Apollo vs. Salesloft vs. Outreach: Which Sales Engagement Platform is Right for You?

Whether it’s over the phone, via email, social media, or in person, every touchpoint has the potential to move buyers closer and closer to becoming a customer.

This is why sales engagement platforms (SEPs) have emerged as the next big thing in sales enablement tools. Their ability to integrate and streamline engagement activities have made them essential to forward-thinking sales organizations.

But that also means choosing the right platform is a big choice. How do the top SEPs compare and how do you know which one is right for you?

We’re here to help.

In this blog, we will expand on the importance of sales engagement platforms and uncover the biggest differences between platforms like Salesloft, Outreach, and Apollo.io so you can start integrating the best tools in your sales cadences, today.

What are sales engagement platforms? And why are they important?

We all know that today’s buyers are time-constrained. They are doing their own research, moving at their own pace, and are being prospected by competitors at every turn.

These developments have changed the rules of engagement for sales teams. A multi-touch buying experience that’s personalized to the prospect’s industry and pain points is now critical for cutting through the noise, maintaining contact, and guiding them along the journey.

This is exactly where sales engagement software changes the game.

Sales engagement platforms are an engagement layer that sits on top of your existing CRM and multiplies its impact – syncing and surfacing data, automating manual tasks, and measuring and tracking the results that matter. Its goal is to make each step in the buyer’s journey customer-centric so your team can win more deals.

Integrating the right sales engagement platform gives you:

• More time for reps to do what they do best. From data integrations and task management to email scheduling and sequencing automation, the best sales engagement platforms offer a world of time-saving features. Without the headache of platform-switching and tedious administrative tasks, sales reps can spend their time on high-value activities that drive revenue.
• Improved productivity and transparency. A strong platform eliminates miscommunications and keeps sales teams working towards the same goal by automatically logging activities, tracking communication history, and referencing shared notes all in one place.
• An integrated platform. The best sales engagement platforms offer native integrations with all your must-have tools like CRMs, Google apps, dialers, email tools, and more. It saves you time, eliminates errors, and gives you info you can trust.
• Faster, smarter selling. Working with the right platform helps you automate actions and make responsive, data-driven decisions. This not only results in a faster sales cycle but leaves your prospects more satisfied and drives conversions.

With all of these benefits, 90% of sales leaders plan to invest in technologies that help their sellers engage effectively with their prospects…and you should, too.

To help you dive into the market, let’s take a look at how Apollo, the #1 ranked Sales Engagement platform on G2, compares to other top sales engagement platforms like Salesloft and Outreach.

Apollo vs. Salesloft

Salesloft is an engagement suite that, similar to Apollo, allows users to set up sales sequences with automated and manual steps, A/B test messaging, view dynamic analytics, and use pre-built reports and dashboards.

It’s undoubtedly one of the most popular sales engagement platforms on the market.

But, the fact of the matter is, Salesloft users are actually paying more for LESS functionality. Let’s take a closer look at how Apollo does what Salesloft does…plus a lot more!

Where Apollo fills the gaps

Combine engagement AND prospecting efforts with Apollo

One of the biggest gaps in the Salesloft platform is that it offers no feature for true prospecting (i.e. finding contact info that aligns with your ideal customer profiles). That’s a huge deal…

This means that Salesloft users have to find contacts using a separate platform or pull contact data from an outside tool like LinkedIn.

Apollo, on the other hand, allows you to prospect and engage in a single, customizable platform. From job change alerts and the LinkedIn Chrome Extension to limitless functionality and filtering in our verified database of over 250M across 60M companies, Apollo is a true all-in-one sales engine that allows you to find best-fit prospects and engage with them at speed and scale.

Automatically clean up outdated information in Apollo

Over 30% of sales and marketing professionals say their records have outdated attributes, and 42% of these professionals say that data inaccuracy is their biggest barrier to multichannel sales and marketing.

That’s why you need a sales engagement platform that is committed to keeping your customer data squeaky clean.

While Salesloft doesn’t offer any kind of data enrichment, Apollo allows you to update and enrich existing records in your CRM, as well as upload a CSV file of external records and enrich it with Apollo’s information.

Apollo has superior engagement Analytics and Reporting

If you want to up your sales engagement game, you need to know where you can improve. And, unfortunately, Salesloft gives its users little opportunity to assess and optimize sales performance.

Apollo offers stronger engagement Analytics and Reporting tools. In Apollo, you can create fully customizable reports and dashboards to track activities, individual team performance, message effectiveness, ROI, and more. This allows goal-oriented professionals to tie revenue directly to engagement activity in-app.

Apollo is a more powerful, easier-to-use platform at a lower cost

With all of these added functionalities, Apollo must be far and away the more expensive option…right?

