Prospecting with Apollo

Apollo is known as one of the best Sales enablement solutions available on the market today. It provides qualitative data and productivity features that will support your team in prospecting and generating new revenues.

Within this tutorial, we will explain how to set up Apollo properly to get results in a matter of days.

Define your ICP - Ideal Customer Profile

When prospecting, the most important step is to define your Ideal Customer Profile, aka ICP. It can be done in many ways, such as starting by finding common traits of your current customers, or running customer development interviews. Here is the most simple way to start.

Design the best ICP

ICP, or Ideal Customer Profile, is the definition of a list of characteristics and traits shared by companies that could benefit from your product or services.

Note that the most precise you will be, the better it will be.

These traits can be grouped into 2 types: the Who and the When.

The "Who" will include any trait related to firmographics, industry, geography, etc. 

Example: any company with more than 50 employees, working in the Social Media industry, based in the United States or the United Kingdom.

The "When" will help you define the most relevant triggers that can justify your outreach. This is as important as the "Who", as it will help you finish the sentence "The reason for my call is..."

Learn from your actual customers

When you look at your best customers, you can identify common attributes that make them a joy to work with. Once you've identified these bright spots, you can use Apollo segmentation features to do prescriptive analysis to uncover and score similar companies. This process can help you understand your total addressable market and identify opportunities for growth.

Your ICP in Apollo

Apollo Search capabilities will help you find companies matching the conditions and traits of your ICP.

Saving your searches will help you get notified of new companies matching your ICP so that you can engage with them. But before that, you need to define your Personas.

Define your Personas

The beauty of B2B selling resides in the fact that many people can be involved in the process - which can of course be a bit more difficult than selling to individuals, but you can see this process as selling to a group of individuals, providing whole teams the benefits of your product.

Your buyer may not be your user

The first thing to keep in mind is that your real buyers may not be your end-users. Furthermore, depending on the size of the company, the buyers might actually not be the same.

Let's say you built an emailing solution allowing marketing teams to engage with their customers.

Small companies will tend to test your product and purchase it if it fulfills their needs. Bigger companies will tend to be more organized and have dedicated teams, running RFPs based on their needs.

Understanding your Personas will help you target the right people within the organization to get in touch with.

Navigating through your prospects organization

Understanding your personas will help you understand, per type of organization on whom you should focus your efforts.

When selling to companies, you need to master the BANT framework: Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline.

Make sure the stakeholders involved in your discussions match either one or all the criteria listed above. The Apollo Personas feature will help you very quickly identify within your Prospects organization who will be the most relevant to engage with. 

Craft your message

Bring relevance to raise awareness

The more you will be relevant the more your leads will listen to you. 

You need to show your leads that you know the issue they are facing deep enough to be able to actually help them. They will have no doubt that you are the best solution for them!

Many ways exist to help you with such a goal, the most powerful ones being social proof. Don't forget people don't know you and don't trust you so far. Providing them a combination of "I know you are facing an issue we can help with", with "Hundreds of companies such as Leader 1 and 2 in your industry trust us" will definitely help you move towards this step. 

Be on point with the right trigger

Remember the "When" traits of your ICP? 

The "I'm reaching out because" will be the key helping you to open the closed door of "I'm not interested".

Understanding the right trigger will help you provide a relevant engagement at the right moment: when your leads are starting to face the issue you can help to solve to be more specific.

Engage people in sequences

Stand out from the crowd

Your leads are receiving tens if not hundreds of emails like yours on a daily basis. Forget being academic, with very well-written sentences, and write emails that sound very personal.

Also, keep in mind that your goal at this step of the prospecting journey is not to "sell" your product, but raise your leads' interest enough to get them into a meeting during which you will actually be able to see if you have an opportunity or not.

Be sincere, not just interested

No one likes receiving emails offering magical recipes promising them the best, such as being rich, healthy, and so on.

Imagine yourself, walking down the street and having someone stopping you to promise you such things. Would you stop?

But everyone loves to discover new ways to move towards their own journey and reach their own goals.

Now imagine yourself again, walking down the street, and meeting someone telling you "I think you might have this issue, just so you know I can help you face the issue by doing X, Y, Z. You might not purchase right away his solution, but actually listen ad start thinking at this solution later on.

Being sincere with people you will be engaging with will help you cut the natural mistrust as people will feel you are truly interested in helping them, not you.