Apollo.io vs. Outreach vs. Salesforce Agentforce Sales

Based on my experience using Apollo.io, it is well-suited for organizations like startups that are actively looking to generate new leads to market their products, and for direct marketing using the Apollo.io mail system and filtering leads by locality, sector, or designation.

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Outreach is very useful for all aspects of work organization. I can keep my tasks organized and complete them quickly and efficiently. I'd like to see an app-based tracking feature to keep my tasks up-to-date with reminders, which would make things much more efficient and eliminate the need to constantly check the website. Outreach es muy útil en todo lo que refiere a organización de trabajo, puedo mantener un orden de actividades y me permite completarlas de manera ágil y rápida. Quisiera un seguimiento desde aplicativo para tener siempre al dia las tareas con recordatorios lo que haría mucho más eficiente y así no ingresar todo el tiempo a la pagina This review was originally written in Spanish and has been translated into English using a third-party translation tool. While we strive for accuracy, some nuances or meanings may not be perfectly captured.

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Obviously, for any business, there are two main areas to focus on — the sales path and the service path. Sales Cloud wouldn’t be suited for a company that’s primarily into support services. For those kinds of companies, Salesforce has a different product — Service Cloud. So, for anyone in the support or service space, Sales Cloud isn’t the right fit.

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• contacts with verified emails
• companies according to their economic sector
• companies based on their size and revenue
• companies based on their location
• contactos con correos verificados
• empresas de acuerdo a su sector económico
• empresas de acuerdo a su tamaño y facturación
• empresas de acuerdo a su ubicación

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• Outreach is great at managing my data to day tasks and reminders for next steps with prospects
• The click to dial works great from Salesforce, and I love the integration with Salesforce where I can upload contacts into Outreach to start a sequence
• Outreach Kaia is perfect to capture calls and search provide actionable next steps. I also like going in and listening to other reps calls
• I like the overview section for reports where I can see how I am doing compared to my peers. Especially on all metrics
• The accounts tab is great to see at a glance which accounts have had the most engagement

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• The customizations - We have an organization that operates differently from most companies, so we’ve had to implement quite a few customizations — and Salesforce allows us to do that quite quickly. Most of the time, delays come from dependencies on other internal parties rather than the system itself.
• From my perspective as a consultant, one of the biggest advantages is that everything is in Salesforce — all the details, all in one place. The ability to customize it easily is a big plus; there’s really a lot you can do with it.

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• Apollo.io's sync to Salesforce is incredibly finnicky and created a large number of duplicates.
• Apollo.io's workflow functionality is rigid and doesn't play nicely with middleware like Zapier.
• Apollo.io is focused on helping you spin up many different emails and phone numbers in a spammy manner instead of focusing on domain reputation.

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• The Salesforce-to-Outreach connection can be weak if a record is converted; Outreach holds onto stake values.
• Outreach can be hard for new hires to grasp, ongoing training in platform would help.
• Customization in report views from Salesforce into outreach could be enhanced.

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• We still need to include the production part. We started using Salesforce to sell the seeds — our inventory is in SAP — and from there we handle sales and track the process of planting, harvesting, selling, and then collecting payments. But we don’t yet manage the earlier production processes, like production planning. We handle allocation, but not full production planning, and that’s an area where we still have room for improvement.

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at this moment Apollo.io seems to be the perfect tool that has mastered all aspects of outbound marketing and CRM to handle and manage sales cycle.

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It's a strong tool that helps our sales development team manage a large number of qualified leads. The sequence framework ensures that every lead receives enough contact attempts that we have confidence that we're not abandoning our prospecting too early without the overhead of managing those activities manually.

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There are days when I wish we hadn't switched, but I know that if we put in the time, we will get to where we want to be with the software and that it has many more capabilities than anything else we looked at. However, the amount of time and onboarding we need to do is also far greater than we realized/were told when we originally bought the product. They told us we should hire onboarding support, but at the end, after we had already reached our budget maximum for this, so it's been slower than we had hoped.

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I gave it a 7 because it doesn't help you out if you're an organization that's call-heavy, because a lot of times the numbers aren't the best. It's not accurate. If you're somebody who's email and outbound and your goal is to find that, then that's cool. It works well for it. Some of the features, the AI tools, and some additional features they have are just too complex. Sometimes it's easy to use, but at the same time, there are tools that are not efficient, and it's like, "Where is this coming from?"Especially if you're looking for your niche, whatever industry you're in, and the target word, sometimes it can't find it. You can see what people are searching for, and it just doesn't add up. If you're trying to get very, very detailed, it's not the best. Sometimes it's going to depend on your industry, of course.

