How To Use Apollo.io 2026 - Full Tutorial

In this video, I'm going to be walking you through how you can use Apollo I.O. to generate more leads, book more calls, and make more money with your own business inside of your own lead generation process. Right. And for a little bit more background context, my name is Jim Fung and I've been running my own lead generation business for the last three years. And a massive component of us being able to book the amount of calls that we've booked for ourselves and our customers really comes down to Apollo Dio. We used Apollo Dio for many, many years, literally scraped millions of leads, and it's also helped us be able to send out millions of cold emails and booking tens of thousands of calls. Right? So right now on my screen is Apollo Dio. I'm just going to start with the pricing just so that you're aware, right, there's different plans over here. But what I'm going to be sharing with you in this video, if you follow it to the T, you're going to be able to scrape leads not without needing to pay, you know, 80 bucks for, you know, the professional Apollo account or even $119. You're able to do this for a much, much cheaper price and you'd be, in theory, able to scrape tens of thousands of leads for literally a couple dollars. Right? And that's exactly how we've been able to use Apollo I.O. again to send millions of cold emails for our own business and our client's business as well. So jumping into the actual Apollo, I'm just going to start off by walking you through some of the different filters and features that are available on Apollo I.O. and exactly what they do. So starting on the left side, right, once you're actually inside of Apollo, this is kind of what it looks like. And there's a couple of different key like features, but there's one that really makes most of the money. And for us, it's under the Prospects and Enrich section, under the people filters and the company filters, right? So, for example, on the people's filters right now, that's what we're on right now on the right side of your screen. As you can see, after you put in different filters, which will be walking you through later, exactly what those filters are in order to generate leads exactly towards your ICP and who you're trying to target. But as you can see, there's just a giant list of essentially people, right? Here's the people, here's the job title, here's the company they work at, their emails, all this other stuff and useful Information that you could use for your lead generation efforts. We have the company's filters which is very similar to the people's filters except on the company side where you're able to for example over here have some filters set up for recruitment agency businesses. Right? So I'm able to use the company's filters in order to find specific recruitment agencies. Right, that's the company's filters and there's lists, you can save your list, things like that. But this is really the main two features that we use, the people and the company's filters. We also underneath of engage, have the sequences filter. So this is kind of Apollo's built in tool that allows users to send cold emails and cold outreach out of them. Personally. Personally for me inside of my own lead generation business and for our clients business as well, I personally do not use Apollo I.O. to send any cold emails or any outreach messages. We use a completely different tool for that customer AI which is super popular in the cold email space. But personally, if you really wanted to, you could technically send cold emails out of Apollo IO. I don't know how effective it would be. I personally don't use that filter. You can set up different emails, see who like open the emails, reply to them, book calls, stuff like that, set up warmups. Right. So there's like all these different features inside of Apollo. Beyond that we also have different features that are very similar to, let's say calendly or you know, your own calendar softwares. Right. So for example, you can see who book calls with you, different conversations, you have active, kind of like a mini CRM and things like that. But for, for the purposes of how I personally use Apollo for myself, all of our clients, all of our students, things like that, we mainly focus on the people and companies filter. Cool. So this next section I wanted to talk a little bit more about how do you actually find the specific people that you're looking to target by using Apollo IO. And this is really like the meats and the bones of this video. So please make sure you're paying attention. So what you want to do is you want to go under the people section and once you're in I again this is what it's going to look like. There'll be a bunch of different filters on the left side and on the right side is going to be like the people and the contact details of who you're trying to target. It's very important that you focus on the left side. And as you can see, even my Apollo plan is not like it's not a paid plan, it's a free trial plan. And as a result there's a lot of like these different features that are actually locked and it tells me that I have to like upgrade my plan and stuff like that in order to get it. I'm here to say the good news is none of these filters from what I have found are, are really worth the value. And what I mean by that is I've actually bought different Apollo plans, tested these filters myself and I just haven't found them to be super effective for filtering. And instead there's other filters that you can use that will help you bring in the exact type of ICV that you're looking for. So here's what I mean. So starting at the top I'm just going to go through like some of these different Apollo dial filters and walk you through exactly what that is. Right. So obviously number of employees, pretty self explanatory, how big is the company? And I've actually found that if you are looking to, let's say you only target specific businesses that are making between 5 and $10 million in revenue every single year. Right. There's actually Apollo filter somewhere down here. So revenue over here is locked so you can't see it, but there's a revenue filter which allows you to find businesses between 5 and 10 mil. But the most important point to note is Apollo Dio. They actually take guesses. So these are like estimates. If you are able to put the filter to 5 to 10 mil, those are estimates. Right? Because obviously they're not public companies, they're private companies. And instead what I have found to work way significantly better is rather than using Apollo's estimates is