Overview
Many Apollo customers leverage the platform to:
- Seek out companies who match the characteristics of their best customers.
- Identify the personas from those companies that are most likely to engage with their outbound requests.
- Create lists of those contacts for use in future engagement campaigns or to export and use in other tools.
This use case explores the steps you can take if you want to use Apollo to engage with contacts at companies who match the characteristics of your most successful customers.
Refer to the sections below for a sample workflow that walks through how to identify the brands that match your Ideal Customer Profile, find contacts at those brands, save those contacts to lists for future engagement campaigns, and export a list for use in your CRM or other third-party tools.
Sample Workflow
Connect/Integrate Your CRM With Apollo
To begin, you should integrate a CRM with the Apollo platform to avoid the need to manually export any Contacts that you prospect from the Apollo database. If your company does not leverage a CRM or if you have already integrated it with Apollo, feel free to skip to the next section.
Please note, Salesforce offers the largest degree of enrichment functionality in Apollo, but Apollo also supports CRM integrations with HubSpot.
Use the links below for the CRM that you want to integrate and configure with Apollo.
Salesforce
Integration
Credentials
- Salesforce Credentials Overview
- Connect "Team Sync" Authentication Credentials To Your Salesforce Integration
HubSpot
Integration
Determine Your Ideal Customers
A successful sales strategy starts with identifying the types of companies you want to do business with. Do you sell best to Enterprise companies or Startups? Are those companies in a specific vertical?
Identify your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). An ICP is a fictitious company that combines the key characteristics that best portray your ideal customer. By analyzing firmographics such as company size, industry, location, annual revenue, and budget you can more easily define the types of companies that you serve best. This in turn helps you to better understand your customer’s biggest pain points, tailor your products or services to their needs, and focus your sales efforts on bringing in the most qualified customers so that you can reduce churn and increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
Once you have determined what your ideal customer looks like, you can use your ICP to identify real companies that match those characteristics.
If you haven't already determined what your Ideal Customer Profile is, follow the steps outlined in the "Identify Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)" article.
Search for Companies in Apollo that Match Your ICP
Analyze your data to determine what your ideal companies looks like. Please refer to the table below for an example of one of Apollo's ideal companies:
| Best Companies | Key Firmographics | CSAT Score | ROI | CLV Ratio | Customer Health | # of Referrals |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Company Type #1 |
|
95% | 30% | 3:1 | Healthy | >5 |
Take as many data points as you can and apply them as filters in a Search.
Launch Apollo and click Search.
Click the "Companies" tab.
Apply filters to your Search to match the data points from your ICP.
To learn more about the available Search filters in Apollo, refer to the ""Search Filters Overview"" article.
Now that you've found the companies that match your filters, you can create a Saved Search to return to them later in this Use Case.
For more information about how to save contacts or companies as a Saved Search, refer to the "Create a Saved Search" article.
Build Personas in Apollo
Personas differ from Ideal Customer Profiles. To identify your ICP, you need to use measurable data (like company size and industry for B2B or age and gender for B2C) to gather information about the type of business or individual that is best suited to your company offerings. To identify your Personas, you need to use qualitative data (such as pain points, goals, and personality type) to gather information about the kinds of individuals that work for the companies in your Ideal Customer Profile.
An ICP helps you to clarify who you sell to, but Personas help you to clarify how you sell to them. Both play an important role in your sales and marketing strategies, but you cannot define Personas without first defining your ICP.
Within the context of Apollo, Personas allow you to create sets of titles, seniorities, and departments that define different groups of people that you target within your ICP. Said more simply, they allow you to create filters to find the people at your ideal companies who are most likely to engage with your outreach attempts.
Analyze your data to identify the Personas that fit the type of people who you have successfully sold to in the past. Refer to the table below for an example of the characteristics of one of Apollo's Personas:
| Name | Title | Seniority | Department |
|---|---|---|---|
| Joyce Wrigley | VP of Marketing | C Suite | Marketing |
We decided to give the Persona that we used in this Use Case a name to help differentiate it from any others we create in the future. The name Joyce Wrigley is an homage to one of the greatest 1990s TV shows ever made, "The Adventures of Pete & Pete." If your company has already developed an internal list of Personas, it may be helpful to use those names for consistency when you build them in Apollo.
With this data, you can create a Persona in Apollo to represent the individuals that are most similar to your ideal contacts.
For more information about how to create a Persona in Apollo, refer to the "Create a Persona" article.
Find Contacts Using Your Persona
You have identified your ICP and created a Saved Search. You have built your Persona. Now, it's time to use Apollo to find the people within your target companies who best match the characteristics of your ideal customer.
Launch Apollo and click Search.
Load the Saved Search that you previously created for the companies that match your ICP.
Once you've loaded the Saved Search, select all of the companies that you'd like to search within and then click Find People.
Apollo returns results for all of the people who work at the companies that you selected.
Next, you need to load a Search filter for the Persona you built earlier.
You've now located the contacts who match your ICP and share the characteristics of your Persona.
Save Contacts to a List
To preserve the contacts that match the criteria from your Persona and ICP you can save them to a list.
From the Apollo Search screen, verify that you still have the Saved Search and Persona filters in place. Then, click the batch selection tool.
Enter the number of contacts that you want to add to your list and then click Apply.
Please note, if you have an Apollo Custom plan, you can select all the contacts in the search result at once. For all other plans, you can select a maximum of 25 contacts at a time.
Click the Lists drop-down and then click Add to Lists.
Give your list a name and click Confirm.
Please note, if you do not previously save any of the selected Contacts before you add them to a List, your modal will look a little different. Apollo will save the Contacts to your database at the same time as when it creates the List.
To view your new list, click Lists from the Search screen.
Your list is now available whenever you need to use it.
For more detailed instructions about how to create a list of contacts from a Search result, check out the Create and Edit a Contact or Company List" article.
Export Your List to CSV
Now that you've got a list of contacts that match your ICP and Persona, you can export them to a CSV and use them in other tools.
From the Apollo Search screen, click Lists.
Click the List that you created earlier.
Click the batch selection tool.
Enter the number of contacts that you want to select and then click Apply.
Please note, if you have an Apollo Custom plan, you can select all the contacts in the search result at once. For all other plans, you can select a maximum of 25 contacts at a time.
Click Export.
Configure your Export settings and then click Start Export
When Apollo finishes exporting your Contacts, click Download.
You are now ready to use the CSV file of contacts that match your ICP and Persona.
For more details about how to export a list of contacts to a CSV file, check out the "Export Contacts from Apollo to a CSV" article.