How GTM Ops Drives 4x More Meetings Using Automated Workflows

Dropping a prospect’s first name in your cold email and calling it “personalization” no longer cuts it.

Buyers don't care that you know their company name or role, and mentioning their alma mater's mascot Sparky the Sun Devil doesn’t make your offer any more compelling.

Real personalization is reaching out at the right place, at the right time, with the right message.

“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,” affirms Stevie Case, former VP of Sales at Twilio and Visa.

Sales leaders agree that well-timed, thoughtfully designed outreach requires a system.

Jay Filiatrault, founder of GTM Ops, built that system using automated Apollo Workflows. 

His team now sends personalized messaging at the moment his prospects show intent to buy, increasing SDR efficiency by 300% and saving 70 hours a week across his team in the process.

Here’s how Jay sends the right message, at the right time, every time, with his "warm outbound" workflows — and how you can, too.

The data advantage: Where smarter sales takes shape

The fundamental goal of sales is to enter into your prospect’s story. 

But that’s a privilege that you have to earn with intentional research that tells you where and when you can drop into the picture.

Jay understands this. His team started experimenting with different intent data sources. They purchased G2’s buyer intent data, built filters on high-intent web visits, and pulled from internal product engagement data — all to get a sense of which prospects were closer to a buying decision.

It worked. They were seeing more opportunities flood in. But the amount of manpower it took was adding dozens of hours a week of manual work. 

Not to mention their messaging was basic and time-consuming. For the prospects that showed intent, reps were using all of their time on LinkedIn profiles, looking for “some tidbit to draw a contact’s attention.”

“This didn’t lift conversation rates much,” remembers Jay.

Of course, this was before they shaved off 80% of their manual research and copywriting efforts.

And it started when they built their first Apollo Workflow. 

Automated workflows make cold outbound warm

Apollo Workflows give you a blank canvas to systematize your outreach with automation.

Jay’s team was getting real results from using intent data. They saw Workflows as an opportunity to turn it into a consistent, recurring process; one that could, essentially, generate leads by itself.

Here’s what Jay did to build a sophisticated system to pick up on those intent signals and activate them across multiple outreach channels.

• First, he set up conditional logic. The foundation of workflows are “if-then” statements. They told Apollo what their “trigger” was (when a contact shows intent, changes jobs, etc.) and then what they wanted the “action” to be (move the contact into a personalized sequence or send them to a specific rep, etc.). 
• He reduced manual work with automation. Jay set it up so that email sends, rep tasks, and LinkedIn touchpoints automatically happened — when they wanted it to happen based on that “trigger” event.
• And it all happens in one, functional layout. Actions, triggers, and automations are laid out in a visual board with drag-and-drop functionality.

GTM Ops brought all of these elements together to create an intent-based workflow that looked something like this.

Allow us to briefly explain Jay’s genius here.

The “enrollment criteria” for this workflow is all based on his HubSpot intent data as well as Apollo’s job change alerts, website visitor tracking, and reverse-IP lookup with the filters for their ICP.

In this way, all of the contacts that Apollo enters into this workflow are in the position to buy. (You can get granular here by filtering based on Apollo’s “high” or “low” intent scores and other intent topics.)

When this happens, that contact is automatically funneled into a sequence – with no work involved for reps. 

With a library of sequences built out (Jay and his team have over 35 that are personalized to each intent signal), they send prospects into a specific campaign that speaks to who they are and where they are in the buyer’s journey.

They have a system in place for tracking spikes in buyer intent. When they see it for a specific account — they send the lead to their reps for the real, human-to-human work.

“If we see a spike in engagement following that nurture we route those higher intent leaders to the BDR, to pick up the phone and do a little more personalized outreach.”

This is done with the addition of workflow steps like manual task assignments, where you can assign specific reps to personally engage. They’re notified (this can happen over Slack with an integration) and contact is made.

