Overview
New to Apollo? Start with a few essential steps to get your account ready, find the right prospects, and begin engaging with them.
This guide walks you through what to do first, from completing your personalized onboarding and connecting the tools you use, to finding prospects and starting outreach. You can explore more advanced features once you've got the basics in place.
Check out the following steps to get started with Apollo.
Complete Your Onboarding
When you first log in to Apollo, Apollo guides you through personalized onboarding. Apollo uses your role and goals to recommend the most relevant setup tasks and features to help you get started.
Work through the checklist to configure the essentials for your account. Your recommended tasks may vary depending on how you plan to use Apollo.
Check out Home Overview to learn more about home and your onboarding tasks.
Connect the Tools You Use
Next, connect the tools you already use so Apollo can keep your workflows and data in sync.
If you plan to send emails from Apollo, start by connecting your mailbox. If you're new to outbound email, it's a good idea to brush up on email deliverability best practices to help protect your domain and set up your mailbox for successful outreach.
If your team uses a CRM, review the setup guidance for HubSpot or Salesforce.
If you don't use a CRM, you can import your existing contact and account data instead. Admin on Apollo can also add users and configure mailbox guardrails for the team as needed.
Find Your First Prospects
Once your account is set up, start finding the people and companies you want to reach.
Before you search, define your ideal customer profile. Understanding your customer base can help you build on success. Next, create buyer personas so you can focus on the prospects most likely to be a good fit.
Then use search filters to prospect from Apollo's database of hundreds of millions of people and companies. Save your searches, share them with teammates, and create alerts to get notified when new prospects match your criteria.
Start Engaging
When you're ready to reach out, choose the channels that fit your sales motion and start engaging your prospects.
Sequences are structured outreach campaigns that help you engage prospects across multiple touchpoints, such as emails, calls, and other tasks. Use sequences to organize and scale your outreach.
Before sending emails as part of a campaign, review email deliverability best practices to help protect your domain and maintain healthy sending.
If calling is part of your workflow, check out cold calling best practices to improve your outreach and maintain a positive caller reputation.
Keep Building
Once you've got the basics in place, explore more of Apollo to automate repetitive work, keep your data up to date, and streamline how your team works.
Use workflows to automate actions in Apollo or supported integrations based on triggers and conditions. Schedule automatic enrichment to keep your contact and company data fresh, and use meetings to make it easier for prospects to book time with you.
Explore Apollo AI to help with tasks like researching prospects, personalizing outreach, and working more efficiently. You can also connect Apollo through MCP to use Apollo data and actions from supported AI tools.
When you want to learn more, explore Apollo Academy, live webinars, and the Knowledge Base for deeper guidance on specific features and workflows.