Company: Apollo.io, San Francisco, CA
Nomination Submitted by: Apollo.io
Company Description: Apollo.io is an end-to-end AI-powered sales platform that provides revenue teams with easy access to verified contact data, along with powerful engagement, automation, and intelligence tools to find and target the right buyer at the right time with the right message.
Nomination Category: Solution Provider Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Sales or Customer Service Solutions Technology Partner of the Year
 Nomination Title: Apollo.io: Democratizing GTM Sales Software for the Underserved SMB Market
- Which will you submit for your nomination in this category, a video of up to five (5) minutes, explaining the achievements since July 1, 2022 of the nominated organization, OR written answers to the questions? (Choose one):
Written answers to the questions
- If you are submitting a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, provide the URL of the video here, OR attach it to your entry via the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above, through which you may also upload a copy of your video. If you are submitting written answers to the questions for this category, provide them in the spaces below.
https://youtu.be/Bnr5Xqzr-Ec?feature=shared
- Briefly describe the nominated organization: its history and past performance (up to 200 words):
Total 200 words used.
- Apollo.io was created in 2015 to solve a problem every company has: how to grow your business and create revenue. Sales is hard, and getting harder. Businesses have to identify their customers, figure out how best to reach them, and then make that approach repeatable for every salesperson in their company. Apollo’s all-in-one AI-powered sales platform simplifies this go-to-market workflow, helping every company, big and small, find and engage the right prospects at the right time.
- We entered a market dominated by a near-monopoly competitor that catered to the top 1% of enterprise companies. Apollo has since reshaped market expectations by offering a simple, powerful, and intelligent GTM solution at a competitive price. We have democratized access to GTM software for the underserved market of 330M global small businesses. By consolidating the sales tech stack, we provide users with easy access to verified contact data, along with powerful engagement, automation, and intelligence tools to find and target the right buyer at the right time with the right message.
- Apollo is trusted by 500,000+ companies and millions of users globally. We are one of the fastest growing companies in SaaS, raising $250 million and valued at $1.6 billion.
- Outline the organization's achievements since July 1 2022 that you wish to bring to the judges' attention (up to 250 words):
Total 162 words used.
- Apollo’s unique approach to product-led growth — where 60% of funds are invested into product development — has resulted in a rapid increase in new users and revenue. Since 2021, the company has grown revenue 2,500% and currently serves over three million GTM professionals at companies such as [REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION], Docusign, and Autodesk.
- With over 80K paying customers, Apollo is the largest product-led growth offering in the Sales Intelligence and Engagement space, currently valued at $1.6 billion. In 2024, Apollo ranked No. 125 fastest-growing company on Deloitte's Fast 500 list.
- On G2, Apollo is the No. 1 ranked best sales intelligence software for small business owners and has earned No. 1 rankings in the SMB categories for lead capture, marketing account intelligence, and lead intelligence -- empowering sellers to find, prioritize, and convert prospects who are actively looking to buy. Apollo was also awarded No. 3 for Best Sales Products on G2’s 2024 Best Software Awards, behind HubSpot and Salesforce.
- Explain why the achievements you have highlighted are unique or significant. If possible compare the achievements to the performance of other players in your industry and/or to the organization's past performance (up to 250 words):
Total 244 words used.
- Apollo.io is one of the fastest-growing companies in SaaS at a time when many companies are shrinking or stagnating. Over the last two years, we have doubled our headcount and are currently ranked by Forbes as one of America's Best Startup Employers 2024. While others are downsizing, Apollo is HIRING!
- Apollo has democratized access to intelligent GTM software for the underserved market of 330M global small businesses, with an estimated market size of about $30 billion. Apollo’s product-led, end-to-end sales tooling approach disrupts an ecosystem of legacy sales tech solutions that are expensive and unintuitive to use, neglecting hundreds of thousands of startups, entrepreneurs, nonprofits, and others. Many SMBs can replace 6-7 different sales and marketing tools with Apollo, cutting costs without losing workflows that give modern businesses a competitive edge. Apollo is proving that creating easy to use, user-informed tools for the SMB market is a viable business model.
- Customers that use Apollo.io see a 48% improvement in reply rates and 90% improvement in demo rates for the sales reps that use the company’s personalized openers.
- Apollo continues to build innovative, end-to-end solutions, with new and upcoming features like AI and automation capabilities to streamline prospecting and outreach, multi-source enrichment to help sales and marketing teams leverage an ever-growing list of data about their prospects for more personalized outreach, and Apollo Labs, a new AI-powered Sales Development Representative (SDR) solution that blends expert human oversight with the power of AI automation.
- Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (up to 250 words):
Total 232 words used.
Customer case studies include:
- GTM Ops, a RevOps agency, used Apollo Workflows to automate their outreach and increase SDR efficiency by 300%, saving 70 hours per week. This allowed GTM Ops to drive 4x more meetings booked, with 75% of meetings coming from the automated intent-based workflows. The agency emphasizes that workflows are critical for responding to the "new reality" of sales, where budgets are tighter, sales cycles are longer, and consolidated sales tools are needed to drive efficiency.
- Smartling, a leader in language translation and localization, recognized that they needed to expand their targeting beyond just tech companies to new industries like government and life sciences. However, this market expansion required a lot of manual research that was stunting their BDRs' productivity. Smartling turned to Apollo's AI Power-ups to automate much of this research process. By leveraging Apollo's AI-driven research capabilities, Smartling was able to 10x their sales rep productivity without sacrificing quality.
- Mutiny, an AI-powered marketing and sales tool, wanted to move upmarket to sign on large enterprise customers but their outbound process was disjointed, with contact data and outreach spread across multiple tools. By integrating Salesforce with Apollo, Mutiny was able to centralize their outbound process, allowing reps to access contact data and run personalized email sequences all in one tool. This increased email open rates by 70% and drove a 200%+ increase in outbound revenue within 90 days.
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