The Future of GTM: AI That Actually Works

Everyone, it's great to be here with selling powers community of sales and marketing leaders. I'm so excited to talk about how we're leveraging AI here at Apollo to drive smarter, faster revenue and how you can too. But to do a quick intro on my on my background. I've been in sales for 13 years spending from companies like Five Stars Upkeep and now here at Apollo and have led both field team and sales and inside sales team. And we've learned that prospecting and building pipeline has always been hard, it's just getting harder. The biggest obstacle for growth is pretty self explanatory to everyone here. But it's really about ineffective go to market. There's a recent survey by McKinsey that said 80% of the CEOs had ranked go to market inefficiency as a top three priority. But only 30% of them believe that the sales team can execute consistently. That's because the modern tech approach to go to market is broken. It's confusing and it's unapproachable for a lot of the businesses out there. None of this is new though. This has been this way for a very long time. Every day teams are going through complex workflow and try to build more pipeline of revenue. It's only getting more complicated and harder to execute. The fact is go to market teams are drowning in tools. For every potential problem that came up, there are different point solutions that tries to help, but it just compounds already complicated tech stack. We understand why this is the current state today. In order for them to achieve better results. The only answer that we have been getting was to buy more software. Buy more software. The complexity of the tech stack is now being felt in every level of the customer facing team. The companies are now having to bury the burden of this tech debt and the technical complexity by hiring more admins, put more bodies and put more experts to manage all these tools. More often than not it ends up being more confusing and it's been more costly. And that's why Apollo is changing the game. We believe that best in class go to market should be easy and it should be accessible. Companies are choosing Apollo because for the first time ever they now have access to power and results that come from an end to end go to market platform without the complexity to manage or the cost. We brought together everything you need to run a modern go to market in one unified platform. But we want to make this even better. So as teased earlier, on September 15th we announced the new Apollo AI assistant. This is the world's first True Go to market AI that actually works. AI Assistant is built directly into Apollo's all in one go to market platform. And it can execute complete end to end workflows across the entire sales funnel just by asking, just by using English. Unlike most AI tools, it goes beyond writing a simple email or answering a simple prompt. But what does that mean? It means that the promise and power of AI can actually be achieved within Apollo. Apollo offers four main solutions. Data Enrichment, Outbound, Inbound and View Execution. AI Assistant navigates the entire platform to accomplish any go to market task you can think of in seconds. The feedback so far from our customers that have joined our beta has been phenomenal. We helped a customer get their go to market platform and workflow set up, done and shipped out the door in less than 30 minutes. For something that used to take a go to market pro weeks to build out alongside with the expertise that's built into the platform, it's been really exciting and it's been a huge leap forward for how we're working with go to market leaders to make it easier, more powerful and more personalized than ever before. But instead of me telling you about AI Assistant, I would love to show this. Let's say you want to create a new outbound campaign. You want an accurate, scaled and highly personalized to your icp. Pull up your AI Assistant and ask it to narrow down a list of companies within your criteria like tenographic or firmographic details, even companies that are hiring for a specific role. A system would then narrow down a list of accounts according to your instruction and suggest some additional criteria for it to research on. And once the accounts are now fully researched, we can then identify and confirm the decision makers within those accounts. It will run a sequence and pull up the contact information and run it through our waterfall enrichment using multiple data sources so that we can find the high value contact information within seconds. Once those email and phone numbers are pulled, it's time for engagement. Now if you never built and created a sequence before, AI Assistant can also create highly personalized sequence for you based on the Personas and pull the contacts directly into the sequence. It's just that simple. And our customers are already seeing the value. Not only are they telling us Apollo reduces cost and complexity, they're also seeing much better results. And this is exciting because that is our North Star. Here at Apollo, we want to help customers create hyper personalized messaging and insights with a scale that only the best companies can achieve and the best resources that they can get. We're so excited about the progress we've made so far. We've helped level the playing field for over 2 million users and over 550,000 companies who rely on us now to go market faster and smarter. We've done this by listening and incorporating customer feedback and stay focused on our belief that making Go to market accessible to everybody is a winning strategy. And so we want to hear from you. We would love for you to sign up for the beta and since we released the beta we have received over 10,000 signups and we would love for you and this group here and this community to join the beta for Apollo AI Assistant. My colleague here is going to drop the link here below for you to sign up and we're also going to continue to unveil more as Gerhard had mentioned. In two weeks we're going to be hosting our first in person user conference on October 9th at the SF Jazz center in San Francisco. Beautiful venue and we're going to be bringing in over 750 sales, marketing and rev ops leaders who are actively transforming how they go to market with within the world of AI. We're also going to have leaders from innovative companies like Anthropic and Glean who are our customers to offer their expertise in how they're thinking about this Go to Market World. And at our event our CEO Tim Zhang and our CPO Bella is going to unveil more about apau's end to end AI go to Market platform that y' all got a sneak peek to today. But registration is free and if you'd like to join us we would love to see you and Register@ApolloIO Next. Not to mention Corporate Pro is also going to be there as well. And with that, thank you so much for your time here and I would love Gerhardt to take any questions that the team have or the the group have here today or what I can help answer for the community.

