Overview
To run a successful account-based sales motion (ABSM), your sales reps need to effectively target a potentially small set of accounts and regional territories. This often means undertaking the time-consuming process of manually identifying and targeting prospects with the right messaging.
Apollo enables your team to automate your ABSM with plays. Set up plays that focus on surfacing contacts for your highest priority accounts. Then, either automatically move those contacts into your sequences, or add tasks to account queues so account owners can manually decide how to engage them with them.
The following sections describe how to create a play in Apollo for your ABSM strategy and manage contacts that are added to account queues.
Example: Create a Play to Target Priority Accounts
The following walkthrough explores how your team can set up a play to surface contacts at a high-priority account, but plays in Apollo offer a variety of automations beyond this specific use case. To explore more automations, refer to Plays Overview and Create a Play.
To apply this example effectively, you should feed the contacts that are surfaced into a sequence. If you've never created a sequence, or just haven't created the right sequence for the accounts you will be targeting, refer to Sequences Overview to get started.
To create an account-based play:
- Launch Apollo and click Plays.
- Click New Play.
- Click Create from scratch.
- For When, choose triggers for the play. For this example, click Based on a date or schedule, then set the frequency to run every 1 week. Check out Create a Play to learn more about the trigger options.
- For If, click the Companies tab, then click Add filters.
- Click the Company filter and add the accounts you want to target with your play. Then, click Save filters.
- For Then, click Add contacts to sequence.
- Choose a sequence from the Sequence drop-down. Contacts that are surfaced by this play will be added to the sequence you select.
Then, select Account owner to send emails. Select Specific user to send emails if an account doesn't have an owner, then add yourself as the backup option.
- Click Filters to further identify the contacts to target within your chosen accounts.
- Add people search filters to narrow the potential contacts at your high-priority accounts. Click the Job Titles filter and add the job titles you want to target. Then, click Save filters.
- For the target settings, click the Max per account for this action checkbox and enter the maximum number of contacts you want processed per each play action. Enter
30.
- For Settings, click the Max people per account checkbox and enter the maximum number of contacts you want processed for each account in this play. Enter
10.
- Click Manual approval. For each contact surfaced by this play, this option adds a task for account owners to manually determine whether to add the contact to the chosen sequence. Refer to the Manually Approve or Reject Contacts section to learn more.
- Name your play and click Save changes.
Your play is now active. It will run as the trigger conditions you set are activated.
Manually Approve or Reject Contacts
If you followed this example play and set account owners to manually approve contacts, Apollo will assign tasks to the account owners on your team to manually determine whether the contact should be added to the chosen sequence. Contacts that are added to sequences will be displayed on account engagement plans.
If you added contacts surfaced by your play directly to sequences, skip to the end of this section. Whether contacts are added manually or automatically via the example play, they all move to the engagement plan for an account.
If you are an account owner that wants to take manual action on the tasks:
- Launch Apollo and click Tasks.
- Go to the Add People on Account tab, then click the Add People task for the account you want to review. A separate task is listed for each account that you targeted with your play.
- The Pending contacts tab shows the contacts that have been surfaced for review by the account owner. Click Accept to move a contact to the Queued contacts stage and add them to the chosen sequence.
If you click Reject, the contact is moved to the Rejected contacts stage, where you can still accept them in the future.
- After you take action on all of the pending contacts, click Complete Task.
Accepted contacts will be added to your chosen sequence's first step.
Whether you add them manually or automatically, contacts that you add to a sequence are also added to the engagement plan for the associated account. To view these contacts, go to an account profile page, then click Employees > Engagement plan.
