ZoomInfo Sales vs Apollo.io: Which is a better fit?

Iyer A.: Hi, good afternoon. My name is Iyer. I am a national sales manager for a very large transportation brokerage. We have about 1,000, 2,000 employees at any given time. And I give ZoomInfo Sales a five out of five. Before we were using ZoomInfo Sales, we had a hodgepodge of different ways that we found our leads, maintained our prospects. We have our own CRM internally where we store data, but lead generation primarily is up to us. We had a little bit of LinkedIn, a little bit of connections, and sometimes just purely looking geographically who's around us. We chose ZoomInfo Sales because it gave us unparalleled amounts of access to the prospects we were looking for, their competitors, as well as acting as a virtual CRM, not for our own notes, but through the news, the revenues, the employee counts, and quite a bit of other metrics and some KPIs that really gave us an idea of who we were targeting and how to get at them, and beyond that, the contacts there and their information. You can't beat getting away directly to the decision maker. We're all used to starting at the bottom or with a friend or maybe a connection. ZoomInfo lets you skip the line on that in ways that you can't really match. If I open it up and I put in XYZ company that I'm looking for, within a few minutes, I'll have the contact that I need and maybe even a way to directly get in touch with them. I can't beat that. Zoominfo Sales was pretty quick for us to take on. We were able to coordinate with their parties and our parties, or basically the management of our team, the one I worked under, met with their team and we ran a trial version. Everyone in the company resoundingly said that they found great benefit in it. Then we got into licensing, and we just haven't stopped since then. If I were to give advice to someone else on whether they should make the dive into using ZoomInfo Sales or pass up on it, I would say go in feet first with your hands ready to swim. If you've always been prospecting, generating leads and trying to cold call and cold email your way around sales, you need to give this a try because you're wasting your time. And honestly, that time could be spent improving, grading, and qualifying a prospect while already knowing if it's a good idea or not. I spent a lot of time at my previous firm basically going through phone books, Google Maps, and a lot of things you're probably familiar with. Now that I have ZoomInfo Sales, every day I know exactly who I'm going after and my next step and how to get at them ASAP.

Steve: My name is Steve, I'm the owner of Ellis Taylor Marketing, and I gave Apollo four stars. Really I mainly used Sales Navigator. I tried everything from Snov.io, FindThatLead. I think Scrap was one of them, like LinkedIn scrapers essentially, and stuff like that. But Sales Navigator was the primary one that I used, and that was bringing in the best leads that I could find. They also had some of the best search tools in terms of prospecting and filters for finding new leads and stuff like that. Really, the two big things that drew me to Apollo were the much more detailed targeting, or I guess it's filtering, for the lead, the prospecting. Then also, the campaigns, the sequences that you could build, and how you could AB test different sequences, the metrics that they gave you on those sequences. But really, to date, the thing that's been the best has been the prospecting tools and just how much you can filter searches out and the different options that they provide for those searches. It was pretty easy to set up and get started with, but there was definitely a big learning curve when it came to learning the platform. I wouldn't say it was really that intuitive because there's such a big platform, it's, I think, hard to make this kind of platform intuitive. It's taken months really to get used to the platform and get used to all the features that it has and really understand it. And honestly, I'm still learning it, and I've been using it for over a year now I believe. So, that's been the biggest thing, is just learning the platform itself. But in terms of getting it up and running, I'd say it was relatively easy. I would definitely say check it out. I think, for me, Apollo has been very useful in prospecting. I haven't had a tool, at least for the price that comes anywhere near it. Everything else seems to be a lot more expensive from my experience at least. When it comes to the other tools they offer, like the actual sending of the emails, the campaigns and stuff like that, I've noticed that for whatever reason, the open rates have just dropped significantly. And since I switched to a different platform for sending my emails, the exact same list and everything else, my open rates shop back up. So, I think there's still a lot of bugs to work out within Apollo. I think that's something to consider if somebody's considering Apollo. But in terms of a prospecting tool, I haven't been able to find anything that beats it, and I've been looking a lot for something to beat it, and I haven't been able to find anything beat to beat it. So, I think for the price, in terms of the prospecting, you can't beat Apollo. But when it comes to the other features, maybe look little more closely into it I would say.