Apollo.io vs. SMARTe Data Platform

Apollo.io played big role for us in saving $$$ by bringing data mining, AI Email Writing and acting as CRM altogether...for small to medium organization they can surely rely on Apollo.io...and it is doing things mostly right with some room for improvement for sure. Sales and Marketing team saves time in getting their emails drafted based on prompts, list of contacts they can fetch in minutes of time, earlier we used to have seperate tool just to mine data, then we used to upload the CSV file to email marketing tool, then we used to draft email...for all these process we were using three different tools - Apollo.io brought everything under one umbrella.

Incentivized

1. SMARTe was purchased to serve three purposes. To to act as a secondary source of enrichment to another product. Our lead qualification processes rely on accurate data being populated and enriched. SMARTe boosts our enrichment rate by 20% in some areas vs our other supplier. We performed this analysis during renewal which confirmed their complimentary functionality in this area. From this point of view it runs silently in the background without maintenance making it perfect for our needs.
2. The ability to correctly classify free Text job titles into segmentable values. Most enrichment platforms will provide values with a job title they provide which is ok, but SMARTe will categorise any title we send regardless of if they match the contact. This has a large impact to how we can successfully make use of our data from segmentation to Lead Scoring.
3. New contacts - we have two options here, download straight from their humungous dataset using the filters provided (including being able to upload accounts to match). Or, use their bespoke service which ranges from desk based research to GDPR compliant phone qualifies contacts. One area that could improve is the integration with HubSpot. A robust API means we have managed to integrate, but Native integration would be preferred.

• 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

• Unlocking Phone Number from a contact
• Unlocking Email from a contact
• Tracking the relevant role within the company
• Understanding companies organization

Incentivized

• There are certain features about prospecting that require updates. For example, if people switch organisations, it should be automatically requesting the new email or new contact data for a particular contact in order to be updated in the system
• The lead databases that are created if their new addition should automatically be updated in the list that I created with Apollo.io

Incentivized

• UI could be better.
• Automate the product buying experience.

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

Apollo.io does provide campaign setup help and made my SDRs team's life easier, with the use of lead enrichment, lead distribution, I can manage my team from a single dashboard. It also comes with CRM that helps me navigate the progress on leads and what my SDRs progress.

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

All of these platforms are good and offer valuable tools, but where Apollo.io is different is how this one platform does the job of several different ones. It is nice not having to use multiple platforms to get things done and makes integration and analytics issues occur less often. It is user friendly and constantly working to improve.

Incentivized

We use them to compliment each other, there are areas that Clearbit provides matches that SMARTe does not and visa versa. This applies at both a contact and an account level. Where SMARTe really stands out (for me) is the ability to classify any provided Job Title. This really has dramatic impact to our processes. Clearbit does have a native integration that offers data refresh.

• It provides more opportunities to gather more clients.
• It gives more results and better results in targeting our sales.
• It is a more effective way to provide information to a large number of potential clients about the events/ projects the company is offering.

Incentivized

• More contacts available
• Increased response rate thanks to more way to reach out
• Increased conversion rate

Incentivized