In 2016, I quit my job.

I was making good money for a 25-year-old, managing account management for a Y Combinator-backed startup, but I quit to start my own business with $2,000 and nothing else — no income, no investor capital, no safety net.

In just three months, my co-founder and I grew that business from $0 to $200,000 in revenue and $1 million in pipeline using the tactics I’m sharing in this book.

When I say that becoming great at sales can change your life, I mean it. It changed mine. I went on to sell that company for enough money to allow me to do the things that were important to me. I was able to buy a ring for my now-wife. I funded my comic book publishing adventures, a passion of mine. I was able to start another company that subsequently failed and taught me everything I now know about product growth, which is why I’m able to do what I do now at Apollo.

That exit gave me options, and those options changed the trajectory of my life.

Outbound sales can change your life. But it’s also much, much harder than you think.

If you’re just starting out in sales, whether at a company or starting your own thing, you’re going to go on a journey.

• First you discover outbound sales, and you think you're a genius because you try something and it works. Eureka!

• Then, you think you can scale it up — that you can just do more of that thing and get more money. Input → output. Easy.

What you find is that it doesn't work that way. What works in the beginning doesn't usually scale.

At this stage, most people crank up the activity. They start sending emails, emails, and more emails. They destroy their email deliverability. Then they wreck their domain and have to recover it, sometimes at great cost.

At that point, they can't grow because they've become addicted to an unsustainable model of growth. They have to evolve; they have to adapt. This is true of any growth mechanism, whether it's paid ads or Google search or whatever. Nothing scales indefinitely.

So what am I telling you that nobody else will tell you?

1. Outbound sales can change your life for the better

2. Outbound sales can also ruin your company’s ability to grow, if you don’t do it right

We — my team at Apollo and I — wrote this book to help you be great at sales, change your financial situation, alter your life, and make your wildest dreams possible.

We want you to experience what we’ve experienced.

Founded in 2015, Apollo emerged amid a giant wave of sales tech. Today, in a market of over 1,000 sales-specific tools, we rank number three, behind only Salesforce and HubSpot. For the last eight years, we have grown with a relentless focus on outbound sales, using our own tool to perfect the process from end to end and applying years of real-life data on what works, and what doesn’t.

For the first time ever, we are making that data — and the strategies derived from it — available to you.

In these pages, you’ll find a tried-and-tested framework for finding the right leads, designing people-first sales strategies, and building a high-performing sales team.

In the process of writing this book, we analyzed data and insights from a variety of sources, including:

• Proprietary Apollo data from more than 500,000 active users, 250 million monthly email sends, and 5.7 million monthly dialer minutes

• The Apollo outbound process that tripled our own meetings set and drove us to a $1.6 billion valuation

• 50+ interviews with veteran sales leaders, enterprise VPs, and multimillion-dollar business founders

• Survey findings collected from over 250 global sales leaders and professionals

Combined with my personal experience, and our team’s experiences at Apollo, what we found in the process of collecting all this data was simply this: what works in outbound sales has changed dramatically over the last ten years — and those who fail to adapt are being left behind.

Between 2013 and 2018, give or take a few years, it felt like any outbound sales tactic you tried worked.

Call blitz a questionable third-party list? Meetings galore. Blast out a few thousand templated emails? Deal city. Set up an automatic nurture stream for your entire book of business? Ka-ching.

Times have changed.

Today’s sales reps send 150% more emails than they did ten years ago, but the average rate of reply has decreased by 10% each year since 2014.

Traditional sales models predict that more touchpoints inevitably lead to more replies, more meetings, and more deals. But the traditional sales model is fundamentally broken. As we see it, there are three major truths every go-to-market (GTM) professional needs to know to be successful today.

Once upon a time, you could shoot off a cold email and as long as you got the pitch right, you stood a decent chance of landing a meeting.

Those days are gone for good.

Generic one-off emails and phone calls are far less effective now than they used to be. With massive competition for your prospects’ attention, it takes more to break through the noise. Apollo’s proprietary data shows that only 16% of people who send one-off emails book a meeting with a prospect.

Beyond that, “lazy” automated emails — even when sent as part of a sequence of multiple emails in a row — don’t work that well, either. Sequences that contain only automated emails are less than half as effective at booking meetings as sequences that include calls, manual emails, social touches, and other tasks (see figure 1.1).

As a salesperson, your ability to form relationships is what makes you valuable. Over-reliance on technology can undermine your efforts before you book even a single meeting.

