What Is Apollo.io? A Brief Guide to Features, Pricing, and More

“Is Apollo.io the sales engagement platform that can take your team to the next level?”

If you've found your way to this article, you're likely in the market for a sales engagement solution that can enhance your sales team's productivity and drive better results.

Let’s delve into all things Apollo.io, from its features to pricing details, advantages, disadvantages, and even explore alternative options. By the end of this article, you'll be better equipped to determine if Apollo is the ideal fit for your sales team's needs.

Let's dive in!

What Is Apollo.io?

Apollo.io is a cloud-based sales automation tool. It serves as a tool for lead generation, contact database management, and email outreach. Founded in 2015, Apollo.io is a lead intelligence and sales engagement platform trusted by nearly 9,000 customers including some of the largest global enterprises.

Features of Apollo.io

• Sequences: Create automated, multi-step touchpoints for your sales outreach, including emails, calls, LinkedIn tasks, and more.
• Dialer: Make, receive, and record calls, join active calls, and log calls to your CRM, straight from Apollo.
• Task Manager: Stay on top of all of your tasks, including calls, emails, LinkedIn connections, and other important action items.
• Apollo AI - AI writing assistant: Craft hyper-personalized emails based on relevant buyer signals for every prospect.
• Bidirectional CRM integrations: Apollo.io comes with bidirectional sync for 2 major CRMs: HubSpot and Salesforce. This enables you to keep your data synchronized within both platforms (Apollo and CRM).
• Plays - 21+ template library: Choose from a library of Plays to deploy game-changing automation in seconds.
• Get alerts on lead signals: Create alerts sent to your Slack, email, or Apollo’s control center to manually take action on new leads.
• Engage at the right time: Create automation to engage leads and customers at the perfect moment and never miss an opportunity again.

Pricing

Apollo.io has four pricing plans. 

Pros and Cons of Apollo.io

Now that we have understood Apollo as a platform, let's weigh the pros and cons of it as well. This would give you a better understanding of whether or not it would cater to your needs.

Pros of Apollo.io:

• No Email Send Limit: Apollo.io doesn't restrict your email sends, giving you the flexibility to reach out to as many prospects as you need.
• Pricing: Although Apollo has limited features available for the lower pricing plans, Apollo.io is said to be offering competitive pricing plans, catering to a larger audience.
• Good Database of Emails: Apollo.io provides access to a substantial database of over 270 million records of emails, enhancing your prospecting capabilities.

Cons of Apollo.io:

• Security: Apollo.io's approach to data privacy has been a source of concern for many businesses. Their terms state that they will have access to all the contact, prospect, or customer databases you upload, using this data to enhance their datasets and then selling it to other customers in a cyclical data-selling model. While this system can offer discounts to customers, it raises privacy concerns, particularly for mid-sized and enterprise companies. This might be one of the biggest red flags while considering Apollo.io.
• Zoho Integration: Apollo.io lacks a native integration with Zoho. Thus Users have to connect their Zoho CRM to Apollo using Zapier. This causes the users to face challenges when integrating Apollo.io with Zoho, affecting workflow efficiency.
• Limited Customer Support: Reports of less-than-ideal experiences with Apollo’s customer support have been raised by a huge number of Apollo users. Timely customer support is a critical component of any software service, as it ensures that users receive timely assistance and guidance. 
• Underdeveloped Onboarding: One critical drawback of Apollo.io is the absence of structured onboarding processes. This deficiency can significantly hinder users' ability to swiftly adapt to the platform, potentially leading to a steeper learning curve and underutilization of its features.
• Playbooks: Users are limited to pre-existing automation templates and may not create custom triggers, reducing customization options. This is a big disadvantage for users adapting to the platform, as they have been in the market, looking for a sales engagement platform, for the very same reason - To be able to customize and automate their sales outreach. The absence of behavior-triggered playbook automations, make it even more challenging for users to adapt their strategies based on customer interactions and responses.
• No Parallel Dialer: Apollo.io's standard dialer, while functional, lacks the advanced capabilities of a parallel dialer. This limitation can significantly impact the efficiency of sales teams, especially those heavily reliant on calling activities. The absence of parallel dialing features hinders the ability to engage with prospects at scale, potentially slowing down the outreach process and affecting productivity.
• Non-Intuitive Reports: Apollo.io's reporting system, while functional, may not fully meet some users' preferences for intuitiveness. This could lead to occasional challenges in extracting actionable insights from the data, resulting in minor delays in the decision-making process for sales teams. 

