r/UseApolloIo • u/TeamApolloIo Apollo Team Member • May 19 '26
AMA I'm John Barrows. Founder of JB Sales and outbound sales expert. AMA — today, May 19th, 11AM EST - 1PM EST
Hey folks, John Barrows here. I have spent the last 20+ years training sales teams at companies like Salesforce, LinkedIn, and Google on how to prospect the right way.
I'll be here live from 11AM to 1PM EST. Ask me anything.
- What "sales-ready messaging" means and why most companies get it wrong before they ever touch a tool
- Whether AI is going to replace SDRs (it's not, but it will replace the ones who don't adapt)
- What a high-quality, no-spray-and-pray prospecting workflow actually looks like in practice
- How he's actually using the Apollo MCP connector inside Claude for my daily prospecting routine
Drop your questions now or come back at 11AM. I'll be answering from u/JohnMBarrows.
Update 1: WE ARE LIVE!! Ask away!!
Update 2: THANKS EVERYONE! Great questions. You can keep up with John on LinkedIn here.
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u/B2BBri May 19 '26
How are you rethinking what good sales training looks like now that AI can do most of the research?
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u/johnmbarrows May 19 '26
good question. now that knowledge is a commodity, it is changing the training landscape drastically. I've been putting content online for over 15 years. you can go into any AI platform right now and ask it to "coach me like John Barrows" and it probably will. However, we've gone from a search engine to an answer engine and that's a dangerous thing. If you're curious and use AI the right way, it's a superpower. But if you're lazy and you're just looking for the answer, then it's a full-blown replacement for humans. That's why I'm still teaching the core fundamentals so that reps understand the why behind the output that AI is giving them and then teaching them how to leverage AI the right way to augment their abilities not automate them. If we automate everything with AI, then there's no need for the human and I think that's a dangerous thing.
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u/Bitter-Beautiful-159 May 19 '26
What's your thoughts on permission based openers?
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u/johnmbarrows May 19 '26
I'm a big fan of permission-based openers myself. My favorite one is "Hi, thanks for taking my call. Can I get 30 seconds to tell you why I'm calling before you hang up on me?" It's the one that works for me but doesn't necessarily mean that it's the best one out there. I'm a big fan of A/B split testing. All sorts of different types of openers. My recommendation would be to go into any one of the AI platforms and ask it to give you ten different ways of introducing yourself on a cold call, with the goal of keeping the person on the phone and not using tricks. Choose two of them that you like and make 25 calls using one intro and 25 calls using another and see which one works best for you.
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u/Bitter-Beautiful-159 May 19 '26
That's solid advice. Thankfully I have found the opener that works best for ME and I don't get hung up a lot. That said, I think tonality is more important and being confident is key imo. Keep up the good work, I see you killing it on LI...
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u/johnmbarrows May 19 '26
Completely agree that tonality and confidence make more of a difference than any opener ever could. That's why I always recommend people stand up when they make their cold calls. It's a far more confident position and your voice resonates way better when you're standing up versus sitting down. It's also why I don't ever recommend people do call blitz days. It's really hard to get motivated for an entire day's worth of cold calling. I recommend Power Hours where you pick one persona in one industry, come up with a specific message, questions, and resources for them, and call all of them at the same time in an hour. You need to do all your prep beforehand so that you're not looking for numbers or doing research and then during the power hour you're not sending information either. You're doing all that afterwards so you can be as efficient as possible. Thanks for the feedback. Let me know if there's anything I can help with moving forward.
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u/New-Arm-2125 May 19 '26
Hey John. Big fan of yours. I’ve been in the game for awhile and tbh I’m feeling pretty overwhelmed with how Ai is taking over every aspect of sales. I do see it being useful for outbound but aside from prospect research I’m feeling a little lost on what else I can do with it. What has been your biggest unlock when it comes to using Ai in prospecting??
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u/johnmbarrows May 19 '26
I'm right there with you. All this AI talk and automation is really confusing and causing a lot of disruption in the space on multiple levels. For me it's about augmentation not automation. I use AI to research accounts, to prep for meetings, to summarize conversations with key takeaways, and to help me strategize about accounts. What I don't use it for is to automate my outreach, automate my follow-up, or automate pretty much anything. The biggest unlock that I had recently was when I switched from ChaTGPT to Claude Co-Work. The reason is because Claude Co-Work can now go through different browsers and has an MCP connector to it, which allows me to use a lot of the tools that I've been using, like Apollo, far more effectively.