As email service providers crack down on bulk sending, sellers who try to make up for single-channel underperformance by sending a higher volume of emails face a tough reality. It’s easier now than ever to destroy your domain reputation and severely hamper your ability to do outbound at all (which we’ll discuss more in chapter seven).

If you’ve been sending one-off emails or bulk auto-email-only sequences — you’re behind. There are no shortcuts to outbound anymore.

Stevie Case, former VP of Sales at Twilio, Visa, and her own business ventures, has witnessed this evolution taking place over her 20-year sales career.

“A couple years ago you could get away with lazy pipeline generation,” she says. “That just doesn’t fly anymore. The core tactical work of personalization — high-quality, human interactions; deep sequences that run long, carry across multiple channels, and reflect a deep level of engagement and research — used to be what the high-performers did. But today, that’s the bar.”

The game has changed. To be successful at outbound sales today, you need a repeatable, scalable process for building real and genuine relationships with your ideal buyers. You need to reach your customers where they are — across multiple channels. And you need a way to measure and optimize your process to continually improve.

Somewhere in the early 2010s, it became accepted best practice to split the responsibilities of your sales team in half, as popularized by the book “Predictable Revenue.” The thinking went something like this: half of your team should focus on prospecting and booking meetings (“meeting setters”), and the other half should focus on closing deals (“closers”), or so the thinking went.

For a time, this setup worked. In an environment where money was cheap to borrow and the economy was booming, many businesses were able to grow this way.

But the world looks a lot different in 2024 than it did in 2010. Those good economic times papered over a real, fundamental problem with this way of running a sales engine: it messes up the incentive structure of your team.

Mark Kosoglow, the sales leader who took Outreach from $200,000 to $200 million, has this to say on the subject:

According to Mark, sales leaders report that Account Executives (AEs ) are just as productive without Sales Development Representatives (SDRs). AEs, who are chronically overburdened by non-revenue-generating busywork and meetings, can simply divert their attention back to prospecting.

As Mark points out, the economics of a split model can be brutal. People are expensive:

• $100,000 for a SDR

• $200,000 for an AE

• $125,000 for a sales engineer (SE)

• $130,000 for a customer success manager (CSM)

• $110,000 for an onboarding specialist

If you’re working deals worth $10,000 per year, this is just not a financial model built for success. “It’s gotten comical,” says Kosoglow, “The economics are off in most cases.”

So what does this mean for you?

For most small businesses today, it means hiring “full cycle” salespeople to own the entire process from end-to-end is the right move — a concept we’ll explore more in chapter eight.

For those teams that do split responsibilities between setters and closers, we found a common theme. The most successful teams use compensation models where:

• “Meeting setters” are compensated partially on revenue closed in addition to meetings set, and

• “Deal closers” are compensated partially on renewal revenue in addition to new revenue

And, to complete the cycle, customer success managers are compensated partially on expansion or new revenue they source via referrals (see figure 1.2).

This kind of commission structure ensures that at every point in the customer journey, each member of your team is incentivized to do what’s best for the customer and the company — and not just what’s best for their next commission check.

The Full-Cycle Selling framework helps you and your team consider and assume ownership over the full cycle of a buyer’s relationship with you, your company, and your product.

On the company level, Full-Cycle Selling is a framework to help companies incentivize and align their go-to-market teams in a way that produces the best outcomes.

On the individual level, Full-Cycle Selling is a philosophy to help salespeople and sales teams structure their approach in a way that honors the full cycle of your relationship with your buyers.

It doesn't matter if you're an SDR or an AE or sales leader. Whatever your role, you’re responsible for the full cycle of a customer’s journey. Because the reality is this: if you sell you a deal and it goes south, who gets blamed? You do. It might be the product's fault, or the customer success team’s fault, or even the customer’s fault, but it doesn’t matter. You sold the deal, and in your customer’s eyes, you’re responsible for what happens next.

When you have that kind of extreme ownership, it changes the way you sell. And if you want to be successful in sales, you've got to be good at every part of it — from opening to closing to renewing.

In this book, I’ll give you the tactics, templates, and strategies for adopting a full-cycle outbound process that works today.

Think of this book as your team’s own reference manual or workbook. Read the whole thing in one go, but feel free to come back and jump to the section that’s most relevant to your business right now. Mark it up, tear out pages, lift the bits you like most and put them into your own training — whatever you need. This is for you.

For more information on any topic, visit Apollo Academy, our Knowledge Base, or the Apollo Magazine.

With absolutely no further ado, let’s dive in.