Apollo.io vs. Close CRM

Best suited for contact discovery on LinkedIn or for that matter any website, but it works best on LinkedIn. It saves tons of work, you can simply select the complete list of people you want to contact and put them directly into an email sequence. It is a little difficult to find contact info on other websites.

Incentivized

Excellent software to increase sales and follow up with existing and new customers. Email and SMS handling are really easy for the sales team, managing leads is really great, and Close merges duplicate leads to help our Data Leads avoid repetitive and unnecessary calls. As mentioned in some comments before, must improve in reports, Close is not appropriate to handle or track agents' hours making it necessary to implement additional software to cover this area.

Incentivized

• Allows users to easily add new prospects to database without much manual effort at all
• Allows you to make cold calls from different area codes that are relevant to where your prospect is located
• Allows A/B testing for emails so you can figure out which ones are gaining the most traction
• You can also find prospects based off of title, company, technologies, etc

Incentivized

• Email sequences. Create and send a sequence of emails until the sequence finishes or the contact replies to your email. You can also pause the sequence manually.
• Email sync. Syncs in real time with your email account, which is huge.
• Zapier integration. We've automated a lot of our pipeline management through the Zapier integration. This saves us soooo much time.

Incentivized

• Their customer service is just terrible. You get an assigned account manager but 9/10 times they wouldn't know what you wanted and/or how the product works or how to fix it. Vast majority of the time it was a canned response that made you question if they read the message, or if they read it and did not understand a word.
• The software was relatively buggy and lacked features that were promised upon signup. They seem to have some large corporate clients and if you aren't one none of your bug submissions, feature requests, or concerns will be addressed.
• Their growing quickly so they seem to be very understaffed which I believe caused many of the issues above.
• The data, while good, can quickly run out if you're looking for specific types of leads. If you're looking for something generic like Managers at companies between 10-5000 people, you can pull leads all day every day. However if you're looking for a specific industry, specific title, and specific location - don't count on having an endless supply of leads (or even really enough to use month after month).

Incentivized

• Make it so one can set the time at which the emails go out.
• Make it easier to set up my workflow.

Incentivized

It's my favorite CRM to recommend to sales organizations. Robust Telephony options including a Power Dialer, SMS, and Voice Drop, are completely integrated into the CRM. The kicker is you can have "Unlimited" contacts where many platforms charge based on the number of users. This can make a huge difference in monthly billing.

Incentivized

I received excellent support at any time I opened up a ticket. But I would add to it that the tool was very self-explanatory, so there wasn't much need for support. With Outreach, we have a closer relationship with our CSM because of the intricacy in things like SFDC task mapping.

Incentivized

I haven't really had the need to use their support, but the only time I had an issue with the platform, the Close team was very attentive and responded in a short span of time. Also they take minimal time to solve issues. The only con here is there is no way to reach out to them apart from email.

Incentivized

I have also looked into and tried Hunter.io and Lusha, and to be honest, I shouldn't compare them with Apollo. I have found Apollo to be so easy to integrate and use with all of my prospecting that I haven't really even tried out the other two. I bet I could find some useful things by using Hunter.io or Lusha as well, but there is honestly no need since I can do everything I want and more with Apollo. I would just be wasting time trying to figure out another platform when I can be focused on growing my own business with Apollo.

Incentivized

Pipedrive was great for us for a long time. We used it for over 4 years. Our product and process was simple. When things got more complex, we needed something that could handle our growing needs and Pipedrive kept falling short. We built our own custom solution in Airtable and though it worked, we spend a lot of time managing it. Close was able to solve all our issues and save us hours per week in admin work.

Incentivized

• Generated a lot of expectations that were not real when we needed them
• The ROI was positive but we decided to stop using the tool
• We loved how easy to use it was and how easy it was to interact with the Support team
• There is room for improvement in the video tutorials - they were from old versions of the software that would not be useful for the version at hand

Incentivized

• Positive - It's much easier now with Close.io to make sure that no deal falls through the cracks. Therefore helping us recover lost revenue.

Incentivized