3 Ways a CRO Used Apollo to Manage the Sales Team and Fill Pipeline 4x Faster

If you’re a Chief Revenue Officer who is also in charge of managing account executives or business development representatives, then you know how stressful the role can be. On top of attending countless meetings and driving forward your revenue strategy, managing a sales team can get pretty chaotic.

Chaos aside, running your sales team running efficiently is key to moving toward those revenue and growth goals.

Jeff Kreinik, the former CRO at BuzzCast, managed a team of account executives and can speak to this all too well. In the early days of working with this team, their outbound B2B sales process was extremely disjointed with different parts of their workflow spread across multiple systems.

In the search for a more efficient solution, Jeff found Apollo. And within months of moving to Apollo’s end-to-end sales engine, his account executives were accomplishing their sales prospecting tasks in less than half of the time it used to take and filling the pipeline four times faster.

Jeff was also pleasantly surprised to find that he suddenly had an easier way to gain insight into team activity and thus set more targeted KPIs for his team.

For Jeff, Apollo was not just a prospecting tool, but a system for sales team management. Here are three ways Jeff used Apollo to more strategically manage his sales team.

#1 – Jeff refined KPIs based on Apollo Analytics

Before Apollo, Jeff kept the team’s goals fairly vague. Because they were using so many different systems, it was hard to track what was working and what wasn’t. However, this changed with Apollo.

“Once we started using Apollo, I was able to track all kinds of KPIs such as the number of accounts targeted each week, or the number of contacts added to an outbound Sequence,” says Jeff. “I tracked a total of ten different KPIs within Apollo, and by doing so, I was able to set specific expectations for individuals and for the team as a whole.”

When the KPIs were more specific, Jeff was also able to be more strategic in helping his team excel. He started to pick up on patterns in team activity within Apollo and could then make suggestions accordingly.

“I gained a lot of insights, and after gathering about three to six months of data in Apollo, I could then project what my team was capable of,” Jeff explains.

#2 – Jeff sped up teamwide prospecting 4x by centralizing their work within Apollo

“Our process before Apollo was highly inefficient,” says Jeff.

“We used one platform to identify targets and create lists, and another platform to find email addresses. Once we had emails, we’d export those to another platform to do our outreach. And then after that, if someone was interested, we were manually adding them to a CRM.”

By switching from multiple platforms to centralizing everything within Apollo, Jeff could help his team maximize their time.

“We were able to 4x the speed at which we could fill the pipeline,” Jeff says.

Not only was his sales team prospecting faster with Apollo, but Jeff could also direct his team to make strategic changes to outbound efforts faster.

“Our marketing director and I created several different email templates, and we would have the account executives A/B test our different templates in Apollo,” explains Jeff.

“We could quickly get back results and then make adjustments across the team to arrive at the best email subject lines, messaging, and calls to action that would drive more pipeline growth.”

#3 – Jeff improved team results with better coaching

By using Apollo to track team activities, Jeff was able to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of his different sales reps. He was also able to allow each account executive to work based on their specific interests.

“I had one AE who was very good at breaking down financial markets into revenue, and I had another AE who really wanted to focus on regional markets,” says Jeff. “Since our prospecting was now more standardized within Apollo, this allowed me to empower those reps to work the way they wanted as long as they stayed within the parameters and templates in Apollo.”

By using Apollo as a coaching tool, Jeff could uncover where individuals were inefficient or where they could lean into their strengths.

“I found that I was expanding the way I managed each AE beyond just how to use a software tool, and I was instead more focused on how they were spending their day as a whole,” says Jeff.

To summarize

At the end of the day, Jeff was truly able to lean into his role as a leader by taking advantage of the right tools in the right way.

Jeff highly recommends Apollo for other sales leaders, but he also recommends being open-minded.

“We all have access to the same tools for prospecting, but what’s important is to be smart about how you use those tools. Try to be more efficient with how you approach prospecting and don’t be afraid to try new things. Spend more time being thoughtful, and I’m sure you’ll see results,” says Jeff.

If you’re a CRO or sales leader wanting to better manage your team’s prospecting activities like Jeff, try Apollo for free today.