Apollo.io vs. InsideSales.com / XANT PowerDialer for Salesforce (discontinued)

Best suited for contact discovery on LinkedIn or for that matter any website, but it works best on LinkedIn. It saves tons of work, you can simply select the complete list of people you want to contact and put them directly into an email sequence. It is a little difficult to find contact info on other websites.

Incentivized

Outbound dialing is where it excels. It's especially good with larger teams of reps. Organizing through campaigns and seek lists is very powerful once you understand how to use it. There is definitely a learning curve with seek lists (I've spent tons of time on the phone with their support staff) but once you understand it the possibilities are endless. You can sort which leads show up by a variety of filters. Even with a list of 10,000+ leads and 5 reps calling on it, you can ensure no leads show up in two reps lists, the reps are calling specific territories, and even skipping leads that are likely on their lunch break! One my of favorite tricks with seek lists and only calling people with titles like Director/VP/C-Level before 8:30am or after 5pm their time, when those people are more willing to pick up the phone. They also appreciate a sales rep who is putting in the extra time to call during those blocks.

Incentivized

• Allows users to easily add new prospects to database without much manual effort at all
• Allows you to make cold calls from different area codes that are relevant to where your prospect is located
• Allows A/B testing for emails so you can figure out which ones are gaining the most traction
• You can also find prospects based off of title, company, technologies, etc

Incentivized

• Organizes your leads based on the parameters you set so you call the hottest leads first.
• Connects with your phone so you can dial from your computer without having to enter the numbers every time.
• It also allows you to record the notes from the call right there and they get added to the completed task in Salesforce.

Incentivized

• Their customer service is just terrible. You get an assigned account manager but 9/10 times they wouldn't know what you wanted and/or how the product works or how to fix it. Vast majority of the time it was a canned response that made you question if they read the message, or if they read it and did not understand a word.
• The software was relatively buggy and lacked features that were promised upon signup. They seem to have some large corporate clients and if you aren't one none of your bug submissions, feature requests, or concerns will be addressed.
• Their growing quickly so they seem to be very understaffed which I believe caused many of the issues above.
• The data, while good, can quickly run out if you're looking for specific types of leads. If you're looking for something generic like Managers at companies between 10-5000 people, you can pull leads all day every day. However if you're looking for a specific industry, specific title, and specific location - don't count on having an endless supply of leads (or even really enough to use month after month).

Incentivized

• No call parking features for inbound calls, if on a call through the dialer, one cannot place that call on hold to take the second call.
• All notes are lost when another inbound call comes in, whether or not you accept that call.

Incentivized

I like that it is simple, functional and I can rely on it to help me get my work done everyday. My job became much harder without InsideSales.com. The new CRM I am using has confusing features and too much going on sometimes. There are so many fields and functions that I find unnecessary--what sucks is when I look at my screen at all these empty fields, it makes me feel incomplete. With InsideSales.com, I knew what to put in every box and why it would be important. I could put it in once and whether it was my manager, case admin or data analyst or me, we all knew where to find it. With our new system, I find myself having to do more input and data entry for other people to benefit--no longer a "one shot, one kill" deal.

Incentivized

I received excellent support at any time I opened up a ticket. But I would add to it that the tool was very self-explanatory, so there wasn't much need for support. With Outreach, we have a closer relationship with our CSM because of the intricacy in things like SFDC task mapping.

Incentivized

They are providing good support. We can contact any time to raise our query.

Incentivized

I have also looked into and tried Hunter.io and Lusha, and to be honest, I shouldn't compare them with Apollo. I have found Apollo to be so easy to integrate and use with all of my prospecting that I haven't really even tried out the other two. I bet I could find some useful things by using Hunter.io or Lusha as well, but there is honestly no need since I can do everything I want and more with Apollo. I would just be wasting time trying to figure out another platform when I can be focused on growing my own business with Apollo.

Incentivized

I am actually not on the decision making side, but we used PowerDialer because of the easy to use integration with our CRM with Salesforce. Having these two tools in tandem was a great platform for us to do prospecting.

Incentivized

• Generated a lot of expectations that were not real when we needed them
• The ROI was positive but we decided to stop using the tool
• We loved how easy to use it was and how easy it was to interact with the Support team
• There is room for improvement in the video tutorials - they were from old versions of the software that would not be useful for the version at hand

Incentivized

• Improved Connect Rates - Knowing when our team has the highest chance of success has helped us optimize our call blocks, leading to an improved connect rate.
• Dials - With dialer lists and click to call functionality, we are able to make more dials to the right people.
• Rep achievement - Though harder to quantify, the gamification has focused the team around the right KPIs.

Incentivized