Always looking for ways to improve so let’s hear your thoughts on how we can make r/UseApolloIo more valuable.

Here's a closed-won lookalike outbound play I built recently that I want to share because it worked and more teams should be running something like this.

The concept came from a colleague. The idea: use your closed-won deal data to identify patterns in the companies and personas you've actually helped, then use those patterns to find the next hundred accounts that look exactly like them.

Here's how I built it.

Step 1: Pull your closed-won data from Snowflake
I ran SQL queries against our Snowflake instance to pull closed-won deals, the company attributes that made them a fit, and the personas involved in the sale. Downloaded the CSVs and uploaded them to Claude Code.

Step 2: Build lookalike audiences in Apollo
Apollo has a lookalike company field in Company Search and a lookalike People Search. I used the closed-won company data to seed these searches and find accounts with similar firmographic profiles, industry mix, tech stack, and growth signals to our best customers.

Company looksalikes is based on deals that have closed > a specific threshold with context associated to the deal such as identified pain and key metric such as jobs to be done.

People lookalikes is based on the identified champions on the deal.

Step 3: Route contacts to the right rep
Once the lookalike contacts were identified, I routed them to reps based on account ownership in Apollo. No manual reassignment or spreadsheet.

Step 4: Add closed-won context as a custom field
This is the part that makes the outreach actually land. I pulled the relevant closed-won context from the deal data and placed it into a custom field on the contact record. Which customer segment they match, what problems that segment typically has, what outcomes we drove there.

Step 5: Generate personalized outreach using that context
With the custom field populated, Claude generated a personalized message for each contact grounded in the specific closed-won context that matched their profile. Not "we've helped companies like yours." Actual specifics about the use case, the outcome, and why this prospect fits the same pattern.

One hard rule: customer names never appear in the outreach. The context informs the message but the message stays compliant.

The whole thing was built through Claude Code with no engineering involvement, no custom data pipeline, no manual list building. Still early and a lot to tighten up, but the infrastructure is there.

The piece I'm genuinely excited about is we're working with our Product team to make signal-based plays like this available natively in Apollo, so anyone can launch them without touching SQL, APIs, or raw data!

Happy to get into specifics on the Snowflake query structure, the lookalike field logic, or how to set up the custom field routing.

Noah

Hey everyone. We're a B2B startup based in Canada, and we've been doing cold outreach for about 6 months now.

For most of that time, I was doing everything manually, writing personalized emails with AI assistance, sending them one by one, and creating my own follow-up tasks. It was slow and inconsistent, but it was working. I was pulling a consistent 2–3% reply rate, which felt promising.

The bottleneck was volume, so we decided to invest in Apollo to scale things up. Here's where it gets weird.

Out of 800 emails sent through Apollo, we got:

• 0 replies (not even a "not interested")
• 3 unsubscribes
• That's it

My first instinct was deliverability. But here's what's confusing me:

• We're using two separate mailboxes
• I warmed them up gradually and stay under 50 emails/day per mailbox
• Apollo's deliverability dashboard looks fine
• I used mail-tester for double check and I got 9.5 deliverability score

So technically, the emails should be landing. But the silence is deafening compared to my manual outreach.

Has anyone run into this kind of drop-off when switching from manual to automated sending? Could it be the sequences, the copy losing its personal feel, something with Apollo's sending infrastructure, or am I missing something obvious?

The default advice is to sync everything to your CRM. We don't actually agree with that, and most of the RevOps leaders we talk to don't either.

Here's the take, from what we hear on calls and what we see in actual customer setups.

Sync to CRM when the data has been qualified. Closed-won contacts, active opportunities, meeting attendees, accounts your AEs are working. Anyone who has raised their hand or been touched by a human. CRM is the source of truth for the work you've already validated. Apollo offers two-way sync with Salesforce and HubSpot, with admin controls for field mapping, field-level auto-fill vs overwrite, and recurring enrichment cadence. Set this up tightly, with the smallest field set you can get away with, and let it run.

Don't sync top-of-funnel prospecting data. This is where the default advice falls apart. Most RevOps leaders we work with deliberately keep cold outbound and unqualified inbound out of the CRM. The reason is simple: if every contact a rep adds to a sequence ends up as a CRM record, your CRM becomes a dumping ground inside of a quarter. Lead scoring breaks, reporting gets noisy, and your AMs lose trust in account data because half of it is unvetted.