Apollo.io's G2 Reviews: 

A sales engagement platform is a significant investment for your organization, and a wrong decision can prove to be costly. 

So, checking reviews on G2 from users who have used the solution you’re evaluating will give you valuable insights about its pros and cons, helping you make a well-informed decision. 

That said, let’s see some of the reviews on G2 for Apollo.io.

Klenty - The Best Alternative to Apollo.io for Growing Sales Teams

Apollo.io is a well-known sales engagement platform, often chosen by sales teams for its extensive set of features. But it's important to think about other options that can provide more specialized solutions for expanding sales teams.

Let’s Explore one such alternative to Apollo, Klenty.

Klenty is a robust sales engagement platform designed to empower sales teams and streamline their outreach efforts.

Klenty: The Alternative Addressing Apollo.io's Drawbacks for Mature Sales Teams:

Equipped with an impressive array of capabilities, Klenty takes the stage as the best substitute for Apollo.io. Klenty offers strong solutions that are customized to meet the demands of mature sales teams. These solutions include Cadence Playbooks, Goals, deeper CRM interfaces, and variable cadences.

On the contrary, Apollo.io may be of interest to you as a startup looking for a reasonably priced Sales Engagement Platform (SEP). Klenty is committed to providing excellent customer service and a user-focused approach, making sure that the outreach efforts of your sales team are successful and optimized.

Klenty emerges as the alternative to Apollo.io that effectively addresses and resolves the primary drawbacks of Apollo.io. With a string focus on Goals, playbooks and deeper CRM integration and more flexible Cadences, Klenty proves to be a stronger alternative for mature sales teams seeking to maximize their outreach efforts and drive success. Whereas Apollo is good for startups looking for an affordable SEP looking to send out bulk emails.

Let's delve into why Klenty might be a more appealing choice for your growing sales team.

1. Seamless CRM Integration:

Klenty boasts a seamless integration with the top five CRMs - Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Zoho. This ensures automated workflows and seamless data synchronization across the board, allowing your sales team to focus on building valuable relationships. Apollo users have often reported concerns regarding its integration with Zoho being unsatisfactory. On the other hand, Klenty has been the best choice for Zoho CRM users. 

2. Email Deliverability:

Klenty offers a robust solution for email deliverability that eliminates the random intervals commonly associated with some platforms. Unlike Apollo.io, which might support a "spam and pray" approach, Klenty excels in ensuring your emails reach their intended recipients effectively.

Klenty's approach to email deliverability includes:

• Email Validation: Klenty automatically validates email addresses for both new and existing prospects, significantly reducing bounce rates.
• Email Sending Control: Klenty allows you to limit the number of emails you send per day and stagger email sending in an irregular manner, ensuring a more natural and reliable email outreach.
• Deliverability Insights: Klenty provides valuable insights, such as the percentage of emails that land in the Primary Tab across different email service providers. It scores your emails based on spam factors and offers suggestions for improving deliverability. This comprehensive approach to email deliverability sets Klenty apart as a more effective option for sales teams.

3. Multi Mode Dialler:

Unlike Apollo.io, Klenty equips sales teams with a robust sales dialer. This Multi mode dialer helps you say goodbye to the tedious task of manual dialing. The dialer automatically calls 5 prospects at once, saving time and allowing you to make 5x more calls.

Country code Integration, Session Reporting, Local dialing, and Pause and resume are few additional features of the dialer that significantly cut down on dial time, allowing you to spend more time engaging with prospects and less time on the dialing process, making Klenty the best solution for calling heavy sales teams.

