How to Prospect in Apollo

Overview

Your goal as a prospector is to intimately understand every account—and every key player at those accounts—in your book of business.

Whether you're a seller with accounts pre-assigned to you in your CRM, you’ve been given a geographic territory to target, or you’re a founder just starting out, it’s your job to:

Know exactly who each key player is.
Find their contact information.
Develop a thoughtful plan to get to know them.

Check out the following sections to use Apollo to find and prepare to connect with your prospects in an intentional, meaningful, and authentic way.

Prospecting by the Book!

Want to uncover industry-leading prospecting tips, tricks, and best practices? Hop into our shiny new book, Outbound Sales, to learn:

If contact-based or account-based prospecting is right for you.
How to refine your targeting with precise Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs).
The signals that let you know when a lead is primed to buy.
How to uncover untapped, best-fit leads.
How to prioritize your leads by their value.

How to Prospect in Apollo: A Checklist

With a powerful, highly-accurate database of over 210 million contacts, more than 30 million accounts, and over 2 million data contributors, use Apollo to narrow your search, find your ideal customers, and gain key insights that help you build strong relationships that last. Follow this 6-step prospecting checklist to start generating pipeline in Apollo, like a true sales wizard.

Step 1: Identify Your ICP and Create Your Personas

Begin by building your ICPs and personas to create a targeting framework for your sales organization. The best, most comprehensive targeting frameworks include multiple personas that you can target within an account.

Follow these simple steps to lay the foundations for effective prospecting in Apollo:

Fill out the targeting framework worksheet.
Log in to Apollo and navigate to Search.
Click the drop-down arrow beside the Persona filter and create the personas from your worksheet. Learn more about personas.
Apply pivot filters in combination with your personas to help pinpoint your best prospects.

Need a Helping Hand?

Click More filters to view all the search filters from your targeting framework, like buying intent, keywords, technologies, job postings, fundings, and more. Then, click ▼ beside the filters you want to apply to your search and configure the settings for each one. Apollo updates your search results as you apply each filter.

If you want to narrow your search to find the specific prospects actively researching products and services like yours, make sure you click the Edit icon in the buying intent filter to select your most relevant intent topics. Learn more about buying intent.

To access a prospect's contact information, click the quick action icons for email or phone beside a prospect in your search results, or check multiple contacts and click + Save. Learn more about how to save contacts in Apollo.
You can also take several other actions on your contacts from the search page, like:

Save them to a list.

Send them an email or enroll them in a sequence.

Enrich them.

Sync them to your CRM.

Export them to a CSV file.

Step 2: Save Your Searches and Build Lists

Now that you've used filters to build highly targeted searches in Apollo, it's time to save and set up alerts for them. This means that when new prospects meet your search criteria, Apollo notifies you by email.

Once you've applied filters to your search, follow these steps to streamline how you find and group qualified prospects in Apollo:

Click Save search at the bottom of the search filters sidebar.
Select a frequency from the Search Subscription Alerts drop-down to turn on alerts.
To apply a saved search when prospecting, launch Apollo and click Search > Saved searches. Click the name of the saved search. Apollo then applies it to your search results. To view any new prospects, click the Net New tab. Learn more about how to save, share, and set alerts for your searches.
Create and add contacts to lists for each outbound sequence you run to better organize and segment your prospects into campaigns tailored to each of your persona's biggest goals and pain points. Learn more about how to build lists in Apollo.
Create table layouts for your ICP and personas to customize the data you view when prospecting in Apollo. You can create private and public custom layouts for your specific use cases and apply them to new and saved searches. Learn more about custom layouts.

Step 3: Identify Your Target Addressable Market

Now that you've saved your contacts and built lists, use the Data Health Center to gain a holistic view of your remaining available target addressable market (TAM) across each of your personas.

Follow these steps to set up the Data Health Center:

Connect your CRM to import your data. This allows you to check the health of your current data and compare it to the data in Apollo to identify key market gaps.
Map the contact and account stages and fields between Apollo and your CRM. Learn more.
Select which buyer personas you want to identify TAM for. Learn more.
Create account segments to define and target your ICP profiles in Apollo with filters like company location, number of employees, stage, revenue, buying intent, job postings, and more. Learn more.
And voila! View your total available contacts in the Data Health Center and filter them by your persona profiles and account segments.

Step 4: Research Your Contacts and Accounts

Researching your prospects is a key component of every successful prospecting motion. The more you understand and can relate to your prospects, the more likely you are to build meaningful relationships with them.

Now that you've identified your TAM, you need to determine which prospects are ready for your outreach and tailor your messaging to meet them where they're at.