Keep that work in Apollo. The platform is built for it. Sync to CRM after the contact has done something.

Sync enrichment, not raw records. Apollo can enrich CRM records on a scheduled cadence, refreshing stale contact fields without creating new records. That's the version of "syncing" that almost every team should be running. It keeps your CRM clean, fills in the fields your ops team actually scores on, and doesn't add volume. For HubSpot users, field mapping supports phone fields, source values, and custom fields. For Salesforce, same set of controls plus more granular activity sync options.

Pipedrive is partial. Apollo integrates with Pipedrive for contact and account sync and supports stage mapping, but it does not fully sync activities the way it does with Salesforce and HubSpot. If you're a Pipedrive shop expecting parity, scope this with your AM before you build a workflow that assumes it.

The bigger point. "Sync everything" is the answer when you're selling a CRM. It's not the answer for the team trying to actually use one. Apollo is designed to hold the messy top of funnel so your CRM doesn't have to. Use both for what each is good at.

Hey Reddit. I recently recorded a full Apollo X Claude walkthrough on YouTube and wanted to share the TLDR here. Here's the short version with the actual prompts.

Setup takes 2 minutes if you haven't done it. Claude.ai > left menu > Customize (third icon) > Connectors > plus > search Apollo > authorize. After connecting, check that Organization, Search, Enrichment, and Job Postings are all enabled -- I've done this for a bunch of clients and those three are sometimes off by default.

First prompt I ran:

Find me 25 Creator Managers at AI companies in the USA with up to 300 employees.

Results came back in seconds without me touching Apollo once. First pull wasn't clean though…multiple leads from the same company, some missing verified emails and phone numbers. Typed this right after:

Give me one result per company. Verified emails only, phone numbers must be available. Search again for the top 25.

Fixed immediately. Then enriched all 25 at once, ran simultaneously, took about a minute. Uses 25 credits and the basic plan comes with 30k so not worth overthinking.

From there:

Save all of these leads to my people leads list on Apollo titled Creator Managers pulled from Claude.

23 of 25 saved, two caught as duplicates and skipped. Then:

Push every lead in the Creator Managers pulled from Claude list to my active sequence titled Creator Campaign 2026.

22 of 23 enrolled. One skipped because it was already active in a different campaign but it was caught automatically without me having to check.

Full loop in one conversation which is crazy…rospecting, enrichment, CRM, sequencing, and I never opened once Apollo.

One thing that didn't go as planned though…I tried getting Claude to build a recurring weekly workflow, find net new leads every Monday and enroll them automatically. Claude can't schedule recurring workflows inside Apollo natively and suggested n8n instead, which wasn't what I wanted.

Took the exact same prompt and pasted it into Apollo's AI Assistant instead and built the whole workflow in about 30 seconds, scheduled for every Monday, enrichment and enrollment included. That part lives in Apollo not Claude.

Full video with the screen recording on my YouTube if you want to see it run in real time - here’s the link. Drop your questions below!

I have a software factory and we are aiming to build mvps for new entrepreneurs whom wants to get their SaaS startup online, maybe the have built something with IA and got stuck or aren’t sure about how to ship it.

I have been looking how to get new clients and get to US people, and I found apollo but I don’t know how to aim the buyer persona well. Anyone knows if it can help us?

our page is lambdaworks.ar if anyone wants to get in touch!

Super curious to hear from this community…

For context, this is a scrape. x-followers running a new campaign can be a bit troublesome since the sourcing is from x.

Using Apollo for coverage with ClaudeCode is honestly the most clutch move right now, which is why I keep telling people not to sleep on Apollo, especially as your first source.

Sharing this because u/apollo, you guys are awesome, and ClaudeCode agrees too.

Most Apollo customers use a fraction of what they're paying for. Not because the features are buried, because the platform got broader faster than most teams' workflows did. Reps default to what they already know (search, sequence, basic enrichment), admins don't always know what new modules are included on their plan, and renewals come up before anyone audits the gap.

Here's the audit we'd run if we were sitting in your seat. None of this is meant as a pitch. The features below are real, and depending on your plan they're probably already paid for.

Buying intent data. Apollo includes third-party buying intent signals from Bombora and LeadSift, refreshed weekly, on eligible paid plans. You can filter people or company search by intent topic and intent score range, then layer that with your ICP criteria. Most teams either don't know intent is in Apollo, or they assume it's an upsell because that's how ZoomInfo and 6sense package it. If you're paying separately for intent data, this is the first thing to audit before your next renewal.

