Learn Apollo.io Best Practices from Power User Gabi Sayah

Meet Gabi Sayah. World traveler, LinkedIn thought leader, and high-performing SDR at Stoke Talent.

Gabi also happens to be one of Apollo.io’s incredible Power Users (this means he’s one of the users who’s in the Apollo platform the most!).

In a recent interview, the Apollo Team sat down with Gabi to uncover exclusive user insights and learn from one of the best.

In this blog feature, we’ll reveal Gabi’s best practices and share his advice for how you can use Apollo to take your sales to the next level!

First, a little bit of background

Stoke Talent offers a freelancer management system. With Stoke, companies can build their own freelance talent pool without worrying about administrative, financial, or legal headaches. It’s Gabi’s job to find companies that are working with and/or searching for freelancers, identify their needs, and bring them into the sales funnel.

And for this, Apollo is the company’s sales-wide outbound prospecting tool.

“The [Stoke Talent] SDR team all uses Apollo”, Gabi says, “We use it to reach our ICP and find companies that are working with freelancers”.

Ever since Gabi started with Stoke a year ago, Apollo has been his end-to-end sales engine, helping him find B2B sales leads, create a system of effective outreach, and reach out to prospective clients at scale.

“Sequences, the data, the calls, everything”, says Gabi. “I really couldn’t imagine what it would be like without it.”

Apollo helps work get done!

Next, we just had to ask Gabi, “How do Apollo’s tools and features help you get work done? What are the biggest benefits you get with Apollo?”

He had some insightful answers for us:

Organization

First and foremost, he said that Apollo helps him stay organized with its dynamic dashboards, task management features, and cross-team functionality.

He emphasized how seamless it is to use the platform across his workflow.

“I’ve seen some other companies’ dashboards. Their user interface might be really nice,” Gabi says, “but I feel like their user experience isn’t as great as Apollo’s. Apollo feels like it’s really meant for me, as an SDR.”

The Chrome Extension in LinkedIn

With instant access to funding data, hiring data, buyer notes, and recent CRM activity, the Apollo Chrome Extension in LinkedIn is Gabi’s bread and butter.

“The Extension part is really a game changer for me…I don’t know what I would do without it,” he told us.

He uses the Chrome Extension to find relevant contacts on LinkedIn and add them into his Apollo Sequences with one click. From there, it’s a breeze to manage LinkedIn prospects in Apollo and make outreach personalized for them.

(Want to prospect as efficiently as Gabi? Download the Apollo Chrome Extension here for free!)

Apollo-HubSpot Integration

The Stoke Talent team uses HubSpot as their CRM and Gabi had a lot of great things to say about how well Apollo integrates with their customer database.

“A positive upside is [Apollo’s] integration with HubSpot,” Gabi says. “It works really well. Everything goes back and forth between the two quickly.”

For maximum sales productivity it’s important to prioritize applications that play nicely with your CRM and the rest of your tech stack. Check out the Knowledge Base to learn more about all of Apollo’s dynamic integrations.

Real-time Data and Analytics

Gabi has a unique strategy of leveraging Apollo’s real-time email insights.

He uses his Apollo Cockpit to see who opened his sales email within the last hour and then cold calls those prospects right then and there.

“When people have just read my email, they might know what I’m talking about, might remember who I am. It makes the call less cold in a way,” Gabi says.

Apollo Best Practices

Gabi is passionate about inspiring modern professionals to be dynamic and efficient sellers (just check out his LinkedIn if you don’t believe us…).

To close, we want to share some of his user recommendations to get you inspired about using Apollo to move your business forward.

Tip #1: Build out effective, industry-based Sequences and provide value

Sequences are custom outreach campaigns in Apollo designed to help you personally engage with your target audience at speed and scale.

An effective sales automation sequence is carefully calculated and well-designed; this involves planning and outlining your desired outcomes, validating your data points, and creating detailed personas.

Gabi continually referenced Sequences, an important element to Stoke Talent’s B2B outbound sales efforts. “Our team has two different sequences that [target] different industries; one for the tech industry and one for marketing agencies”, he told us, “And we can really see which one is performing better in Apollo.”

He described how Apollo Sequences can allow you to make actionable adjustments, and urges other users to leverage this feature.

Here’s a dashboard snapshot of Gabi’s two sequences and all the Sequence performance data he is able to see in his Apollo instance:

As a more technical recommendation, Gabi also recommends scheduling your Apollo Sequences over a longer period of time.

“Rather than sending out an email every two days,” Gabi says, “Send an email, I don’t know, once a week, that’s actually giving some value and that people could learn something from.”

He adds that this tactic also keeps email deliverability high and supports the maintenance of a healthy domain!

Tip #2: Find the perfect messaging with A/B testing

When you build out sales sequences, Apollo makes it easy to A/B test your sales strategy.

“I recommend using the A/B testing…testing different titles, different subject lines, changing up a little bit of the email,” Gabi says. “I think it’s a great tool and feature.”

A/B Testing allows you to test multiple messages in a sequence step. Apollo sends an even traffic distribution to each message variant in the test. This can help you to determine which message engages more prospects and helps you better reach the intended audience. You can leverage this data to improve the effectiveness of future outreach sequences.

Gabi shared an example of the insights he receive from two emails he tested within a sequence:

“One email I put in a few links to our website and another I didn’t, just to see if people might find that link helpful or if it [wouldn’t] help with the reply rate and open rate,” Gabi told us in his example, “Obviously that 5.5% is a lot better and that makes a big difference!”

Tip #3: Use granular filters like funding and job posting to find ideal buyers

Gabi’s last recommendation is simple, but fundamental to efficient Apollo prospecting: utilizing advanced filtering when prospecting in Apollo’s database.

As an example, he often uses Apollo filters to identify which companies have raised funding within the past few months and/or are looking to hire. This tells him which companies are growing and are potentially interested in bringing on some freelancers.

A perfect prospect for the Stoke Talent pipeline!

More than just funding data, advanced filters allow you to search according to technologies used, titles, headcount by department, job postings, location, year founded, and more!

With a simple filtered search, it eliminates the hours of preparation (and often additional funding) that often go into finding ideal buyers for your pipeline.

Parting Thoughts

From small business owners and SDRs to founders and enterprise execs, Apollo.io is proud to say that we have some of the most brilliant, forward-thinking, and advanced users in the world.

Exclusive insights from Power Users like Gabi are what fuel sales success across the Apollo community.

Try out his tips and tricks in Apollo today!

(And if you don’t have an account, worry not! You can sign up for Apollo for free.)