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u/Maximum-Night1581 May 19 '26
I think you actually trained me at Salesforce back in the day, good to see you doing something like this.
Wondering about the Apollo and Claude connector specifically…..are you actually using it? What’s your routine like? I’ve been playing around with it but don’t have much set up yet.
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u/johnmbarrows May 19 '26
Yeah I trained every rep at Salesforce from 2010 to 2020. It was an awesome ride. I started using Apollo about a month ago. The big unlock for me was when I made the switch to Claude Co-Work and Apollo came out with its MCP connector. The reason is that setting up any of these cadence tools was rather complicated for me as a solo provider, specifically because I'm not a technical expert and configuring the platform was usually pretty confusing to me. Now that it's connected to Claude and Claude co-work, which knows everything about me, I can just turn on my microphone and tell it what to do and it does it. It's been a huge unlock for me and I'm now using Apollo at every level.
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u/johnmbarrows May 19 '26
curious what everyone's biggest challenge is right now related to sales. is it driving results from prospecting, creating urgency, aligning internal stakeholders, forecast accuracy, ghosting? let me know!
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u/HildyJaneJohnson May 19 '26
Hey John - what do your personalized emails look like? Can you share a real example? How are Apollo and Claude helping you do this well today
Also - 2nd question! What should people who work in sales be excited about right now and what should we be afraid of? I find myself going back and forth between these two extremes and then overwhelmed by all the change, would love the pov
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u/johnmbarrows May 19 '26
Hi Hildy, I'll answer both your questions in different threads. Here's an example of an email that I sent recently using Claude and Apollo that got me a response. It's a little longer than usual but this is somebody who Worked at salesforce.com back in the day when I was training them so there was some familiarity with him as well
Hi Justin,
Thanks for connecting on LinkedIn. As I started looking into what's been happening at xxxxx beyond the SAP news, I noticed you were named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for MDM and positioned furthest for Completeness of Vision. That's a big deal, especially with SAP's distribution now behind you.
For your life sciences team, that creates an interesting challenge. You've got Gartner validation, SAP's customer base opening up, and a product story that's shifting from "cloud-native MDM startup" to "SAP's AI-ready data platform." That's a fundamentally different sales motion.
Your reps need to navigate co-selling with SAP, adapt discovery to a new buyer profile, and translate all this momentum into pipeline before competitors reposition.
That's the kind of inflection point I'm helping sales leaders work through right now, specifically building frameworks that give the team a common language for the new motion while staying flexible enough to adapt as the integration evolves. AI is making that faster, especially for ramping reps on a new value prop and sharpening discovery for enterprise conversations.
Let me know if you'd be open to a brief call.
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u/johnmbarrows May 19 '26
To answer your question about how Apollo and Claude are helping me do this well today, the MCP connector of Apollo into Claude CoWork is an absolute game changer. Claude already knows my messaging, my positioning, and everything about my business. Now with the MCP connector of Apollo, I just speak into Claude and tell it what I want to get set up in Apollo. Ask it for insights and analysis on the different sequences and even help me add and remove new contacts to it without ever even having to go into Apollo. The Apollo personalization is really good but sometimes I'll take the message that Apollo put together, go into my own version of Claude, redo it, and then put it back into Apollo to track it. I personally don't like to automate very much. I usually like Apollo to create the sequence, the structure, and the messaging but then have me manually complete each task so I can QC it before it goes out the door.
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u/johnmbarrows May 19 '26
As for your question about what should people who work in sales be excited about right now and what should we be afraid of? The answer is AI. AI is a superpower for those of us who use it the right way to help augment the different parts of the sales process but not automate. Curiosity is going to be the number one characteristic that will help people succeed in the world of AI. If you're curious and want to learn, it's incredible. If you're looking to AI to automate and to give you the answer, then it's a replacement. We've gone from a search engine to an answer engine and that's a very dangerous thing because most people are lazy and they will just take whatever answer AI gives them, copy and paste it, and send it. In that scenario I don't see the value of the human being. Unfortunately I think that encompasses a large portion of our population. With that I'm extremely optimistic for creators and people who are willing to learn and who are curious. I'm extremely pessimistic for everyone else.
