How Smile Digital Health 2X’d Connect Rates and Consolidated Their Outbound Tech Stack

When Mariah Campbell took over Smile Digital Health's SDR team, she inherited a fragmented outbound stack — disconnected tools, broken data syncs, and sequence formatting issues.

Smile sells mission-critical healthcare infrastructure to some of the most regulated, hardest-to-reach buyers on earth: payers, providers, government agencies. Every percentage point in connect rate is hard-won.

When Mariah consolidated the team onto Apollo, the results were fast. Connect rates climbed from 1.9% to 4% at peak, and each rep got back more than two hours a week. 

Here’s the full story.

The challenge: outbound in healthcare is brutal

Smile Digital Health operates in one of the most regulated, spam-filtered buying environments in enterprise software.

Mariah Campbell, Smile's Sales Development Manager, doesn't sugarcoat what that means for outbound: "Outbound is tough in general, specifically in healthcare. Filters are very strict, personas are busy, data is inconsistent. There's a lot of spam filters.” 

On top of those baseline challenges, Smile's outbound motion is unusually complex. They're selling across payers, providers, Health IT systems, and government registries. Each segment offers different solutions, different buying committees, and different regulatory pressures. The same job title at three different organizations can mean three completely different conversations.

When Mariah took over the team, she inherited an outbound stack that was adding complexity. The stack was scattered across multiple tools — an expensive data provider that was not properly syncing with their sequencing, a sequencer where inboxes were not warmed and workflows issues arose often, and sales navigator for lead discovery running in a silo. 

“A lot of broken systems, disparate sources of contact/account data, and the sequencing small papercuts like bad formatting would hurt our efforts.” 

Reps were jumping between tools to find contacts, enrich data, and execute outreach and the data didn't always integrate cleanly across systems. 

The decision: consolidate on a platform that could grow with them

Mariah initially considered a best-of-breed approach, but realized more integrations would only add more overhead. She'd seen Apollo in a previous role and assumed it was still just a data provider, but quickly realized the product had expanded to a full platform since her last demo. 

Instead of stitching together a sequencing tool, an enrichment tool, and an intent platform, Smile could consolidate onto a single platform and grow with them in Apollo. 

A unified workflow 

Before Apollo, an SDR's day looked like this: pull a list from a third party provider, cross-reference it on Sales Navigator, manually research on LinkedIn, verify on the prospect's website, manually add to Salesforce, build the sequence in Salesforce, then hope the data synced cleanly when the email actually went out.

After Apollo, that workflow collapsed into a single platform.

Mariah explains: "SDRs are able to identify their accounts and contacts directly in Apollo. We can pull all the filters and lists we need, enrich them directly from Apollo’s data instantly, and roll them into sequences all within the same platform. Calls and emails, all done in one place."

Time savings are real and measurable. At least two hours per SDR per week. 

Faster outbound messaging & play experiments 

The single biggest unlock for Mariah's team isn't the time savings alone. It's the agility.

In healthcare, regulatory windows open and close fast. CMS mandate updates, digital HEDIS campaigns, new quality measure requirements — the kind of regulatory shifts that reshape buying priorities overnight.

When these moments hit, the SDR team needs to be in market with tailored messaging within days, not weeks.

That agility shows up in the numbers. When Smile launched a focused outreach push tied to an industry event in October 2025, connect rates peaked at 4% — more than double the 1.9% baseline from August 2025. 

Now, every week, Mariah runs a pipe generation review with her team using Apollo's analytics — querying data through the AI assistant or diving into reports to see which subject lines won, which send times drove opens. The visibility is what makes coaching possible.

Deliverability you can actually trust

Mariah's team uses Apollo's analytics not just to track engagement, but to diagnose deliverability issues. 

Apollo makes it easy to separate out gatekeepers, bots, and spam-blocked sends from real engagement signals.

The result: improved send scores in a market where every domain reputation point matters.

The results

The transformation showed up in the metrics, the workflow, and the visibility — and they compound on each other.

• Each SDR gets back 2+ hours per week: The old disjointed workflow collapsed into one platform, so reps can focus on selling, not admin. 
• Connect rates more than doubled at peak: From a 1.9% baseline to 4%, a 2.1x lift in a market where percentage points are hard-won.
• Reporting drives optimization: Mariah runs weekly pipe gen reviews with real data (open rates, gatekeeper vs. bot vs. spam). 

Why Smile Digital Health chose Apollo’s all-in-one solution

We asked Mariah what she'd say to another SDR manager — particularly one selling into healthcare or another regulated industry — who's evaluating their outbound stack today.

"Look for something that reduces friction for your reps. There are a million tools out there, and a lot say they're all-in-one. The more you can do on one platform, the better. It needs to be super easy and user-friendly so reps can create sequences, do research, enroll people, make tweaks, and A/B test quickly.”

"All in all, I love Apollo. It's nice being able to house all of this in one space."

Want to see what Apollo can do for your sales team? Book a demo →