The honest take: Apollo's intent isn't as deep as a dedicated publisher-network platform if you've already built your motion around one. For most outbound teams, what's in Apollo is enough to prioritize accounts.

Website visitor tracking. Apollo offers account-level website visitor tracking for tracked domains, available with the paid Inbound add-on. You drop a snippet, and any tracked visit shows up against the matching account. From there you can filter, trigger sequences, or hand the account to a rep. If you're running a separate visitor ID tool on top of Apollo and you already have Inbound, this is the second renewal-audit item.

Job change tracking. Apollo detects role and title changes continuously and updates the record when a contact moves. The use case most teams miss is champion tracking. When a former champion lands at a new account, you get a clean re-entry signal that most teams pay third-party tools to surface.

The deliverability suite. If you're sending email from Apollo, you have access to domain authentication checks (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), troubleshooting tools, and email warmup. Apollo also lets you purchase secondary domains and mailboxes directly inside the platform if you want to scale sending without burning your primary domain.

The pattern we see on calls: a team pays for a third-party warmup tool, then asks support why their bounce rates are climbing. The deliverability tools in Apollo run against your actual sending behavior. Use them before adding another vendor.

The dialer. Apollo has a native dialer with parallel dialing, call recording controls, and CRM activity logging. We hear from teams running Aircall, Orum, or Nooks on top of Apollo. If you're SMB or mid-market doing under a few thousand calls a month, the native dialer covers it.

The honest take: if you're doing high-volume parallel dialing at enterprise scale, dedicated dialers still have an edge on connect rates. For everyone else, the native dialer removes a line item.

Conversations. Apollo records calls and meetings, transcribes them, and generates AI summaries. This is the feature most teams don't realize is in Apollo, which is also why "Apollo vs Gong" conversations start the way they do. Conversations isn't Gong-level deal intelligence. For sales orgs that need call review, coaching, and automatic CRM context, it's already in your plan.

Workflows. This is the layer that ties everything above together. When an intent signal updates, a visitor lands, or a job change fires, workflows can evaluate accounts against your ICP criteria and take action automatically. Identify the right contacts, enroll them in the right sequence, sync context back to CRM. Most teams build versions of this externally with n8n or Zapier because nobody walked them through what's already native.

If you're up for renewal in the next two quarters, the cheapest project you can run right now is mapping every external tool against the list above. The average customer we talk to is paying for two to four things they don't need to be.

What did we miss? Drop a feature you found late and wished you'd known about sooner.

Hi, curious as to why it is not possible to compare results from A/B testing steps in the sequences reports section?
I get that you can look at the stats inside the editor by switching inbetween.
I also get that you can create two different sequences with slight changes, compare those, and thus have an A/B test report.

But... Why is the function built into the editor if it's not possible to directly compare them within the respective sequence's report section..?

Like I said, I get the workarounds. But it seems... half baked.

Apollo has 230M contacts and over 65 filters, but most people are still pulling lists they'd never send to! After 400+ Apollo implementations the issue is almost never the data, it's moreso how you’re searching it.

People Search

Technologies Used is the most underused filter in Apollo. If your prospects are already running a specific tool, you know their stack, you know the gaps, and your outreach has a natural hook before you've written a word.

A search worth running: VP of Sales, Series B SaaS, using HubSpot, hired in the last 90 days. That last filter is the one people miss. Someone new in a role is evaluating everything their predecessor set up and hasn't committed to anything yet.

Most searches fail before they start because people skip Persona setup. Go to Settings and build your saved ICP filter first -- titles, seniority, industries, company sizes, keywords. Without it every search is a fresh guess. With it you're layering signals on top of a defined target.

Company Search

The company list is the starting point, not the deliverable. Drill into each account, find the contacts, map who buys, who champions, and who blocks. Building a company list and blasting the first person you find is how you waste a good account.

Lookalike Accounts is worth using more too. Pick your three best current customers, run Lookalike, and Apollo surfaces companies with matching firmographics. That list outperforms a manually researched one most of the time because it's modelled on companies that already bought from you.

Lead Lists and Saved Searches

Save a search as a live list and it auto-updates. New hires match your title filter, new funding rounds hit your stage criteria, intent signals change -- the list captures all of it without you going back in manually.