by targeting number of employees. So obviously a company that's making five to $10 million a month, they probably have a bunch of different employees, are probably not in the 1 to 10 range, probably not in the 1120 range, they're probably not even in the 21 to 50 employee range. But they're probably going to be in some of these filters beyond that. Right. So maybe 51 to 100. Right. So that's a better, much, much, much better way to target specifically who you're looking at is through employee numbers. Right. Obviously if you are just starting your own, let's say lead generation business or you're targeting smaller companies, maybe solopreneurs, that type of thing, founder led businesses with maybe a couple of different VA's small team, maybe 1 to 10 is good or 11 to 20 is good. But that's the employee number filter Personally, for me, that really depends on the ICP of who I'm trying to target, but that's what it looks like. There's also another filter for email status with different ones. There's some people online who, who really like using this filter. Personally for me, I always just like to keep it unchecked. And the reason why is even after we get our leads list off of Apollo, yo, we're not just going to take that lease list, download it to our computer, upload it to our email automation tool and just start sending a bunch of cold emails, right? That's not at all what we're doing. What we want to be doing is we want to be manually verifying these email addresses, basically just making sure that these email addresses are updated. The correct, the all working, all of that is in order. And we actually use a separate tool to do that called Million Verifier, which I'll be showing you in a minute here. But personally I don't like to use the email status filter at all. The next one. Job titles are pretty self explanatory. Depending on who you're looking to target. Maybe they have a specific title, right? Maybe you're trying to do outreach specifically to the founder, to CEO, to a business owner. Those would be the filters that you're looking to put, right? Or for example, if you want to target only the head of sales, head of business development, VP of sales, things like that, those would be the specific titles that you put. So for example, in my own search, I put a sample search over here, I'm looking to target all these people. Founder, CEO, owner, co founder, head of growth, all these people. And I'm excluding these titles of consultants, recruiters and coaches, right? So for example, I just wanted to make sure that in my list of email contacts, I don't have any of these three people. So those are, that's the job title filter. The next one is obviously the company name. So for example, if you want to target a specific company, let's say apple.com, then you would put it in here, right? Obviously I don't think I'm going to have much here because I'm looking to target recruitment agency businesses. But for example google.com, amazon.com, if you're looking to target specific companies, then you could put the filter in here. Although I usually use the company's filters over here more so to target specific companies. Now this next filter is locations. That's just pretty much where your contact is located for the purposes of what we do we typically like to target the big five English speaking countries, so Canada, us, uk, Australia and New Zealand. So these are kind of like the filters that I put including North America, but if you know, depending on who you're trying to target, you obviously put in different countries. So for example, I've had many clients who for example they were in the Spanish market, they live in Spain and they want to work with Spanish speaking businesses. So for them they will target Spain and obviously they wouldn't be targeting, let's say North America, which is predominantly English speaking. Right. So that's locations. The next one is Industry keywords, which is arguably the most important filter where I see time and time again a lot of people using Apollo Dio kind of incorrectly or just not as efficiently and just as a result not being able to get the results they're looking for, not being able to get the amount of leads, replies because and make as much money as they want to. And a lot of that is because they are using this industry and keywords filters wrong. So here's what I mean by that. So under Apollo I.O. under the industry and keywords filters, if you click this first dropdown, there's actually a bunch of these different built in tabs. But that's not at all from my personal experience. What has worked the best. I found that Apollo I.O. is not always super accurate in terms of their own industry matching and what they think the businesses belong in which industries. Instead what you want to do is you want to use something called keywords. So here's what I mean, right? So for example, if we go on the right side over here and let's just click into this one. Staff Max, Staffing, recruiting. Obviously they are a recruiting company. But if we look inside of the keywords on the left side over here we see all of these different like keywords that they put. So for example their recruitment agency. So obviously they would have the keyword of recruitment, recruitment agency, candidate engagement. Like these are keywords that are highly relevant towards recruitment agencies and search firms and things like that. So obviously those are the keywords that that would be used to find that. Or for example if this was, let's say a marketing agency as another example, the keywords here might say marketing, it might say Facebook, it might say social media, it might say email marketing, it might say those different keywords. And if I was targeting marketing agencies, those would be the keywords that I would put in this section of include keywords in order to find marketing agencies. Again for the purposes of this example, obviously I'm looking for recruitment agencies. So the keywords that I'm using are recruitment agency, recruitment, recruiting, staffing, employment, search firms, executive search, which are all common keywords that even you might put onto Google if you're looking for a recruitment agency. And that's why I put under include keywords. But what I also did, and this is really the filter to make sure that your filtering, your targeting is super, super clear on exactly who you're looking for, is the exclude keywords section filter. And this is where so many people mess up because they probably don't even know that this exists, to be honest. Right. But I would commonly exclude keywords