With automation that handles the routing, paired with the human work from their army of SDRs, GTM Ops is now handling the work that used to require three reps, all with one SDR.

"We’ve seen a 300% increase in efficiency for SDR or BDR teams for the customers we’ve implemented it at. It took 3x the amount of SDRs to do this work before we were automating this," says Jay.

A 300% efficiency boost is possible for you, too — and you’ll be halfway there with this intent-based workflow template pre-built in Apollo. Get like GTM Ops and give it a try.

Workflows respond to the “new reality” of sales

Jay and his agency are championing the messaging that outbound sales is changing. 

You hear these clamors all over LinkedIn. 

Maybe you even saw the data in our newest book “Outbound Sales”. 

But what does “this new reality” actually mean? And how do workflows help you respond to it?

Jay stresses three things that make end-to-end automation critical for teams trying to grow in the current market.

1. Workflows unite your toolset

Budgets are tightening, sales cycles are getting longer, and there's virtually no benefit to stitching together (and paying for) multiple sales tools when one or two can do it all.

Jay’s internal team uses the two powerhouses: HubSpot and Apollo.

HubSpot is their CRM, “the central repository of all the customer data.” With an Apollo integration, data is funneled into Apollo where the pre-sales and post-sales magic happens; ICP identification, data enrichment, targeting, list building and pushing all of that into segmented, automated workflows.

“I believe very much in the vision of consolidated platforms, but the reality is very few players have been able to build that in a compelling way. But Apollo is one of them.” — Jay Filiatrault, Founder at GTM Ops

👉 Consolidation success story: Collin Stewart, the CEO of Predictable Revenue, cut his tech stack in half and has decreased time-to-meeting by 50%.

2. Workflows help you reach across multiple channels

Apollo data found that only 16% of salespeople who send one-off emails actually book a meeting and that adding an additional touchpoint on a different channel increases your chances of booking a meeting by 24%.

“We try to reflect that process as much as possible in the Apollo interface,” Jay says, “We orchestrate all of our outreach through multiple channels, not just email but phone and LinkedIn automation,” he says.

Every lead is unique. So, GTM Ops has built a library of over 35 personalized, multichannel sales sequences with messaging that highlights what they know about them.

These sequences are the meat of his Apollo Workflows and a key reason why he’s able to run his entire agencies’ go-to-market out of one platform.

3. Workflows bring you into the story at the right time

Pop sensation P!nk may not have been thinking about intent-driven outbound when she sang, 'Just give me a reason! Just a little bit’s enough!' — but she’s onto something. Chances are, your prospects are singing the same tune.

There should always be a real, data-based reason for when, why, and how your messages are getting in front of your prospects. That’s real personalization! And, frankly, no one cares for anything that’s less.

Intent signals from Apollo and other sources are seamlessly pushed and pulled between their data warehouse in HubSpot, answering things like:

• Who are the right people to reach out to in those accounts?
• What’s the most relevant sequence based on the history of intent signals that we’re seeing for that account?
• How can we personalize the messaging and timing based on the specific intent signals we're seeing for each account?

Intent-based outbound is now the source of 75% of all the meetings that his team books. Largely, because the Apollo Workflows he has set up built around this intent are automating the entire process with conditional logic and timely triggers.

The most powerful form of personalization is relevance

Right person, right message, at the right time is the winning formula of outbound today.

GTM Ops now does it at scale. Beyond their intent-based workflow, they’ve built out dozens more to address a variety of sales scenarios:

• Their workflow based on when a prospect changes jobs is 4x-ing meetings booked
• And workflows that are leveraging sequences driven by AI Power-ups are cutting manual data collection by 80%

And it’s really not as complicated as it seems. “A lot of the workflows we’re using are table stakes. Very, very simple,” says Jay.

Apollo’s template library already has high-impact workflows and automations built for you. 

Sign up for Apollo for free and choose the templates that will be most impactful for you. Then, all that’s left to do is customize it.