4. Goal-Driven Outreach:

Klenty supports sales teams to have a Goal-driven outreach. With Klenty, sales leaders can set up milestones for sales reps to hit on a weekly and monthly basis. This means reps stay accountable to targets and adapt their approach to hit goals.

For every rep in their team, managers can track KPIs like:

• Activity targets 
• Prospect coverage targets
• Conversion targets

They also get full visibility into rep efforts across emails, calls, LinkedIn tasks, text, and WhatsApp.

5. Intuitive Reports:

Klenty sets a high standard with its user-friendly reporting system, significantly improving the ease of extracting actionable insights from your data. Unlike Apollo.io, which may leave users grappling with a less intuitive reporting system, Klenty ensures that your sales team can effortlessly access and understand critical data.

With Klenty's goals and reports, you can gain a clearer understanding of your sales processes, track performance, and make informed decisions to drive success with a comprehensive dashboard with various types of reports such as - Cadence reports, list reports, email reports, call reports and activity reports. 

6. Free Onboarding:

Klenty’s extensive onboarding process is free of cost to all of its customers. The support is customized depending on your sales team’s size and goals. What’s more, the support team will have as many onboarding calls as you need till every member of your team becomes comfortable using the platform.

7. Free 24x5 Customer Support:

Klenty’s customer support is impressively responsive—a response time of only 2.5 minutes—for the same price you pay and remains free of cost for the entirety of your customer lifespan.

8. Free Deliverability Consultancy:

Despite Klenty’s features that ensure good email deliverability, If sales teams who use Klenty encounter any email deliverability issues (like emails going to spam or having a high bounce rate), the customer support team will analyze their deliverability and provide actionable suggestions to ensure their emails land on prospect’s primary inbox. This, too, is free of cost. 

9. Free Quarterly Reviews:

Klenty takes a proactive approach in improving its customers’ performances. Every quarter, the customer support team analyzes how customers use the platform and prepares a deck that includes customized insights like overall performance review, recommendations, and product roadmap.

10. Intent-Driven Outreach:

Klenty lets you segment prospects and run the right next steps for them based on their intent. Through this customized outreach and follow-up efforts based on the prospect’s buying journey, you can execute the right activities at the right time for every prospect.

High Intent Detector allows you to assign points and isolate those prospects who are closer to buying than others.

11. Truly Multichannel:

Unlike Apollo, Klenty is truly Multichannel. Apollo allows you to engage via emails, calls and LinkedIn. In addition to emails, calls and LinkedIn, Klenty lets you execute SMS and WhatsApp follow-ups.

Klenty empowers sales reps to make complete use of 5 different channels: 

• Phone: Place calls and voicemails in one click without the distraction of dialing.
• Email: Personalize email text and videos with prospect data at scale.
• LinkedIn: Complete tasks like LinkedIn InMails and connect requests in a click with personalization.
• SMS: Use text messaging to complement your cold calls and boost your chances of striking a conversation.
• WhatsApp: Schedule and send personalized WhatsApp messages in one click. 

Through a full-fledged and automated multichannel outreach, reps can reach prospects wherever they are, and book more meetings—all at scale.

Plus, Klenty’s multi-channel inbox collates all prospect communication across all channels in one place, so you can manage prospect interactions without the pain of switching tabs.

12. Helps Sales Teams Consolidate Their Tech Stack:

Apart from its sales engagement platform, Klenty also offers platforms to source accurate contact data of ideal buyers (Prospect IQ), schedule meetings automatically with prospects (Schedule IQ), and analyze your calls using AI (Call IQ). With Klenty, you can effortlessly consolidate your tech stack to work with a unified data foundation for all the stages of the sales cycle.

With Klenty, build a high-performance sales team and experience premium customer service, and never compromise on your privacy. 

Want to see in action why Klenty is the best Apollo.io alternative? Schedule a demo today!