that might, what's the word that might intertwine with the industry that I'm looking for, if that makes sense. So for example, what I mean by that is one of the keywords I excluded is SaaS, so software companies. So if I didn't exclude that, what I'll actually see is I will have a bunch of recruitment SaaS platforms, so different software tools that are maybe being sold to recruitment agencies or some kind of recruitment software. But again, since we're looking to target recruitment agencies, we don't want to target recruitment software companies. Right. We want the actual recruitment agencies. So one of the keywords I put is SaaS. Or another example is I put marketing or ads. Because if I didn't include these as exclude keywords, I might come across different like recruitment marketing agencies. Right. Marketing agencies who help recruitment agencies, which again is not our target. Icp. We want to work with recruitment agencies, not marketing agencies that provide marketing services for recruitment businesses. Right. Or coaches. Right. There's a lot of people teaching, let's say people how to become recruiters. We don't want to work with those people either. Again, we want to work with recruitment agencies. So you want to think of common keywords that would be commonly associated with your niche. One thing you could do as well is in when you're doing this process where you include the keywords, I strongly suggest just looking the right side, browsing through the section, clicking into a couple of these and, and if you notice that let's say there's like a software company in here, right. Then add it as a keyword. If you notice, let's say an E commerce company, I don't know why there would be, but let's say there was an E commerce company, you would then exclude it under the keyword of E comm or E commerce. Right. And that's how you really build an airtight targeted leads list. And again, this is the part where so many people get it wrong because they probably don't even know this exists. Now moving on to different filters, there's also buying intents. Again, I've never really seen this filter to really be that much helpful. You really don't need it. You also don't need owner and some of these other ones just don't need it at all. There are some somewhat like useful filters. So for example, technologies could be a little bit useful. Basically you're targeting technologies they might use. So for example, let's say you are targeting E commerce brands. E commerce brands, the vast majority of them are probably using Shopify to host a website. They might be using Klaviyo for their email marketing. Those are different technologies that you could put in here. So you might be able to put Shopify in there and you will get a list that is more targeted towards E commerce brands. You can add in Klaviyo, it'll be even more targeted. So that could be a good filter. Although I have found again, it's not completely necessary, especially if you're using the industry keywords specifically how we just ran through, right, with the include keywords and the exclude keywords. But after you set up all the filters, after you get good at this, although you take you less than five to ten minutes to do, you're going to get a leads list. So for example, instead of this search right here that we have of recruitment agencies, founders, CEOs, owners in north, you know, in the big five countries, as we can see, we have 88,000 of these recruitment agency people, contacts, people that we could put inside of our leads list and then we could do outreach to, to potentially sell our, you know, our services to. Right? What you want to do is you want to obviously download this and move it, you know, save it onto your computer so that you can upload it into your outreach tool. But again, right back to the pricing. If you wanted to download all 88,000 of these people, going to cost you a lot of money, right? For example, the basic plan only has 30,000 credits per year. So that's like 3,000 per month, right. Professional 48,000. Even the organization plan, it only provides you 72,000 credits per year. So meaning that if you paid $119 per month, which is like 1.4 K, I think over the course of a year, you're not even going to be able to scrape this entire lead list. That's a massive problem. Right? You don't want it. You obviously don't want to be spending Thousands of dollars a year to build your leads list, right? The math, just simple, simply doesn't matter. Instead, what you can do instead is you could actually take this, search the URL at the top and you can actually copy this. And you could use this tool called Leads Friday. Obviously tools like this, there's a bunch of them out there and they always change and things like that based on the Apollo updates. But this is the one that I found works the best. And you're paying $3 for every 1,000 Apollo leads, right? So for example, if you wanted to scrape this entire search of almost 90,000, you'd be paying around like 200 bucks, which is much, much cheaper than paying $1,400 a year for Apollo Dio, right? So this is a tool that you could use. You could go check this out on your own time. Basically, after you get this leads list, you scrape it. This is kind of what it looks like, right? Obviously I filtered this a little bit, but as you can see as the first name, the last thing, the title, the company, company name, emails, different things like that, keywords, countries. But what you want to do is once you get a leads list like this, you don't want to just download it to your computer, upload it to your sending tool, your outreach tool, and just start sending a bunch of cold emails or start doing outreach right away. A very important step that you must 100% need to take is you need to verify your email list just to make sure that These emails are 100% updated, they're correct, if you emailed them, those people will actually exist. Because if you email people with non existent emails or wrong emails, then your emails will bounce and it'll actually severely mess up your outreach deliverability and your outreach infrastructure. So what I have found is to use this tool called Million Verifier, which basically allows you to verify your leads list for you. And it's a tool that you 100% need. So this is basically a short Guide on Apollo I.O. and how to use it in 2026 to generate leads, generate replies, and book you a bunch of calls for your own business. Hope you found this video valuable. If you did, make sure you drop me a like, make sure you drop me a subscribe and I'll see you in the next one. See ya.