How Apollo Tripled Meetings Booked Using Its Own Platform

No one knows “product-led growth” (PLG) better than Apollo. 

Building software that enables sales teams to reach out to the right prospects at the right time with the right message, Apollo has been on a massive growth tear, as it aims to help businesses of all sizes learn how to go-to-market, better.

This is what compelled Casey Krebs to join as a RevOps Manager, as he recognized Apollo’s huge opportunity to shape the future of sales and sales technology.

This is a story of how Casey worked with the SDR team to build a new account-based sales and marketing motion utilizing Apollo’s own platform, in the process, single-handedly booking over 1,800 meetings.

Building a new product-led sales motion (PLSM)

Before Casey, Apollo’s SDR team looked much like anyone else’s.

They mostly engaged in cold outreach, which was not particularly effective. At the same time, it was difficult for the SDR team to know how to focus their outreach given the staggering volume of users across workspaces and accounts. 

This led to a lack of focus amongst SDRs, which in turn impacted team effectiveness. 

The key? Figuring out how to better utilize event-triggered data to hone in on the right set of customers.

“We had numerous product signals that could be effectively leveraged to enhance our pre and post sale messaging,” said Casey, “The goal of the PLSM initiative at Apollo was to optimize outreach without bombarding prospects and customers.” 

The first thing that Casey did was work with the team to understand what event-triggered account-level and contact-level data currently existed, such as: “webinar attended” or “usage limit exceeded”. Apollo was to be a centralized hub that ingested all of this data, using the strategic implementation of Account/Contact fields and custom field mapping.

Having event-triggered data enabled Casey to hone into data-drive strategies, such as targeting customers who may have visited the demo request page but didn’t actually book a demo.

“With Apollo's event-triggered data, we could create high-intent audiences and deliver the perfect message to our prospects precisely when it mattered most,” he said. 

Once the data was ingested, it was time for Casey to create outreach using Apollo Sequences — multi-step outbound campaigns that delivered personalized messaging across a variety of channels. 

Not only could Casey generate persona-specific messaging using AI, he was also able to A/B test different taglines, messaging and channels to see what worked best with prospects. 

“We typically do 2-3 variants for each step and subject line. And the goal is just to see what you know, what is, what's landing, what's not, what's performing well, and then we can customize future messaging, or we can turn off variants that aren't performing well,” he said. 

Finally, Casey built Apollo Plays to automatically add prospects to a Sequence based on defined rules. Using Plays, Casey was able to route the right folks to the right, hyper-relevant sequences based on the actions that they had taken or other specific triggers.

“Plays are the backbone of our ABSM program,” said Casey, “We have a number of industry standard Plays that we can create like reaching out to no shows, but we create our own Plays from scratch, too. We can trigger folks to be added to a Sequence based on an event, like people who’ve hit certain thresholds within the product or people who might have opened your email. They’re very customizable.” 

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!

With the entire ABSM motion created, the only thing left was for AEs to go forth and sell! 

And the results speak for themselves.

Casey has generated 3x more meetings with a 23% increase in sales-qualified opportunities across the PLSM program.

David Castellanos, a sales leader at Apollo has been effusive in his praise. “[The program] allows the team to reach out to way more accounts than they would be able to manually,” he said, “Especially with AI messaging, it transforms the way we even speak to these customers. Hours/days are saved there.” 

At the end of the day, one of the program’s main wins is taking the tedium and the manual labor out of an SDR and AE’s work day. 

As Paula Urrutia, another Apollo sales leader, noted, “The automation we have in place allows our sales team to do what they do best - hop on calls to uncover pains and drive value in order to help our clients be more successful.”

If you’re interested in turbocharging your sales motion, reach out to the Apollo team today.