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How Emerge Market's CMO Tripled Apollo Spend to Drive 400% Pipeline Growth

Drowning in tech stack chaos, Emerge rebuilt their go-to-market engine on Apollo — sparking 400% pipeline growth and transforming how the company sells, markets, and scales.

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Profile photo of Alyssa Haeussler

Alyssa Haeussler

PUBLISHED Oct 14, 2025

Ben Sanders inherited a tech stack nightmare as CMO of Emerge, a digital freight technology.

The breaking point: a prospect on the verge of signing a major deal received an automated demo request. Their response: "This seems uncoordinated. Is this what your company is all about?"

“That was the straw that broke the camel's back,” remembers Ben. “The only way to solve this is if we move to a technology stack that will work for us, as opposed to against us.”

The go-to-market transformation would drive 400% pipeline growth and position Emerge as a leader in freight procurement technology.

From tool chaos to clarity in one platform

Despite significant pandemic demand, Ben's teams were drowning in operational chaos.

The tech stack was a patchwork of solutions: Salesforce and HubSpot as dual CRMs, ZoomInfo for enrichment, and multiple outbound tools. Nothing talked to each other. Teams were sidetracked by managing data inconsistencies and manual processes.

"My teams were focusing too much of their energy making sure we weren't reaching out to the wrong people, Ben explains.

Instead of patching integration issues, Ben made a bold call: rebuild the entire stack around Apollo. "It takes guts to really move a technology stack across all of your sales and marketing pipeline," Ben notes. "Even a few weeks of downtime in your sales pipeline can have a big ripple effect."

The decision hinged on three factors: high-quality enrichment data across the entire GTM process, Apollo's AI vision aligning with Ben's scaling plans, and responsive support through Slack and email.

"I view it as a partnership, not just technology," Ben explains. “That’s a level of support that is hard to find without paying millions every year."

Without Apollo, we would still be in the digital stone age, using multiple disparate tools, combing through different lists, manually deciding who to reach out to.

- Ben Sanders, CMO, Emerge

Scaling calls with parallel dialer

One immediate win came from Apollo's Parallel Dialer. Previously, SDRs had to build lists in Apollo, export them to another dialing tool, sync results back, and deal with enriching, tagging, and managing talking points for dials one by one.

It consumed "at least an hour per SDR per day, and that's a conservative estimate," Ben explains.

That manual work disappeared with Apollo. Reps now see enriched data, past activities, call transcripts, and company news — perfect talking points for cold calls. With that streamlining, Emerge's reps can scale up their dials and still focus on higher-value prospecting activities.

As enterprise sales manager, Daniel Rael, observes: “People actually answering their phone is a struggle. Without a parallel dialer, I don't even know if we’d make phone calls anymore. It wouldn't be worth spending all that time trying to get a hold of people.”

Unified CRM: From data chaos to crystal-clear pipeline insights

Moving from multiple CRMs to Apollo's unified platform solved their coordination issues while providing enhanced analytics capabilities.

The team can now analyze specific attributes like which titles, seniorities, and geographic regions generate the most positive phone interactions, and which email approaches drive the highest reply rates by industry and company size.

"Now we can drill in on things that were unimaginable before," Ben notes. “That creates a healthier funnel because we're finding more people that are looking for our solution.”

AI-powered targeting and personalization for perfect-fit prospects

The CRM migration revealed many poor-fit contacts thanks to intel from Apollo. Using AI research, Emerge rates leads on a 1-10 scale to help reps focus exclusively on high-potential prospects.

Daniel explains, "We weeded out a lot of shippers that my SDRs would have been going after. Now they’re focused on anyone that's a seven or greater on our shipper scale." Not only did this speed up the reps' prospecting, "They're more confident with who they’re putting time and effort into."

AI-powered custom data points also transformed Emerge’s outreach precision. They could now make every interaction more relevant, like a specific message to manufacturing leaders hiring 5+ transportation managers in the past three weeks.

“Hyper personalization is the future of marketing,” Ben says. "For the first time ever, we're able to leverage AI research to make thousands of campaigns hyper-personalized. We could never do that in our other tools before.”

The results: Mission critical for growth

Ben's team tripled their Apollo spend as they consolidated their entire go-to-market motion and saw results like a 400% increase in net-new pipeline activity.

What started as tool consolidation became the foundation for next-generation go-to-market.

"Without Apollo, we would still be in the digital stone age, using multiple disparate tools, combing through different lists, manually deciding who to reach out to. But now with Apollo, we have everything in one tool, powered by AI,” says Ben.

For GTM leaders facing tool chaos, Emerge’s approach offers a clear framework: consolidate ruthlessly, bet on AI capabilities, and choose partners who scale with your vision.

As Ben sums up, "Partnering with Apollo is mission critical for our growth."

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