Apollo.io vs. Outreach vs. Salesloft

If a company is looking to do higher volume email and phone outreach, Apollo.io is a good tool. I would recommend first verifying if this type of outreach works with your offering. If it does, this tool will be very helpful for you.

Incentivized

Outreach has made a huge impact to our business. As with any software, the key is in the implementation and making sure that all reps are onboarded and trained effectively to maximise the platforms capability. We have a sales team of 35, which includes customer success, whilst the platform may be suited for a larger business, for a company of this size this has been ideal

Incentivized

I find it to be the best resource for scheduling calls with clients. Specifically when the call includes multiple people using Salesloft, it's so simple and easy to use to send open times to client and then to be able to send active links to the client where with one click the calendar invite shows up on my calendar? it's the best most efficient tool I have in my toolbelt at the moment. When it comes to logging, it's also simple but I wish I could add a contact to SL from the Microsoft integration.

Incentivized

• Firstly, finding the details of the potential customers that is there name, designation email and phone number since these are the most important cases most of the times I can get this data in Apollo.io
• I can pull the bulk data of the targeted organization, or I can pull the emails based on the location and job titles
• Apart from the email capture, the thing which helpful is that the email sequence can find emails and send emails in Apollo.io itself and also the report and the dashboard are so clean
• Friendly UI and UX Apollo.io was the first tool which I used. Since then I'm still using Apollo.io for easy understanding

Incentivized

• Sequencing -- setting up automated to-do lists so sellers can simply log in and run through their call and email tasks efficiently.
• Templates/snippets -- we have dozens and dozens, really useful to systematize our communications around feature sets, pricing, etc.
• Reporting -- super simple to get reporting on how sequences are performing, overall rep activity week over week, etc.

Incentivized

• Salesloft enables us to outreach at scale.
• Salesloft helps us identify our warmest, most buyer ready prospects to streamline our outreach.
• Salesloft helps us to identify quickly areas to course correct and provides the necessary data to do that.
• Salesloft also surfaces data around outreach so we can ensure we are targeting our team with sensible KPIs that connect to our business goals.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• It is not very clear how to use the automated info-filler logic provided to customize emails and outreach to each prospect and account. More in-app guidance on that would be invaluable.
• I wish my Outreach program didn't sign me out so frequently; I have to sign in multiple times a day.

Incentivized

• Would be nice to have custom reporting available. Coming from Salesforce, the included canned reports are useful but I like to roll my sleeves up and build exactly what I want.
• Conversations will record meetings booked via MSTeams but requires the BDR/SDR to hit record. Other solutions (e.g. Chorus.ai) join as a participant and don't require a user hitting the "record" button. We have to change our flow to make this work and it is a bit clunky.

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

SalesLoft is absolutely VITAL to our daily operations. We could not function without it or a program like it. Speaking as a Sales Person who has had to operate without a product like this, the difference is night and day. The ability to stay organized, automate tasks, easily log activities and notes, review calls, and coach team members is an absolute gamechanger.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Overall, Outreach is usable and scalable across team sizes. The only reason I give a nine and not a 10 is that there are improvements that can be made within the reporting feature. It is usable, but not everyone can easily self-learn the best practices. At times, it may require building 2-3 reports and then using a VLOOKUP in Excel to achieve the desired outcome.

Incentivized

Drift was extremely easy for both our demand gen team and SDR to jump right into. It was feature rich and purpose-built for marketers—it was remarkably easy to connect our marketing automation, CRM, and more to the platform and get everything to work together. Now the ability to create digital experiences and conversation landing pages is democratized—empowering our team to do better work and provide better prospect/customer experience.

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.

Incentivized

The availability is pretty good, we do sometimes have errors or delays in syncing activities but nothing that has been too detrimental to our workflow. Most recently we had an issue with Lofting through Outlook due to a change in security token that took a few weeks to resolve but it is fixed now.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Yes timely and easy to use. The only delays we have are when we run our big month sales blitz and activities take some time to sync to the reporting as well as SalesForce

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The support team was very responsive but at the end of the day they took a long time to fix our issue. The issue did get fixed, though, so that is what matters. Very nice people who are there to help in any way they can.

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

Incentivized

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.

We had some virtual training with our CSM which was very well constructed. It took some time to get into the full swing of things but with a few weeks of hands on experience I was feeling confidant. The SL team was always available to answer questions or jump an a call to walk us through stuff. I also used the Customer Help Center for a few self guided learnings on how to use specific features related to reporting and team management.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

must invest time and effort in define the best way to integration with Salesforce in order to get data visualization

Incentivized

In terms of Apollo.io, the easiest part is its integration and versatility in handling data. LinkedIn NAVIGATOR, on the other hand, is also a decent tool, but it’s significantly more expensive than Apollo.io and Lusha, especially when considering a decent set of data. However, it’s somewhat incomplete when compared to Apollo.io.

Incentivized

Salesforce, Apollo, and HubSpot offer similar capabilities, but they simply don't meet the needs. They're more useful for other processes. But for specifically doing outreach as an AE or BDR, Outreach has everything you need. The integrations are great, the software is easy to use, the capabilities are well thought out, and it just makes your life/work a lot easier.

Incentivized

Salesloft blows outreach out of the water in all aspects. One of the biggest issues I had was their unwillingness to listen to customer feedback. I had requested several small changes to be made when I had previously used the platform that unfortunately fell onto deff ears. I am much happier using Salesloft and the positive results I've experienced are a direct result of that.

Incentivized

When I first joined the company we were a sales team of 10. Over the last 4 years we have grown to 30 and have used Outreach the entire time. Everyone uses Outreach and it works for virtually any size business. The seat model works perfectly for any size company plus Outreach can handle hundreds of thousands of emails being sent out. We never have to worry about throttling or any type of lag time based on usage. This is key when scaling.

Incentivized

The scalability was pretty good, we started with 4 or 5 users on one team and scaled into 30+ members across 3 teams

Incentivized

• Helped to book 30 meetings in 30 days.
• It's very easy to learn.
• We sign our new clients based on the list of accounts in the industry that Apollo.io provides. This gives us a clear picture to identify which industry to target.

Incentivized

• Features for booking a meeting are nice, especially with the transition to different time zones.
• Calling is a nice feature, and it's good that I can hop around outreach while in the call when pulling up info.
• Task creation is also a good feature.

Incentivized

• I have been with a company that was using Salesloft, but moved to a competitor. I can't say it was exactly the competitors fault, as a lot of other internal changes were happening, (hence leaving the system that was working well), but we had the worst sales year in company history that year. Reps who consistently performed at or above quota were suddenly struggling to keep their pipelines in order, and the middle of the pack reps were going on PiPs and being let go.
• Is it the dialer, or the leadership? You decide.
• But the leadership also changed the dialer - so maybe it's both?

Incentivized