How Smartling 10x'd Rep Productivity with Apollo's AI Power-Ups

Modern sales organizations are separating themselves into two categories: those that understand how to use AI and those that don’t.

What divides them isn’t mastery (If someone tells you they’ve cracked the code to artificial intelligence, they’re lying). No — what separates the profitable and the unprofitable, relative to AI, is how they think about its fundamental role in their sales process.

The laggards are still trying to get machines to act like humans. The leaders are enlisting AI to do what humans can’t.

One of those leaders is Grace Feeney, Senior Manager of Sales Development and Operations at Smartling. 

As one of the first users to implement Apollo Power-ups, she’s using AI in a way that’s rarely seen today, carefully engineering prompts that run “always on” research to fuel a prioritized pipeline that novice BDRs can run with.

This is how the Smartling team is using AI to expand their targeting, send more personalized emails, and 10x rep productivity — without sacrificing an inch on quality.

Is manual research stunting your growth?

Smartling is a leader in the language translation and localization space. And what they see happening in their industry is emblematic of a trend taking place across all sales: teams cannot continue to rely on primarily targeting big tech companies.

“When I was a rep [at Smartling], I used to prospect a lot of tech companies,” she says, “Now we’re seeing needs across state and local governments that need language compliance…we’re seeing a huge growth in life sciences as an industry, too. They all have massive needs for translation.”

But, ripping open your targeting framework for market expansion isn’t for the faint of heart.

These prospects aren’t ones that have been cycling through your CRM for months. They aren’t prospects that your reps (often novice SDRs) have experience with. Your reps don’t speak the language of the industry, they don’t know which attributes correctly signal intent — hell, they often don’t know what those attributes are.

Learning all of that — coaching towards all of that — takes so much manual research that it begs leaders to question if it's worth the payoff. 

“My BDRs tell me that they’re spending all of their time researching prospects but there’s this level of manual work that I just can’t measure,” Grace relays, “And that’s the thing that frustrates me."

This, dear reader, is the part where we circle back to AI — because Grace recognized it as a potential solution, too.

AI-driven research completes the picture

Smartling has always been hyper-focused on outbound; and for a number of years, it’s all been happening with Apollo.

What started as a journey to better data (their previous data provider was “very hard to search, even just to see contacts”) quickly turned into a deep CRM integration with a whole playbook of automated sequences powered by warmed-up email inboxes.

So, naturally, Apollo’s AI Power-ups were an intriguing solution for Smartling’s unique research challenges in moving up-market.

Allow us this brief pause.

What are Apollo Power-ups?

After interviewing a swath of users, we found that 21% of sellers say that researching contacts and accounts is their biggest time sink.

AI Power-ups is Apollo’s response to this pain.

Power-ups let users prompt AI to automatically gather insights from Apollo data, LinkedIn posts, and web content for more accurate, more informed targeting. 

Power-ups will then run in the background and auto-populate your contact lists and CRM with detailed research crucial to closing deals.

More specifically, it helps you:

• Research and gather data on contacts and companies
• Filter your searches and building highly specific lists with a Power-up (ex. pain point type)
• Write highly personalized emails in a faction of the time

Learn how to use AI Power-ups and use our three key tips for building your first one.

Or keep reading — Grace has some incredible tips herself.

With one prompt — a pain point is solved

Grace explains that there are a few levels that are critical to contact research at her company.

1. First-party data. This is the data you have on a contact that exists in your CRM (if you have any).
2. Third-party data. This is information you can get from verified databases like Apollo, including industry, funding, employee headcount, or intent data.
3. External data. This is the “boots on the ground” work that can only be gathered by manually researching on LinkedIn, webpages, and Google searches.

It’s that last element that was causing the hangup. 

“I have a lot of reps that will go down a rabbit hole of research. And I don’t even know if they are researching the right stuff,” Grace says.

It was the first thing she solved with a Power-up.

With a little engineering, she created a prompt to automatically gather insights on Smartling’s biggest qualifying factor for contacts: a prospect’s experience with translation services.

