Apollo.io vs. InsideSales Playbooks

Best suited for contact discovery on LinkedIn or for that matter any website, but it works best on LinkedIn. It saves tons of work, you can simply select the complete list of people you want to contact and put them directly into an email sequence. It is a little difficult to find contact info on other websites.

Incentivized

It is well suited for any sales department, to try to get ahold of the person you are trying to get ahold of. Playbooks has increased the number of decision makers that I can get ahold of on a day to day basis. This tool would probably be less suited for people that do not have calls to make outside of the company.

Incentivized

• Allows users to easily add new prospects to database without much manual effort at all
• Allows you to make cold calls from different area codes that are relevant to where your prospect is located
• Allows A/B testing for emails so you can figure out which ones are gaining the most traction
• You can also find prospects based off of title, company, technologies, etc

Incentivized

• Playbooks does a great job of letting reps know when phone numbers are not a working number.
• Playbooks does a great job being able to be tailored to your specific organization or business.
• Playbooks does a great job of having a very friendly user experience.

Incentivized

• Their customer service is just terrible. You get an assigned account manager but 9/10 times they wouldn't know what you wanted and/or how the product works or how to fix it. Vast majority of the time it was a canned response that made you question if they read the message, or if they read it and did not understand a word.
• The software was relatively buggy and lacked features that were promised upon signup. They seem to have some large corporate clients and if you aren't one none of your bug submissions, feature requests, or concerns will be addressed.
• Their growing quickly so they seem to be very understaffed which I believe caused many of the issues above.
• The data, while good, can quickly run out if you're looking for specific types of leads. If you're looking for something generic like Managers at companies between 10-5000 people, you can pull leads all day every day. However if you're looking for a specific industry, specific title, and specific location - don't count on having an endless supply of leads (or even really enough to use month after month).

Incentivized

• The ability to filter specific plays or pieces of information so that it's more user-friendly for the overall organization. Essentially, more room to customize the organization of accounts and how you're working them.
• The initial onboarding process of accounts results in high levels of tasks - the ability to break these down in an easier way to help with time management would be helpful.

It only took a day to get comfortable with Playbooks. The ease of use and overall usability is fantastic in the sense that it's pretty straightforward once you get enough repetitions in the tool. I also like all of the videos and resources available if support is needed

Incentivized

I received excellent support at any time I opened up a ticket. But I would add to it that the tool was very self-explanatory, so there wasn't much need for support. With Outreach, we have a closer relationship with our CSM because of the intricacy in things like SFDC task mapping.

Incentivized

I have also looked into and tried Hunter.io and Lusha, and to be honest, I shouldn't compare them with Apollo. I have found Apollo to be so easy to integrate and use with all of my prospecting that I haven't really even tried out the other two. I bet I could find some useful things by using Hunter.io or Lusha as well, but there is honestly no need since I can do everything I want and more with Apollo. I would just be wasting time trying to figure out another platform when I can be focused on growing my own business with Apollo.

Incentivized

The Insidesales Playbooks is by far more intuitive and organized than other programs I have used in the past. Unfortunately I have not had experience with other products that are available out there. I would hope we will see more improvements from the ISDC tool as we all use it more and provide feedback

Incentivized

• Generated a lot of expectations that were not real when we needed them
• The ROI was positive but we decided to stop using the tool
• We loved how easy to use it was and how easy it was to interact with the Support team
• There is room for improvement in the video tutorials - they were from old versions of the software that would not be useful for the version at hand

Incentivized

• 100's of hours back in our week due to Salesforce Integration!
• We have more clients answering the phone due to creative caller ID solutions.
• We can standardize our messaging by partnering with Marketing to help build plays and auto-enroll certain contacts based on messaging.

Incentivized