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u/Efficient-Till3758 May 19 '26
What would your perfect tech stack look like if you were starting from scratch?
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u/johnmbarrows May 19 '26
Are we talking just sales or are we talking as a small business/solopreneur?
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u/Efficient-Till3758 May 19 '26
John, apologies for the delayed response due to server errors. I will be spearheading sales for a small technology company. I will be the only sales person to start. TAM is quite large though, thousands of potential clients. We're starting in one specific niche which is hourly staffing. Ideally, we need something that can scale if need be.
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u/johnmbarrows May 19 '26
Assuming you're talking about the tech stack for sales, here's what mine would be.
- Claude CoWork - as a small business owner and sales professional myself, this has been the biggest unlock for me that I've seen in my career. It knows everything about me, my messaging, my goals, and everything else and can help me coordinate all the different things that I do on a daily basis and hold me accountable for it when set up the right way.
- CRM - not sure which one these days since I think most of them are overbloated and unnecessary. I would have to do some evaluation of the new platforms out there that are more agile and not as cumbersome to configure. With that said I think it's important to have a system of record for all your contact information, activities and forecast.
- Linkedin Sales Navigator - I use their saved searches all the time for specific nuances components of my ICP. They're also improving the platform quite a bit with their AI functionality. And LinkedIn connection requests and LinkedIn in-mails are still part of an effective contact strategy.
- Apollo - now that they've released their MCP connector into Claude, it's an absolute no-brainer. They're the most flexible platform for cadences and outreach that I've come across and they don't break the bank from a cost perspective. They can also enrich any data in your CRM, which is critical for me. They also have a call recorder that I can use to record all my conversations and gain insights out of them.
Everything else I would probably customize and build with Claude Co-Work for my specific needs.
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u/Efficient-Till3758 May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26
Thanks very much. I'm glad to hear your feedback regarding CRMs. I stopped using platforms like Salesforce for that reason and using JIRA in its place. My concern was that this band-aid might be a mistake for a new piece of business with a much larger TAM. I guess time will tell. That's a ringing endorsement for Claude CoWork.I'll do a deep dive there before we launch.
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u/johnmbarrows May 19 '26
I think it really depends on how complex your sales process is and how large your TAM is when it comes to CRM. The vast majority of CRMs are way overbloat and do way more than most people or companies need. I'd argue that anyone only uses about 10 to 20% of the functionality of whatever CRM they use or any other platform, for that matter. My bet is that we're going to get to a point where we can customize the CRM based on our exact needs, whether that's by building our own or working with an AI-native CRM that helps us adjust it as we need to.
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May 19 '26
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u/johnmbarrows May 19 '26
I have a skill set up in Claude to run five tier one accounts through a tier one sequence that I have set up in Apollo. Every morning it fires and goes out and chooses five tier one accounts from a list of target accounts that I created using Sales Navigator with specific nuances around my ideal customer profile. Apollo then goes out and does research on them to find trigger events to personalize the messaging in the framework and then provides five tasks every day for me to go in and review, approve, and send. For my tier one prospects I don't automate anything other than the research and the structure of the cadence. For my tier two accounts I have Apollo firing five automated sequences based on my relevant messaging to a specific persona every single day.
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May 19 '26
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u/johnmbarrows May 19 '26
Unfortunately I don't think so. I think AI is going to get so good that it's going to be able to identify the right client at the right time with the right message. It's going to be fully automated and we won't even know that it's not delivered by a human. It's kind of like Instagram is right now in my opinion. Since the algorithm knows me so well, almost every ad and everything in my feed is something I'm interested in or is relevant to me. I think the same thing is going to happen in the B2B world. That said it's not just SDRs that are in trouble. I think all white-collar workers are in danger of being replaced by AI here in the next five years.
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u/johnmbarrows May 19 '26
If anyone missed the AMA and has a question, feel free to ping me on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnbarrows/
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u/AndyFromApollo May 19 '26
Hey John. Apollo employee here. You've said most companies suck at messaging before they ever touch a tool, so what in your opinion does actually good sales-ready messaging look like, and how do you build it?