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It's not as simple as it used to be -- getting pretty bloated, and I'm not a fan of the UI. I think it could be a far more usable product (and indeed, at one point it was) if the most important things for a seller were the most prominent. Take cold emailing, for example: the window where messages are being composed is tiny, and it's frustrating to use—maybe that's just me, though.

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Because I think it could be easier. We have different standards today since we’re used to interacting with consumer apps like Starbucks, where all you do is scan your card. Then, when you use Sales Cloud, there are still a lot of manual inputs. So my mission with AI is really about figuring out how to make that easier.

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In our years as Outreach customers, I can count the number of outages we've experienced on one hand. Generally, outages have been very brief and have not completely frozen our access to the platform. Scheduled maintenance is always proactive communicated and the hours never interfere with standard business hours or scheduled sequences.

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Salesforce is always available securely from any internet-capable device anywhere in the world, UNLESS you choose to set security measures so that ONLY trusted IP ranges may access the system at certain times of the day. It's all about choice and flexibility with Salesforce products.

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Outreach's performance overall is very high quality. Pages load right away. Occasionally it might take a minute to generate a report, but not any slower than in other platforms I've used. Outreach is integrated into many of our other tools and seems to be a very clean integration. Everything runs very quickly.

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Salesforce performance in general is excellent. "The cloud infrastructure beneath Force.com has been fine-tuned over the past 10 years. It powers nearly 100,000+ businesses running more than 185,000 applications that 3 million users count on every day."
Points per Salesforce -
1) Multitenant kernel - With a multitenant platform, each business that uses the app doesn’t have its own copy. Instead, all businesses share a single copy and then customize it for their specific needs.
2) ISO 27001 certified security - You can’t compromise when it comes to enterprise-level security. Force.com is road-tested and trusted by nearly 100,000+ companies, including many of the world’s most security-conscious organizations, such as banks and health care providers.
3) Proven reliability - All Force.com apps run on world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities. Force.com has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for years.
4) Proven, real-time scalability - Force.com is used by many of the world's largest enterprises, including Cisco, Japan Post Network, and Symantec. Applications can automatically scale from a few users to millions of page views, as needed.
5) Real-time query optimizer - You need fast access to your data. The Force.com query optimizer delivers under 300ms response time, at a massive scale.
6) Real-time transparent system status - You can always see real-time system performance, availability, and security information at trust.salesforce.com.
7) Real-time upgrades - Unlike traditional software platforms, our upgrades never break your customizations, code, or integrations. We upgrade the platform for you 3 to 4 times each year. As a result, you’re always on the latest version, with access to the latest features, performance, and security enhancements.
8) Real-time sandbox environments - With a single click, you can create copies of your applications, configuration, and data in separate environments for development, testing, and training.
9) Three global production data centers and disaster recovery - Force.com runs on three geographically dispersed, mirrored data centers with built-in replication, disaster recovery, a redundant network backbone, and no single points of failure

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.

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There is almost zero customer support. What they do offer is a live chat feature which is active during "normal" business hours which is nice for instant inquiries if someone is available. However, you do not have a dedicated representative to address questions or concerns and their billing process is confusing and messy without any support.

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The overall support has been good. More and more features are being released quite frequently. Very small features are also making big difference in how the tool can be adapted and used better. If there is anything we need or are stuck, the support team sets up a call and helps in resolving the issue/provides workarounds.

We were trained in person and it was very easy to understand. And if we missed any pointers there was more training given to us. So i always like this tool. The drafts were also prepared for us to sync outreach with our devices so it was straightforward. Highly recommend

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I attended two training sessions. I would rate them a 4 as an advanced user. It was very basic – great for someone new – would give 8+ for new person.

I had 3 years of experience at the time. I skipped basic and went onto advanced and still not helpful. A lot of it was best practices that didn’t feel relevant for our business

Lots of attention from the Outreach training team, with a great willingness to customize to our needs. To be clear, you get out what you put in. If you don't work with them, you'll get cookie-cutter training. But we asked for a lot of customization, and they delivered what we asked for.

I have gone through multiple. The content that’s delivered is quite basic – I wish they had more advanced training.

We are grandfathered into premium support plus training. We get unlimited access to instructor led and online training for free. We have taken advantage of this

I expected more assistance in connecting Outreach with Salesforce. We have a basic connection, but many fields were left without a sync. We can apparently sync data without adding the app into Salesforce, but believe we could get more functionality with a better integration. The basics of setting up our sequences and using Outreac to run them was was fine.

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Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.