Gary, thank you for the generous offer and for your presentation and what I'm most intrigued by is the capability to dial. I understand that there is a feature. I don't know whether you've released it yet or whether this is something you're still you've already released. I don't know. Can you bring me up to speed?

Yeah. Dialing is a component of our platform and like I mentioned earlier, it's an end to end go to market tool so you can log into the platform. You never have to leave the platform to do any go to market task. Dialer is one of those. And we also have released our parallel dialer that enables the sellers to dial multiple numbers at the same time using our databases that we have embedded in between the platform.

So can you explain that how the magic behind that, how does that work? How many dials simultaneously can that your AI system handle?

Yeah, so the AI assistant itself doesn't actually make the dials. The AI assistant helps put together the contact list, the workflow and the sequence to help enable a seller to make the dials. AI assistant don't replace the sellers. They replace all the complicated workflows behind all the sellers would have to do themselves. It's almost like having a rev ops person, a marketing person and a go to market person in your pocket working for you 24, 7.

So do you dial maybe 5 numbers or 10 numbers simultaneously and wait until somebody picks up?

Exactly. It's on par with similar parallel dialers that are out there on the market today. So you can do your old traditional dial one on one, go through your sequence, or you can put for the SDR friends out there, you can put them into a parallel dialer that dial simultaneously at the same time and the calls will then drop when we get a connection for the, for one of your contacts.

Another question is do you need to have Salesforce to make this work or can you work with an Excel spreadsheet and do the dialing?

Yeah, that's what's super exciting about it. So obviously we do integrate with most of our larger CRM platform out there in the market, Salesforce, HubSpot and so forth. But part of the deal execution is also using Apollo as a CRM by itself. So if you're using spreadsheet, think about using Apollo to manage all your entire workflow, including deal management and also your contact management.

Right. So are there any guardrails? Let's say you were to import some numbers in Europe and, and the person that is doing the dialing doesn't know that they're on a GDPR list not to be dialed. Is there any safety guardrail that Apollo creates not to dial those numbers?

Yeah, absolutely. So we do have a section called workflow for the guardrail to exist. But we are also Apollo itself is also GDPR certified. So yeah, so absolutely. Again, it's going to be personalized based off of the company, what their profiles are, who they want to reach out to, and so they can configure all that within the platform itself.

Right. Another question is about the buying intent. Everybody wants enriched data. How do you get to that data?

Yeah, there's many, many ways for us to start that. But buying intent also stems from our inbound solution coming in from our website tracking, bringing in those information in and we can then enrich those information on the spot. So part of that is to also make sure that we're getting the, we're transferring those contact data or the website visits that are anonymized into something that, that we can turn into an interest for the SDR team to follow up on. So that's part of the four solutions I just talked about, which is inbound, outbound and do execution and pipeline. Part of the inbound solution is to also then transfer those website intent and those website data into actionable insights for your team to follow up on.

So can you give me a before and after scenario? Let's assume a company has 20 salespeople and they're all dialing manually. They're all get the emails, let's say from their connections on from LinkedIn and imported into Salesforce. And to do all this manual work and the dial manually compared to shifting over to Apollo using your AI search tool, build a list quickly and then start dialing. What's the before and after scenario in terms of time saving, ROI and ability to reach more people in compressing time?