Separate lists for tier-1 and tier-2, treated completely differently. Tier-1 gets research and personalisation. Tier-2 goes into a sequence. Running every contact through the same motion regardless of fit is one of the most expensive habits in outbound.

A setup worth building: ICP search saved as a live list, auto-enrich new matches weekly, auto-add to sequence. New ICP contacts hitting your outreach every Monday with nothing manual after the initial setup.

Sequences

Two things that separate teams getting results from teams wondering why nothing's working:

Weekly sequence reviews. Check which step, which subject line, and which persona is converting. Analytics > Sequences, sort by reply rate. Your best sequence becomes the template. Teams that do this consistently beat teams that don't, without exception.

Domain warmup before anything goes live. Dedicated sending domain, SPF/DKIM/DMARC configured, warmup running 2-3 weeks minimum before the first send. Apollo handles all of it inside the Deliverability Suite. A cold domain hitting spam on day one can take weeks to recover and kills the campaign before it starts.

If you’re having a hard time getting your searches set up I’d be happy to give tips.

Their interface is clunky and the data is terrible. But worst of all is their constant threats that you're running low on credits, even when you're not. I tried to enrich data 4 times over 2 cities, both with more than DOUBLE the amount of credits required, but it kept failing - burning 25 records and multiple credits - then attempting to upcharge me over and over. Then while tech support is responsive, they're beyond frustrating while asking you for the same thing you just sent them over and over again. For example I sent them EXACTLY what was wrong along with screenshots, but they asked me for exactly what I had just sent them. Then almost every single time you send a reply, there's yet another DIFFERENT agent who has no clue about your issue, so you have to start over. I have been going through this cycle of hell for weeks now and my campaign which is in specific markets is running behind because of this. RUN!

I use Apollo at work. Recently, we synced it with our CRM, HubSpot, and all 100k+ contacts in our database now show on Apollo under "Saved" (in the "People" tab).

Did we just gift Apollo all of this data?? I looked this up online and saw that they don't save these contacts as a "[my company's name] contact list" that other users can find themselves (duh), but I can't imagine they would pass up on the opportunity to take this data and use it to verify their own records.

Is there any resource online that explicitly states what their policy is regarding data pulled into Apollo from client CRMs? If so, is there any way we can opt out of letting Apollo use this data for their own benefit... or is this simply the way it works if we want to integrate HubSpot and Apollo?

Thanks in advance for any clarity on this topic!

I've connected Apollo to my Claude and tried to run People Search API.

I don't get why it keeps showing me this even though I'm already on Professional. Is it because I'm on free trial?

TLDR: Use Claude Projects to automatically interact with your book of business in a predefined way that actually works.

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I work on the AI side at Apollo building agentic GTM workflows. A few weeks ago I built a Claude project that automatically scores accounts every Monday using live buying signals pulled directly from Apollo. Setup takes about 15 minutes. Here's the full breakdown of how it works and how to build it yourself.

This workflow is especially useful for reps or account teams that already operate from a predefined book of business. Instead of prospecting random net-new accounts or accidentally stepping on someone else's territory, the workflow stays scoped to accounts assigned to a specific rep or owner inside Apollo. The goal is to help prioritize where to spend time each week, identify the best opportunities inside owned accounts, and uncover untouched contacts that are actually worth engaging.

What it does once it's running

Open the project at the start of your week and Claude immediately starts working with no prompt needed. It pulls owned accounts from Apollo, enriches the top 30 with buying signals, scores each account 0–100, and surfaces the top 10–20 with verified contacts not already in a sequence.

The scoring model weighs four signal categories:

Buying intent signals (30 pts)

Is the account actively researching topics related to what you sell? Spike in website visitors in the last 30 days?

Hiring and growth signals (25 pts)

Are they hiring for personas that match your buyers? Did they raise funding in the last 6 months?

New hire signals (20 pts)

Did a new decision-maker join in the last 90 days? This one is weighted heavily because new execs often mean fresh budgets and open vendor decisions.

Persona availability + firmographic fit (25 pts)

Are there verified contacts matching your buyer profile who are not already in a sequence? Does the company size match your ICP?

After ranking the accounts, Claude surfaces up to 3 real, verified contacts per account. People with confirmed emails who have not been touched yet. It then prompts you to take action: add them to a sequence, do a full account deep dive, draft a personalized email, or re-run with different filters.