No, not at all.

Apollo allows you to discover value with a free version, as well as free trials of paid plans. If you’re ready to upgrade to a paid plan, pricing starts as low as $49 per user a month with no onboarding, setup, or integration fees.

Salesloft’s pricing, on the other hand, is based on a mix and match of product packages, with high starting prices and additional start-up fees.

Apollo offers affordable plans and price points for one-person startups to Fortune 500 companies and everyone in between. You can learn more about Apollo’s pricing here.

What users have to say about Apollo vs. Salesloft

“Instead of choosing a scraping tool and an email verifier and a task manager and a sequencer and a database tool, we figured out it could all be found in Apollo and at a GREAT price point, which blows Outreach or Salesloft out of the water.” – Administrator in Media Production (G2 Review)

“I’ve used Salesloft at former companies…it was still a huge time suck for me to prospect in Salesforce and then import my contacts into those platforms. What I love about Apollo is that my entire top-of-funnel lives in one place, all while instantaneously pushing every data source and activity into Salesforce.” – Haylee Taylor, Senior Associate at ClozeLoop (G2 Review)

Apollo vs. Outreach

Outreach is another popular sales engagement tool that has similar offerings to Salesloft. Outreach users get engagement features like sequences and rule sets, an in-app dialer, a bi-directional CRM sync (only for Salesforce), and task management capabilities.

This is all great, but does it go above and beyond for its users?

Let’s see how it stacks up against Apollo…

Where Apollo fills the gaps

Prospect in Apollo’s largest, best-in-market contact database

Similar to Salesloft, Outreach has extremely limited prospecting features. Which makes it difficult to not only build productive workflows, but find accurate and up-to-date contact information on your prospective buyers.

With Apollo, however, you have access to a database of over 250M contacts across 60M companies. Within the database, you can filter across 200 attributes and 65 advanced filters to hone in on your ideal customer profile (ICP) and find the right buyers for your pipeline.

From here, customer engagement is easy. You can instantly add contacts to B2B lead lists, automated sales sequences, assign multi-channel tasks, and more. Joining together prospecting and engagement functionality, our database is one of the many reasons why Apollo is the ultimate all-in-one sales engine.

Access customer insights with Apollo’s superior Chrome Extension

Outreach has a Chrome Extension that supports users in engagement actions like basic email functionality and displaying account information in external browsers.

But where it matters most, it certainly falls a little short (Take it from a G2 reviewer in Information and Tech services, “There are more issues with the [Outreach] extension than with most extensions out there”.)

Unlike Apollo, the Outreach extension doesn’t support as much functionality in important sales tools such as LinkedIn and Google Calendar. Apollo’s extension allows you to instantly add individual or multiple contacts on LinkedIn directly into a sequence. You can also access important prospect insights prior to meetings with the Chrome Extension in Google Calendar, view contact information from within your Gmail account, see detailed company info from any webpage, and so much more.

Download the Apollo extension for free and check it out for yourself.

Spend fewer funds on an easier-to-user platform with Apollo

We’ve noticed that when it comes to ease of use, sales professionals love Apollo.

In fact, Apollo is ranked high than Outreach in all of the below categories on G2:

• Ease of use
• Ease of setup
• Ease of admin
• Quality of support
• Ease of doing business with

And, if you can believe it, Apollo is also the more affordable choice. As mentioned above, Apollo offers free plans with loads of sales tools, with affordable paid plans as well. Outreach has no free version, starts with higher base prices, and also requires that users pay for separate prospecting tools to find buyers.

And, as you are well aware, you can do both prospecting and engagement within Apollo for even less.

What users have to say about Apollo vs. Outreach

“Apollo combines both Zoominfo and Outreach.io into one seamless application. Having the ability to research, prospect, and sequence all in one place is amazing. The chrome extension and salesforce integrations are amazing as well. Lots of customization and analytics. I would highly recommend.”- Administrator in Computer Software (G2 Review)

“Unlike Outreach, Apollo really has better reporting and a better user-friendly interface. Making it so easy to go about your research and outbound campaigns. My team used to struggle with analytics before switching to Apollo. The contact stages are also one of my favorites since you can add or remove whichever dropdown item you did not want your SDR to see.” – Nelson Guzman, Post-Purchase Marketing Specialist at flexEngage (G2 Review)

In Closing

The various interactions that sellers have with prospects in all stages of the sales cycle are crucial for achieving sales success. The tool you chose to support you along the way will make all the difference on whether or not you’re able to convert prospects at speed and scale, quarter after quarter.

As you consider all the sales engagement platforms on the market, give Apollo a try for free and see how our best-in-market functions and features can empower your team and drive your sales organization to success.