It looked something like this:

“Figure out if this {{contact.first_name}} that works at {{account.name}} as a {{contact.title}} has experience translating a website from one language to another.”

With a few more clarifying “if-then” statements, she hit “save” and let Apollo AI loose to scrape the web, searching across LinkedIn, web pages, and profiles.

👉 If you're a beginner in AI prompt engineering, Apollo has a library of prompts for you to feed AI that will help you get the results you want. Start with this one for "Identifying likely to engage contacts" then explore more on the Apollo Academy.

Her Power-up now runs itself, funneling data into their CRM and their Apollo instance and replacing the bulk of the manual research her reps were doing across a number of tools.

“We’ve essentially built out a full suite of sales enablement functionality for higher quality prospecting,” she says.

With an AI research engine that finds information, across the corners of the world wide web, and funnels it into their engagement platform, Smartling is reaching into those new markets. 

How?

1. Reps can roll data straight into outbound sequences. Once contacts are added into a sequence, they can directly “apply” Power-ups to the body copy of sequences to bring research from across the web into their messaging.

2. Power-ups put up research guardrails for learning reps. Remote work has made it increasingly difficult for managers to build a structured environment. The fact that Apollo Power-ups guides her reps to relevant signals is one of Grace’s favorite parts about the tool. “[BDRs] are the one department that I really fundamentally believe is at a disadvantage due to remote working,” she says, “Power-ups helps them elevate to the right people and helps me manage them better as their sales leader.” 

3. They're a great development tool for teams experimenting with AI. Great managers create growth opportunities. With Power-ups, Grace gives young reps the space to experiment with AI, technology that will only continue to stake its claim throughout their sales career. “It's the people who learn how to use AI that will be next level,” she says, “My BDRs can make their own Power-ups and it’s building up their own skill sets of how to deal with AI.”

4. And, productivity has skyrocketed. Smartling is sending better, smarter emails at a higher volume. With the research directly in front of them, reps are able to send 10x more emails than before. 

Insights into target companies only AI can find

With her team’s success using AI for contact-level data, Grace looked to widen their scope of research to the company level (in other words, an account-based prospecting approach).

During her time as a rep, scanning company websites for ripe buying signals, like whether or not prospects had a “translation toggle” on their site, took hours of her time.

“When I was a BDR, I’d have to go to websites manually — checking in the top right corner, checking at the very bottom of every page.”

So, she took it to Apollo:

“Look at the {{account.website_url}} of this {{account.name}} and determine if you can toggle between multiple languages. If it can be, then figure out if the website has any gaps in its translation. If so, return to what those reasons are.”

The output of this Power-up now not only qualifies accounts. It fundamentally changes the level of personalization and familiarity her reps can build in their first interactions with prospects.

They now have the information they need to call out the need, the mistake, the gap. And gift it to their prospects.

“We no longer personalize with something generic like: ‘Hey Grace, I saw you love Guinness because you’re Irish’,” she tells us, in her melodic Irish intonation — which admittedly, made that non-example sound pretty cool.

“Now, we can say: ‘There’s a problem on your website right here, and I just wanted to give you a heads up’.”

Personalizing off of value? I’ll give it to Grace — that’s cooler than a pint o’ Guinness.

Power up your research and redefine your reach

It’s overwhelming, being hit with a tidal wave of AI. 

But, it’s not your job to figure it all out — it’s your job to explore, experiment, and build something that gives you results.

Apollo is doing the same.

“You can evidently see that [Apollo] is putting all its money back into the product. The customer is getting a better experience.” — Grace Feeny, Senior Manager of Sales Development and Operations at Smartling

Power-ups — and the suite of data and engagement tools that work in tandem to it — allowed Smartling to reach into new markets with research gathered beyond human capabilities.

If you’re interested in expanding your team's capabilities, you can sign up for Apollo for free and try Power-ups.

You can also schedule a demo for a personalized approach to putting AI within your outbound.