What’s New in Apollo? Here’s our Q3 ‘22 Product Updates

We’ve been up to some exciting things at Apollo…

This article will recap our most recent webinar where VP of Product, Krishan Patel, covered Apollo’s recent product releases and shared a glimpse of upcoming features that our users can look forward to in the rest of 2022 and beyond.

Apollo’s 2022 product themes

Before we dive into specifics, we want to share the three core product themes that will continue to drive us in building the future of intelligent selling:

• Best-in-class data.

  We all know that, at Apollo, data is king. That’s why we will continue to improve the size, quality, and coverage of our B2B database for better prospecting and better results for our users.

• Intelligence.

  Another focus of ours is to further develop AI functionality to provide actionable insights across your entire sales process. We want to make sure that it’s easy for you to identify exactly how you can improve your success rates.

• Engagement 3.0.

  Apollo is determined to provide our users with the automations, personalizations, and channels needed to engage their customers with the right messaging at every stage.

So what’s new in our product?

Here are some of the exciting features we’ve released (or will release soon!) to help us achieve that vision:

Use Buying Intent to find high-potential prospects

Have you heard the BIG news?

We recently launched Buying Intent, a feature that allows you to find and prioritize buyers that are actively researching solutions like yours and gain insight into what, when, and how often they are expressing interest.

“Buying Intent used to be this feature that was only available to companies with a lot of money to spend,” Krishan says, “What we’ve done is created a free version of Buying Intent because one of the core missions of Apollo is to provide world-class, go-to-market tools to everyone.”

Armed with intent data intelligence, sellers can target the right buyers, engage at the right time, and convert with the right message.

For example, you might want to find companies that are interested in lead capture software and are showing a high intent score. Hover over their contacts in Apollo to see when the intent signal was expressed, how frequently, over what time period, and so on.

Have more questions about intent data? Head to the blog to learn how to supercharge your sales with intent data.

Convert contacts into opportunities with Meetings from Apollo

Manually setting up and managing your meetings is an unnecessary time sink.

Now, you can take your scheduling to the next level with Apollo Meetings – the ultimate calendar tool for quick and easy scheduling.

Sync your calendar to Apollo and get a shareable link to include in your emails. Your leads can then view your availability, select a time that works, and automatically have the meeting scheduled on both of your calendars. This not only simplifies your workflow, but empowers your prospects to book meetings at their own convenience.

Head to the Apollo Meetings tab to set up your calendars and start booking.

Improve deliverability with Sequence Diagnostics

If you send a high volume of emails, but you are not optimizing for deliverability, your domain reputation can take a hit over time and more of your emails will end up in spam folders.

Sequence Diagnostics helps users understand exactly how they can improve their deliverability, highlighting things in email setup, domain reputation, and contact data that can be improved.

Think of it like your own personal customer success manager that ensures your emails end up in your leads’ inboxes every time.

Sequence Diagnostics:

• Run diagnostics (obviously)
• Help you connect with mass email senders like SendGrid and/or Mailgun
• Assist you in setting up tracking domains
• Identify and pause any unverified contacts in your sequences

Eliminate manual emails with Follow-up Sequences

Sending emails in a single thread is an organized and natural way to follow up with prospects.

With Follow-up Sequences, sales reps can reconnect with a prospect in an existing email thread until a response is received.

For example, if an account executive sends an email after a demo to follow up on scheduling a call, they can add them to a follow-up sequence, so that, if that person does not respond in a certain amount of days, they will start getting follow-up emails checking in with them.

This will reduce the time spent manually following up with prospects and allow reps to focus on other opportunities. Krishan also adds, “Follow-up Sequences prevent people from ghosting you and/or slipping through the cracks if you’re too busy to consistently follow up.”

Get more done with LinkedIn Automation

Reduce the number of manual clicks required to execute each task with our new LinkedIn Automation.

This time-saving feature gives you the ability to automate and execute social tasks in LinkedIn itself instead of switching between LinkedIn and Task Manager.

While it won’t be 100% automated (due to legal restrictions), you will be able to go to your list of LinkedIn tasks, click ‘auto execute’, and Apollo will take you into LinkedIn and open each connect request for you.

Talk about efficiency!

Improve engagement with Sequencing Alerts

Do you have a lot of sequences running simultaneously? If you do, chances are you find it difficult to frequently analyze and optimize each one.

Sequence Alerts will give you visibility into underperforming sequences and provide you with automated insights and recommendations for converting more contacts.

“The goal here is to take you from a place where you’re setting some meetings to one where you have an optimized, end-to-end system for sales engagement,” Krishan says.

This feature will provide you with actionable suggestions such as improving subject lines, tweaking step spacing, and adding personalization, and even give you helpful resources for doing so.

Identify gaps in your HubSpot CRM and enrich instantly

This is something we know you all have been waiting for…

Apollo is releasing HubSpot CRM enrichment (very soon!).

If you have mapped your fields to your CRM, Apollo will ensure that those fields are always populated anytime a new record is added to your CRM. This will help you automatically keep track of changes and have up-to-date records in HubSpot, improving your conversion rate through your entire pipeline.

Leverage contact data you can trust as we continue to improve our B2B database

Lastly, we have some exciting new developments on the data side of things:

1. We are adding 20% more international mobile numbers to the Apollo B2B database. Reach more prospects internationally with Apollo’s Click-to-Call Dialer, verifying calls in real-time.
2. We are making our email verification logic more rigorous and advanced, which will result in a 1-2% reduction in bounce rates for our users. Now, you can feel even more confident in a protected email domain reputation when you reach out to prospects in Apollo.

What’s on the product roadmap? Here are some of the functionalities you have to look forward to…

To continue building the future of intelligent selling, we have even more on the horizon.

Krishan shared a snapshot of some of the key product features you can expect in Q4 and Q1:

• Intelligent Engagement. You will be able to get deeper insights into your engagement performance. Apollo will help you maximize efficiency by providing recommendations for improving underperforming sequences, automatically selecting the higher-performing option in A/B tests, and moving your contacts to best-performing sequences.
• Data Health Center. With a CRM integration, we will calculate how much stale, unenriched data you have and create a monthly schedule to automatically clean up your contact data.
• Salesforce AppExchange Integration. This integration will allow you to analyze, cleanse, and enrich your data with Apollo directly within Salesforce.
• Apollo for Recruiters. We’re adding more comprehensive recruiting filters like years at past companies, skills, degrees, and majors (which will serve as awesome personalization data for salespeople, too).

In Closing

We hope you are excited about these recent releases and the future of Apollo – because we sure are!

You can watch the full-length product webinar here and don’t forget to follow us on LinkedIn to never miss out on future Apollo webinars, events, and product updates.