Yeah, and a lot of it that you just talked about were just tab switching. I'm just thinking about that in my head right now that they're switching into a tab, into a, into an Excel spreadsheet, going back into a dialer. And that's exactly what we want to solve. We want to bring everything into one holistic platform. So not only you don't have to do any research on your accounts or on your contacts with multiple view, you can do those in bulk. You can pull those information in your contact information and your email addresses. But more importantly, the contact Personas and account information like recent funding, are they hiring right now or are they have they just recently went through an M and A and pull all those data into one aggregate platform and dial from there. So the tap switching the compound tech stack is exactly what we're here to solve and to combine everything into one. One instance. Now on the other side is that we also have something called Apollo everywhere, which means you can download our Chrome extension in our sidebar with whatever websites you're on because you're just scouring on a website. You can see the company information and the type of data that we also have on the company to even empower the sellers to get even better. So again, for the 20 sellers, in that example that you had just mentioned at Gerhardt, the sales leader and the Revenue leader can then also look at a very high overview to see exactly what has been researched, what's been engaged, what's been talked about and when they start having conversations and when they start having, having, having sales discussions, we can pull those data coming directly from the field because we also offered conversation intelligence that just makes every layer of data that you have within Apollo even better.

That sounds really interesting. So you're collecting the conversation intelligence and feed it back to salespeople as best practices.

Yeah, well, best practices but also coaching. Right. That's what everybody craves for. We want to know exactly how the sales conversations are going and how they, how they went. But also more importantly afterward there's follow up, there's items that we have to go in and carry through. How about letting Apollo using that data to help you craft up the personalized message and be able to pull those back into the template.

So I'd like to get two numbers from you. One is what is the percentage of call volume in terms of increase before and after.

This is what's unique about Apollo. We serve many different types of industries, many different types of organizations from small and large. So there isn't just one data that we have provided for that we have. But we know that the teams are highly more effective and oftentimes they save costs by consolidating a lot of tools within one tech stack. And that way we can then immediately see the value right off the bat.

Well, I would assume this is, I don't have the practical experience that you have, but if you dial manually, salesperson will have maybe three or four conversations a day and just by having the automatic dialer you can have seven or ten conversations a day.

Yeah. Connection rate right now has been, has been very brutal for a lot of organizations out there. And that's why better data, cleaner data is the place for us to start. It has to serve as a foundation and then we can then continue to augment those data to get more dials out and get more at bats. So it's not just getting more ad bats here for the team. It's all about getting the most accurate data, the highest connect rate and who we can reach out to within the Personas that you're selling into.

That is pretty impressive. What are you most excited about when it comes to your event in San Francisco?

I'm excited to learn, I'm excited to have all the go to market leaders to come in and talk about how they're pivoting themselves today within this new world of AI. AI has been talked about for now, over a year and over two years now. But I love to actually hear about how they're augmenting that and putting that into the day to day tech stack and how Apollo can continue to make that into the next level for these leaders that we're bringing together.

Can you show the slide again and how people can sign up for the event for free?

Yeah. So this is the link. It's Apollo I.O. next. We have a lineup of our existing customers that are coming in and talk about not only how they're using Apollo to solve these problems, but how are they thinking about the next iteration of the go to market teams. So very excited for the event and I'm also going to be personally be there too. If I see you in person, I'd love to say hi.

Yeah, we just dropped it in the chat as well. And I have a quick question, final question, what geographies does this value prop cover?

Yeah, so sorry, are you referring to Apollo next or are you talking about Apollo in general?

Apollo in general, yeah.

Apollo serves customers from all around the world. So we don't serve a very specific geography. We do cover databases and also information across, across the world. So regardless of where you're at, Apollo can surfy.

Yeah. And Terry's asking about how the parallel dialogue works. Let's say 10, you call 10 people at once, then whoever, whoever answers first hangs up the other nine. Doesn't this come across as rude? So can you explain how the technology is root free?

Yeah, it's root free. Yeah, I think that's the word for it. But for the, for the dollars are dropping the calls, it's typically dropping the calls that are being in the middle of being connected. The goal there is to, is to, is to connect with a person live on the other side of the phone. But again, ultimately, at the end of the day, parallel dollar is just a very small portion of what we offer to build pipeline. A lot of it starts with again having better data, aggregate those data into the platform, but also more importantly just building out the sequence that we can actually get highly engaged on.

So I want to reassure you, Tara, the way I understand it is when 10 people are dialed simultaneously by a machine and the first person that picks up automatically shuts down all the dialing. So in the chances of two people picking up at the same time out of 10 is not that great. So I don't think you antagonize a lot of people. That chance is less than, than 1% in my opinion.

Yeah.

Well Gary, thank you so much. We are out of time. That was a great session. And I want everybody to meet up in San Francisco at Apollo next.

So excited to see you all here. And also, thank you so much for your time here, Gerhard and everyone.

Thank you, Gareth.

See ya.