I've had an overall great experience with Apollo.io. It allows me to reach out to my ideal customer profile at scale while being able to customise my messaging and workflow. It's also extremely easy to keep track of which leads are warm, not interested and ones to nurture. I also find it extremely useful for lead sourcing - There's a lot of filters I can use to make my list as granular as possible.
RainKing is less appropriate when you don't have the funds or resources to pay for it. You could easily Google the information that you're looking for, or use CrunchBase, but it's extremely time-consuming. RainKing makes this very easy and the data seamlessly sends to Salesforce with the proper integration. RainKing is very appropriate when you have a large team of folks that need to source leads/accounts simultaneously and need licenses to do so - it's worth the money with a larger team.
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.).
Being able to search for companies that are currently evaluating solutions in your space.
The contact information for people and related people is also great, I have used dozens of other data solutions and prefer Rainking.
Rainking also gives you the ability to create lists of your ideal buyer and download them which was great for my team and I pull new contacts to prospect!
I can't get over how impressive the org chart info is in RainKing, it allowed myself and my team to find other involved prospects and get a good feel for organizations.
Credit usage is not always clear, we've done actions and then been surprised by the credit usage, so having more clarity on this BEFORE the credits are used up would be great.
LinkedIn steps are not ideal, there's no automation and does nothing to speed up or help with that step, this really is an email platform, not for social media.
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.
Apollo.io has all features of prospecting, outreach automation including email sequences, campaign tracking, lead scoring, and analytics in one interface which enables sales persons to manage their entire sales funnel without having any other extra tool. Another benefit is for pricing related which has been understand from our management team.
I've used SalesNavigator and Zoom Info. I actually think that Ranking is a great solution if you can use it in tandem with SalesNavigator. When it comes to pulling lists, in my opinion, Ranking does it best. Now that it has the database combined with Discoverorg, it's even more powerful to use.
I don't have that information readily available to quantify the positive impact. However, I will say that I've found a lot of good prospects via RainKing to target my outreach efforts to. I definitely feel like the product pays for itself.
