How Apollo Improved Routing Accuracy by 300% While Boosting Inbound Conversions

Like many fast-growing companies, Apollo faced a common dilemma: ask for more form fields to improve lead routing, or remove fields to increase conversions?

With 10% of leads being misrouted and form completion rates at stake, Henry Mizel, Apollo's SVP of RevOps, knew we needed a better solution.

Working across RevOps, Marketing, and Internal Tools teams, we developed an approach that achieved both goals: routing accuracy improved by 300% while form conversions increased by 40%.

The solution was so powerful, we knew we had to make it available to all Apollo customers as Form Enrichment – and that's exactly what we did.

Here's how we used it to transform our own inbound process.

The hidden cost of form fields for revenue goals

Apollo's website is a critical inbound lead channel. When prospects complete forms, Apollo’s automated routers quickly connect them with the right sales reps.

To route leads effectively, we needed accurate company information. Our solution at the time was to ask for it directly on our forms. But this approach created two significant problems.

First, as Henry Mizel, our SVP of RevOps, discovered, the data wasn't reliable. "We were asking a lot of questions on the form, like team size and company size," he explains. "But not everyone completing a form knows exactly how many employees their company has. This was creating ambiguity on the edges and routing errors upwards of 10%.”

Second, lengthy forms hurt conversion rates. Each additional field increased the chance that a prospect would abandon the form entirely. And even a slightly incorrect input can result in leads being routed to the wrong team, leading to wasted time, missed quotas, and lower win rates.

Consider a mid-market lead mistakenly routed to the SMB team. The consequences cascade. The MM rep misses a valuable opportunity, the SMB team struggles with a deal beyond their scope, and the customer experiences frustrating handoffs or worse – falls through the cracks entirely.

Accelerating pipeline with form enrichment

The answer to our form dilemma was hiding in plain sight. Apollo already had the company information we were asking prospects to provide.

“Apollo is a data company,” said Henry. “We already have all of the data – phone number, company size – what if we could use it to fill in the blanks?”

Now, using just an email address Apollo could instantly fill in firmographic, technographic, and contact details on lead submissions using Apollo’s best-in-class data.

This improved data collection led to a 300% increase in routing accuracy, allowing the right reps to connect with every lead faster.

Powering the full inbound journey

Our solution didn't just solve the routing problem – it transformed our entire inbound process.

The new approach starts at the form fill: forms dynamically adapt to show only essential fields, while Apollo automatically enriches the rest of the data behind the scenes. If critical information is missing, the system intelligently surfaces only the necessary additional fields.

Form conversions increased by 40% with this streamlined approach. But the real power comes from what happens next.

“With everything on one platform, we’re even able to integrate our lead scoring model right to our routers,” Henry shared. “That means we could send very high scoring leads to a specialized team, or leads with lower engagement on a different path.”

Based on the quality of the prospect filling out the form, for example, they could be sent immediately to schedule a meeting.

The seamless new inbound process led to demo-form-to-meeting-request ratios that exceeded industry standards by up to 4x.

The platform advantage

What started as an internal solution to our form problem revealed something bigger: the power of having data enrichment, routing, and engagement all on one platform — now available in our Apollo Inbound solution.

“This instant form enrichment just wouldn’t be possible without an all-in-one platform like Apollo,” said Henry. “In fact, if you tried to string together multiple point solutions to achieve the same result, it would actually add a lot of latency and friction.”

Looking ahead, we're exploring ways for enriched forms to trigger even more sophisticated workflows across Apollo, continuing to build on the vision of a fully integrated inbound and outbound solution for smarter, faster revenue growth.