We found the contact data from Apollo.io was more reliable than Instantly.ai. We used Instantly.ai for about 6 months before stopping our use of it. Growbots doesn't give you as much volume for the same price at Apollo.io. However, we did close sales with Growbots, and we did not with Apollo.io. It could have just been our unique experience, but that's what happened.

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They're not direct competitors, but they share many of the same functionalities. Gong has a greater focus on spoken communications, such as calls and demos, rather than emails. I think Gong also has stronger AI capabilities at the moment. However, I don't believe so, Gong would be ideal for prospecting and mass outreach, as Outreach is. Outreach is more suitable for exploration and outbound communications management, whereas Gong is better suited for deal and pipeline management and analysis.

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So I've evaluated, implemented Microsoft Dynamics in the past. I've used Oracle CRM solutions. I've used Daylight, which is a very niche CRM system the last couple of years. And I've evaluated a variety from Legacy Microsoft Ones to Zoho and Sugar when making implementation decisions at other companies. But usually I've gone with Salesforce. I'd say it's better than most. The only one that I generally prefer, and last time I chose an implementation from scratch, I did Microsoft Dynamics. And the reason is for small mid-size organization, Microsoft Dynamics, if you already have Microsoft Office products, it's much better integrated to all of the Excel, Word, OneNote, Outlook email than what you get from Salesforce. And so that's the only one that if someone's a Microsoft organization and small sized company, it'll save a lot of integration things, a lot of security, a lot of login and access and IT management by just sticking within the Microsoft ecosystem. But outside of that, if you don't use Microsoft or if you're a large organization or have other needs that you want, Salesforce I'd say is better than all of the other CRM offerings out there. It's the easiest to use and the most robust and the most vendors and products for the ecosystem.

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Salesforce is the most widely used CRM system. Professionalism tends to increase when things go wrong for market leaders. Salesforce considers us as users because they own the market. Having all of our data in one place and all of our teams working within Salesforce. Anyone who uses Salesforce is impacted by it, even if they don't.

As a business of 100+ people, we are on the smaller side. We took it on when we were 50 people overall with 15 sellers. We are now double that it has scaled brilliantly. We would completely trust the system to scale with us if we doubled in size

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It's very scalable as it has a ton of features (but you do need an admin who understands how to leverage these features). Because of the various features, we've also needed to host onboarding sessions with our users so that they can familiarize themselves with the platform, which isn't always super user-friendly or intuitive.

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Using Salesforce.com has made my daily routines more efficient and simplified the manual tasks I had to perform independently. I can now access data from any device, online or offline, and provide better guidance to my team about the forecasts provided by the built-in artificial intelligence (AI). A chat with a Salesforce support specialist would be great. The knowledge base has a community forum where Salesforce users can ask questions and learn more about the product.

• Apollo.io has helped me find a good set of new target audience for the business that I am in, essentially helping me build a prospective line and grow my lead database by 25 to 30% where I lack a certain skill
• The Apollo.io quality of the data that it has is significantly better through other competitors like Lusha and others
• In terms of the revenue increase, there have been certain instances where I have found a new acquirer that essentially I would not have found in a general scenario and that has help me generate from the new identified lead

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• Increase in meetings booked
• Increase in call metrics as it is easy to make more calls using Outreach features. Basically cutting down admin work time before the call.
• Prospect journey and experience has been a positive flowing through a set amount of emails and calls rather than just being blasted with random emails. Helps BDRS stay focused on more important parts of the job.

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• It allows me to keep a close eye on all of my performance metrics through the Dashboard Reporting, ie what my sales pipeline looks like, how much it's changed in the last 60 days, new opportunities created in the last 7 days, # of emails sent for the week, etc. The ease of the design and output make it really easy to check my progress throughout the day to find where I have holes and am falling short on my personal and work goals. It's resulted in greater transparency with my Mgmt Team and shorter 1-on-1 mtgs with my boss as he can see exactly where I am at all times (to be fair, I'm a senior sales rep, so he pretty much lets me do my job completely unfettered), but it does prove that I am continually producing which recently resulted in a raise I didn't even ask for.
• The SF repository is so detailed that I don't have to spend tons of time finding frequently used websites attached to a client or see what all interactions with the company look like. Even though I don't use SF for my bulk emails and email sequences, SF provides me with an email to use in the bcc of these emails which links everything back to SF. I find that extremely helpful. This really impacts my efficiency and I can honestly say that once I started using all the functionality of data management, it saved me about 20% of my time/week that I could then allocate towards other revenue-generating tasks like prospecting and account management. The more time I have for those, the better. My year-over-year on accounts 1 year and older just grew by 17% this last year.

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