Follow these steps to access detailed insights into your contacts and accounts:

Visit a contact's profile page to view contact-specific research data and details, including:

Contact information: Access a contact's email, phone number, and other basic information, like contact stage, owner, engagement, and local time.
Company information: Learn more about a contact's employer, including annual revenue, location, employees, new prospects and existing contacts, industry, stage, and owner.
Work history: View a contact's past work experience, their job titles, and the companies they've worked for to date.
Insights: Read about the contact's current employer; their latest news, the technologies they use, any recent funding rounds, job postings, and employee trends. If you've set up website visitor tracking, you can also access this data from the insights widget.
Activity: View a log of all interactions between the contact and your team.
Signals: See if the contact matches any signals you've created in Apollo.
Tasks: View, complete, or skip any upcoming tasks and visualize your completed tasks for that contact.

Visit an account's profile page to view account-specific research data and details, including:

Company overview: Learn more about the organization and view basic firmographics.
Recommended new prospects: Visualize high-value prospects within the account that fit the criteria of your target personas.
Account details: Access an account's contact information and view other basic details like owner, stage, location, and associated parent account.
Insights: Stay up-to-date on the account's latest news, the technologies they use, any recent funding rounds, job postings, and employee trends. You can also access website visitor insights if you've set up tracking.
Activity: View a log of all interactions between the account and your team.
Signals: See if the account matches any signals you've created in Apollo.
Tasks: View, complete, or skip any upcoming tasks and visualize your completed tasks for any contacts in that account.

Click the tabs at the top of the profile page to access additional insights and recommendations and to view any sequences, deals, or conversations associated with the contact or account.

Step 5: Build A Lead Scoring Model

Codifying your prospects into tiers to define what makes a prospect great (tier 1), good (tier 2), and not so good (tier 3), is crucial to building a healthy pipeline that leads to tangible revenue.

Now that you've researched your prospects, it's time to leverage Apollo scores to help you determine which prospects are most likely to close.

There are 2 types of scoring models in Apollo; AI-powered auto-scores and manual scores. With AI-powered scores, Apollo leverages your historical data and prospecting wins to identify which of your contacts best fit the criteria of your ICP.

To access AI-powered auto-scores in Apollo, you need to use Apollo actively in your prospecting and engagement workflows. You also need to keep your contact and account stages up-to-date. There are several ways to do this:

Manually update contact and account stages one at a time, or in bulk. Learn more.
Auto-update contact and account stages with plays.
Connect your CRM and sync your contact and account stages to Apollo.

If you've connected Salesforce to Apollo, you can map the Status picklist field to your Apollo stages.

If you've connected HubSpot to Apollo, you can map the Lifecycle stage or Lead status field to your Apollo stages.

Alternatively, you can build your own scoring models manually:

Follow the steps in the Create a Score article to build your scoring modal from scratch for contacts and accounts.
When you define your scoring criteria, make sure you apply:

The persona filters you built earlier.

The attributes from your targeting framework.

The behavioral attributes that help indicate a contact or account's readiness to buy, like contact engagement and buying intent.

Don't forget to assign points for each attribute you select to define its importance. Learn more.
For a holistic view of how your saved contacts rank according to your score criteria, hit "render distribution" before you save your scoring model.
When you've saved your scoring models, you can:

View a contact or account's score when prospecting in Apollo search. Learn more.
Apply the scores filter to your search to hone in on your highest-ranking prospects.

Step 6: Use the Apollo Chrome Extension

Now that you've laid the foundations for effective prospecting in Apollo, it's time to leverage the Apollo Chrome extension to unlock Apollo functionality within your tool stack and across the internet.

First, download the Apollo Chrome Extension.

Then, use the Apollo Chrome extension with:

LinkedIn to prospect faster, leverage critical contact and account data and insights, automate engagement tasks, and streamline how you connect and build relationships directly within LinkedIn.
Any website or company page across the internet to search for and access contact data and uncover key information without switching tabs.
Google Calendar to access Apollo data from your calendar and log meeting notes to streamline your call prep.
Gmail to enroll contacts in automated follow-up sequences, apply templates to your emails, configure open and click tracking, and receive follow-up reminders directly from your inbox.
Your CRM to view your contacts or accounts' full Apollo profile, enroll contacts into Apollo sequences, create and log new tasks, and assign and complete calls—all directly in Salesforce or HubSpot.

Next Steps: Follow Email Deliverability Best Practices

You're Not Done Yet!

Now that you've learned how to prospect effectively in Apollo, hop into checklist #2 to track and improve your email deliverability score and ensure your messages land successfully in the inboxes of your most qualified prospects.