritize their time and drive more business.
  • Cost-Effectiveness: Apollo claims to be "the best sales platform in the world, at an (almost) unbelievable value". It suggests it can replace multiple tools like ZoomInfo, Outreach, Salesloft, Gong, and Chili Piper to cut costs and get better results. Predictable Revenue, for instance, cut their costs in half by switching to Apollo. Sales Team Builder considers Apollo a "one-stop shop for great data, data enrichment, and a SEP" offering excellent value for quality data.

Pricing: Free Forever Plan and When to Upgrade

One of the standout features of Apollo.io is its completely free forever plan. This plan is quite generous, offering:

  • Unlimited email credits.
  • 60 mobile credits per year.
  • 120 export credits.
  • Access to many of the basic features required for lead finding and outreach.

However, you might consider upgrading to a paid plan, such as the basic $49 per user per month plan, to unlock even more powerful features. The primary reasons to upgrade include:

  • Advanced Filters: Paid plans provide significantly more filtering options for your prospects or leads, going beyond basic criteria like country.
  • Buying Intent Filtering: This is an absolutely amazing feature for targeting specific leads. It allows you to filter your company search to those who have expressed interest in specific products and services. For example, a marketing agency could filter for dentists actively searching for marketing agencies.

The Verdict

Having reviewed its features and pricing, Apollo.io genuinely appears to be a robust and comprehensive sales outreach platform. With its massive database of contacts and companies, you're unlikely to run out of leads anytime soon. Its ability to automate, optimise, and personalise the sales process, combined with its strong data management and meeting assistance tools, makes it a powerful contender in the sales tech arena. Agencies using Apollo have reported decreasing SDR workload by 20%, doubling email open rates, halving speed to book meetings, 5x-ing meetings, automating CRM enrichment, and streamlining pipeline building. It also helps improve overall performance and streamline operations.

In my opinion, Apollo.io is definitely worth it, especially given the cost-effectiveness compared to replacing multiple dedicated tools. The existence of a free forever plan also makes it incredibly easy to try out and see the value for yourself before committing. The YouTube reviewer considers it "the best sales Outreach platform there is".

Explore the Apollo platform to find leads, manage pipeline & close deals. Apollo.io