"Apollo is an all-in-one sales intelligence platform with tools to help you prospect, engage, and drive more revenue. Sellers and marketers use Apollo to discover more customers in market, connect with contacts, and establish a modern go-to-market strategy.
Apollo's B2B Database includes over 220M contacts and 30M companies with robust and accurate data. Teams leverage Apollo’s Engagement Suite to scale outbound activity and sequences effectively. Finally, up-level your entire go-to-market processes with Apollo's Intelligence Engine with recommendations and analytics that help you close."
In short, we'll be using Apollo to generate leads from the LinkedIn database through automated emails (called Sequences) to people we find after applying filters as: Country, State, City, Industry, Position, etc.
For this purpose, a specific Gmail Account has been created: pinvestor@equityandhelp.com which will be the one in charge of sending all the Sequences to our prospects, and forwarding to each PI/PISC/Ambassador any email that contains keywords as their first or last names, so it's important that every sequence contains your full name and custom signature.
So, in order to use this tool, follow these steps:
1. After receiving the login info for Apollo, go to apollo.io on your web browser and use it to access the account:
2. On the top bar, hover your mouse over the Engage button and then click on Sequences on the dropdown:
3. It'll show you the amount of current Sequences running. Please note that every single one should contain the name of the person managing it and the language used on the emails as well.
3. It'll show you the amount of current Sequences running. Please note that every single one should contain the name of the person managing it and the language used on the emails as well. If yours has already been created, please skip to step 8. In case you need to create a new Sequence, go to the top right corner and click on the New Sequence blue button. So it'll show you three options like this:
- Prebuilt: It'll give you a series of email sequences with an email template for each. You can use this version if you need help on how to compose your approach to cold leads.
- New: Pretty self explanatory. It gives you a blank sequence where you add as many steps (emails) as you want and compose them from scratch.
- Clone: It allows you to copy a preexisting sequence from another employee that you can edit as much as you want.
For the sake of this example, we'll click on NEW.
4. After naming your sequence, notice that it shows you on which hours your emails we'll be sent: Business hours from Monday to Friday. You can also edit or create new schedules under the dropdown button. Also, if you click on the Advanced Options button, you can select additional preferences like the Ruleset that can be:
- Default: Send as many emails it can on the schedule.
- Custom Ruleset: We created one for this purpose, giving it a maximum of 125 daily emails so that the sum of all sequences doesn't exceeds Gmail's maximum of 2000 emails per day. And further rulesets can be created or edited later on under the settings button.
5. Click on the Add Step Button:
6. Leave the Automatic Email option enabled. The "Wait for" time means the amount of time it will take for your emails to be sent after selecting your audience, so you have a window if there's the need to change something on your emails before they go out. You can either increase or reduce said time.
The Send at most button should be enabled, since every employee using this tool has their fair share of emails available to be sent on a day without collapsing the Gmail's daily maximum. This amount should be discussed on the Google Chat group for Apollo.
On this step, we'll tell it to send at most the 50 emails per day (image says 125). Click on the ADD blue button to finish:
Note: Since each employee is given a maximum of emails per day, this should be taken into consideration when deciding on how many sequences they'll send. If there's one in english and one in spanish, this maximum amount should be split in two. And then split that number into the amount of steps for each sequence.
For example: If we are allowed to only send 300 emails a day, and we are using two Sequences (one in english, one in spanish) then each sequence would send only 150 emails per day. And if each sequence only consists of three emails each, we'll be filling the "Send at most" with 50.
7. As soon as you click on Add, a new window will pop up:
The first step on any sequence should be New Thread, selected under the Type dropdown.
Here's where you get to compose the subject and body of the email, add any links, images and more information that you might find convenient. And if you count the buttons below the body text box, the eight one is called Snippets (will say so if you hover your mouse over it).
8. This tool allows you to tell Apollo that you want it to personalize each email from this step to the recipient's info, so it'll pull it from their LinkedIn account and change the snippet for their actual info. You can see it at work on the preview on the left of your text box:
9. Also remember to untick the "Include Signature" button and manually copy/paste yours from your email, since this is a single Gmail Account and it would be pulling just one from the email, instead of using yours. When everything looks good to you, click on Save Changes.
You should be looking at something like this:
10. Next, click on Add Step Again.
10. Repeat the process from step 7, but this time change the type to "Reply to Previous Thread" so it will follow it up. Compose your email, remember to manually insert your signature and untick the "Include Signature" button. Save changes.
10. Repeat the process from step 10 as many times per steps you want. The recommended amount is 3. Now, if you check at the right of each step below the first one, you'll notice the "Deliver email if no replay in X days". You can change it by clicking on the three dots right to it. Then Edit if you want to extend or reduce said amount.
11. When you are done, go to the top right corner and select the button to start the Sequence.
12. Now all we need is an audience. Click on the top left A icon to go to the homepage and then click on Search, and then People.
13. Go to your left, click on Persona and then Add Persona. This is where you'll be filtering the criteria that you want your prospects to meet: Industry, position, location, etc.
13. Go to your left, click on Persona and then Add Persona. This is where you'll be filtering the criteria that you want your prospects to meet: Industry, position, location, etc. Click on Save Persona and make sure it's ticked.
Note: A good trick is to edit the Persona title on a daily basis adding the amount of people contacted from this result list. In this case, there are 15,316 people that match our criteria, but we can only email 150 of them a day. So you'd be changing the title to 150 on your first day, 300 on the second, 450 on the third and so on.
14. Click on the highlighted square and select the exact number of people you want: 150 and max 1 per company, to avoid spam. Also notice that there are a number of pages on the bottom, it says: 25 of 15,316. Each page contains 25 prospects, so if you do your math like "I contacted 150 today, on my first day. 150/25=6 so I'm on page 6. I'll start from page 7 tomorrow" to avoid repeated contacts.
Note: If by any chance you are selecting already contacted leads, Apollo will tell you how many and on which Sequence.
Click on Apply Selection.
15. Click on the arrow, then Add to Sequence.
16. Select the Sequence corresponding to you from the dropdown menu, then click on confirm.
17. Go back to your Sequences and notice how many of these leads will be on the Active section if you activated the sequence on step 11. If not, just go to the button at the right and tick it (the one at the left of the star). It shows it's paused on this example, but it'll say active on yours.
By opening your Sequence and clicking on the Statistics menu you can see in detail how many of these leads have read your emails or not, and even read the entire conversation through Apollo without needing to access the main Gmail for it (pinvestor@gmail.com) and you can even answer from this menu, or click on their name and then go to their LinkedIn profile if you want to research them.
If they don't respond to your first email, they'll be moved for the next step and so on until the Sequence finishes. Each email also has an unsubscribe button at the end allowing them to opt out in case they don't want any further approaches from you, too.