Apollo is great cause it's free. There are thousands of leads but also thousands of unverified email address. If you're serious about paying a pretty penny for a lead database, there are better ones out there.
It is best used for cold outreach sales. While it has some research capabilities for trends in some ways, it really shines in finding and maintaining up to date information on contacts. Being able to mass update contacts that might have moved to a new company allows you to see easily when you might need to find a new contact, or if you have a contact at a new company, expanding your network and reach. It is not a CRM, I don't recommend using it as your full CRM, it is great for tracking cold outreach, but then you should move contacts to your actual CRM tool.
Uses [of DiscoverOrg] include searching for prospects in accounts. Getting all of the relevant contact information in one place. Using the export button saves time by allowing you to select one or more leads to import into CRM. Sophisticated search allows for you to build lists, and export as above. Good support with various experts available to help you get started and get better at using it.
Sequencing automated email campaigns for outbound prospecting (BD Function).
Integrating with Sales Navigator to help me find emails/phone #' numbers/"add to sequence" while prospecting. It's easy and seamless to find & then load contacts into Cadences.
Integration with Salesforce is a huge plus. Allows me to not worry about logging anything, but the executive team can see my activity & what is going on (emails going out, responses I get, etc.).
The analytics on the outreach data is always helpful as well (open rates, click rates, etc.).
Prospecting Lists/Lead Gen - Discover Org does this very well because of it's ability to provide current information (email/phone) on an individual at a company. It's easy to segment & drill down by categories - to find the right targets to reach out to.
Insights - DiscoverOrg is great at providing insights or "scopes" on prospects as well. Meaning it will show who is handling what project (Decision-Maker) and what projects they are particularly interested in at the moment/what initiatives. For example, the scopes may show that they are interested in AI initiatives or a Merger & Acquisition or Digital Transformation & will say who is in charge of the initiative.
Stellar filtering capabilities - you can filter lists in so many ways. You can go by function, or even look at companies with small marketing teams (let's say less than 10), or you can search for companies with an "x" amount of $ budget for IT spend. Or even companies that use a specific HR workplace management system.
Improvement on the search capabilities - since there is so much to search (which is a plus) it makes it harder to do this in a timely manner. You have to dedicate a certain amount of time to be able to pull a proper, useful and clean list.
Make it more user friendly - there are so many different tabs, search buttons, pull down, etc. I think it can be quite confusing to a new user.
The tool is simply better than most other lead/company data repositories, and they are dedicated to keeping their data clean, even if they are far from accomplishing this task at present. The tool works, and it is relatively easy to use. Overall, DiscoverOrg provides the level of lead/contact, customer, and even industry level data the sales orgs have come to expect from this sort of tool in a format that is fairly easy to use. They do also provide support for sales teams looking to use the tool effectively, which is great!
It is easy to use. The UI has enough options to learn, with advanced documentation and support. The customer service is quick to respond and assists with information in real time. The UI has different segments for each feature which makes it easy to use.
Settings are easy to change as per preferred requirements
The team wants to solve probelms, but we are finding that they don't know how to solve the more technical issues quickly. I suspect that they don't have a mature process for escalations, and they don't have a usable knowledge base article repository. They seems to push emails around to let us know that people are working on the issues to find solutions, but this takes weeks and oftentimes still leaves us without a resolution.
I link the interface of Apollo.io better than Zoominfo. Zoominfo only provides a company employees and rarely the specific people I was looking for in shipping and logistics. It generally recommended higher level executives like Presidents or COO's instead of the decision makers I need to work with. I also found much of the info Zoominfo provided to be outdated. In some cases the people were no longer employed with the company
ZoomInfo acquired DiscoverOrg and I believe legacy DiscoverOrg will phase out in the near future. ZoomInfo is 100x better than DiscoverOrg and are very pleased with it's functionality and easy of use. We only selected DiscoverOrg because we were on an auto-renewal contract and did not unsubscribe in time. We did not plan to renew DiscoverOrg. But since then we have been upgraded to ZoomInfo and are finding much more value in that platform than we did in DiscoverOrg.
After using DiscoverOrg, our lead are now well qualified and suitable. We are able to generate good and qualified. This is the positive impact.
After using DiscoverOrg, our sales team is now able to cold call the target contacts, the number provided by DiscoverOrg, the interaction held is now increased and we are able to produce good leads.
After using DiscoverOrg, we are able to understand better because of their reports and dashboards which is very informative.
