InsideSales.com / XANT PowerDialer for Salesforce (discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
Apollo.io
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.
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.
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.).
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
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.
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 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.
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.
