Customer.io Skyrockets Sales Qualified Leads by 70% After Implementing Apollo

When you’re a sales leader at a company that offers world-class messaging automation like Customer.io, leading an efficient and data-driven sales team isn’t an option — it’s a requirement.

Customer.io needed a modern sales intelligence and engagement platform that played nicely with their tech stack and increased conversion rates. 

“Because of our hybrid sales model, we needed a tool that worked for both trial accounts in our self-serve flow and demo requests in our sales motion,” shared Kaleb Batman, Sales Development Manager at Customer.io.

Here’s how Kaleb and Customer.io revolutionized their sales team’s workflow with Apollo and drove 70% more sales-qualified leads.

What Sets Customer.io Apart?

Customer.io, a leading messaging automation platform, helps companies like Notion, Shutterstock, and IMAX build and send data-driven emails with ultimate control and flexibility. 

“We’re something new; completely purpose-built,” says Kaleb.

And they are.

Here at Apollo, our own growth team uses Customer.io to nurture our users at scale, streamlining and personalizing our one-off email broadcasts and product onboarding messages to more than 1M users.

And we’re not the only ones: over the past two years, Customer.io has averaged 50%+ year-over-year growth. To continue the momentum, the sales team needed consistent and reliable data to develop new relationships and build prospects’ trust. 

They needed a B2B lead database with verified emails and phone numbers, as well as the ability to engage prospects in multi-channel sequences, all from one platform. The ultimate tool to help them scale their sales motion.

Going-to-Market with Outdated Tools

Kaleb was in an SDR role when Customer.io looked to up their sales game. He was provided with two tools: Close CRM and ZoomInfo.

Everything was manual. Their sequences — when they decided to use them — didn’t allow them to customize steps and manual data entry needed for every call, email, and social touchpoint.

“It just wasn’t scalable.”

Customer.io began searching for a tool that united quality data with efficient engagement features to ensure their team could provide relevant content to the right audience at the right time.

Soon, Apollo was brought in.

A Solution Built for Scale

Suddenly, Kaleb and his team had a database of 250m contacts at their fingertips.

“What I saw was this huge, brand new platform that had the capabilities of Salesloft and Outreach, plus ZoomInfo. Apollo is two platforms in one in a way that could save us clicks, save us time, and allow us to create sequences for the first time.”

Kaleb, at this point one of the company’s most seasoned and successful SDRs, stepped into a manager position, tasked with training, leading, and coaching a team of SDRs to success in Apollo.

“I saw a lot of potential to be influential from the ground up, in terms of my product knowledge and industry knowledge, but also my experience building and scaling SDR teams.”

Apollo was there to help him do it.

Using Apollo to Create a Better Way to Work

The SDR team suddenly had a world of functionality.

Kaleb remembers telling the team: “This thing has a lot of stuff you can do. There’s a lot of people you can search for, there’s a lot of companies you can search for, there’s the intent you can layer on, there are technologies you can search for, you can pull reports.”

Kaleb and Customer.io sales leadership focused on coaching and developing reps, teaching them important sales development tactics like automation best practices, filtering for ICPs, personalizing outreach, and building sequences. 

Leveraging Apollo, they built, tested, and rolled out playbooks that aligned with their ideal sales motion, making it easy for reps to carry out the right message at the right time. 

Customer.io evolved its engagement strategies from enrichment to split tests to insights in order to make its outbound sales more effective.

For every sales engagement obstacle, Apollo had a solution.

Over time, new ideal customer profiles were uncovered, template and sequence libraries were organically built out by the team, and cold call quantity and quality increased as talk tracks were sculpted around objections in real time.

“We increased lead flow and had folks consistently hitting quota and accelerators.”

With an end-to-end platform that allowed reps to supplement their contacts with verified data and engage best-fit prospects all in one place, Customer.io increased their sales qualified leads by an extraordinary 70% and took their team of 12 salespeople up to 29.

And with their insatiable appetite for excellence, you better believe that Customer.io’s growth to date is only just the start.

Alex Heurich, Director of Sales Operations at Customer.io, put it best.

You can, too. Contact Apollo.io today.