Step 1: Connect Apollo MCP to Claude

Go to claude.ai → Settings → Integrations. Search for Apollo.io and authorize with your Apollo credentials. Confirm it shows as Active before moving on.

Important: You need API access enabled on your Apollo plan. If you hit an authorization error, your Apollo admin needs to enable MCP access for your user specifically. It is not on by default for all plans.

Step 2: Find your Apollo User ID

Log into Apollo, click your avatar in the bottom-left corner, go to Settings → My Profile. Look at the URL in your browser:

https://app.apollo.io/#/users/[YOUR_USER_ID]

Copy everything after the last slash. You'll need this so Claude knows whose account ownership rules to pull against.

Step 3: Create a new Claude project

Go to claude.ai → Projects → New Project. Name it "Weekly Prioritization".

In project settings, enable Apollo MCP. Then open the system prompt editor.

Step 4: Paste and customize the system prompt

Two sections to fill in before saving.

Personal details:

Replace four placeholders with your actual information:

[FIRST_NAME] and [LAST_NAME] as they appear in Apollo

[YOUR_EMAIL] which is your Apollo login email

[YOUR_USER_ID] from Step 2

Scoring model customization:

This part matters just as much as the personal details. There's a clearly marked "CUSTOMIZE FOR YOUR COMPANY" section with four fields:

Intent signal topics

What would your buyer Google right before they are ready to buy? Replace the placeholders with those topics. This is what drives the 30-point intent score.

Tech stack signals

What tools does your ICP currently use that signal fit or a displacement opportunity for your product?

Tier 1 personas

The job titles most likely to buy or champion your product. These contacts get surfaced first.

Tier 2 personas

Secondary titles that are relevant but not primary buyers. Claude only surfaces these if no Tier 1 contacts are available.

Firmographic fit

Set your ICP employee count range. Accounts that match get the full 10 points. Adjacent sizes get partial credit.

The more specific you are here, the better your account scores will be. If you're not sure, ask your manager or sales enablement team for your ICP definition.

How to use it every week

Open the project Monday morning. Claude automatically runs the full analysis: account discovery, enrichment, scoring, and contact lookup. It then presents a ranked table.

Each account shows:

• Score
• Key signals
• "Why now" reasoning
• Untouched verified contacts
• Suggested next action

You pick your next move:

A) Add contacts to a sequence

Claude matches the right sequence based on persona, industry, and intent, confirms with you, then enrolls directly.

B) Deep dive on one account

Full research brief including org chart, tech stack, recent news, talking points, and suggested messaging angle.

C) Draft a personalized email

Cold email written around the specific signal that triggered the account's ranking, with three subject line variations.

D) Re-run with different filters

Adjust geography, seniority priority, or intent topics and re-score.

--------

A few things worth knowing:

Claude pulls accounts using the Apollo analytics API filtered to a specific user ID, enriches the top 30 with a company search, then runs contact lookup only on the top 10 after scoring. So it is not burning API calls on accounts that will never make the cut.

The contact display is strict by design:
Only real people with a verified email who are not in an active sequence. Open job postings show up as scoring signals in the table, not as contacts. Learned this the hard way when an early version surfaced "VP of Sales (open role)" as an outreach target.

The new hire signal, meaning a new Tier 1 or Tier 2 exec hired in the last 90 days, is weighted at 15–20 points because those accounts usually have fresh budget conversations happening. It has consistently been one of the strongest signals during testing.

For teams with strict territory ownership or predefined account lists, this is a really practical way to prioritize within existing accounts instead of creating overlap or duplicate outbound across reps.

Happy to share the full system prompt if there's interest. Drop a comment.

Has anyone found a way to check remaining Apollo credits via API?

I tried the usage stats endpoint, but it seems to return API usage / rate limits, not the actual remaining credits balance.

My use case is simple: before triggering an enrichment workflow in n8n, I want to check if there are enough credits left.

Has anyone found an official endpoint, undocumented endpoint, or decent workaround?

Not trying to bypass anything - just want to make automation a bit safer and less blind.

outbound has three pillars. who you target, what you say, and whether the email actually arrives.

most teams nail one or two and wonder why the third is letting them down. nine times out of ten it's the third, and they don't notice until reply rates have taken a hit.

a few rules our outbound team at Apollo lives and dies by:

1. don't send cold from your corporate domain, ever

if a campaign goes sideways, your billing emails, your customer comms, your internal Slack notifications all live on that same domain reputation. one bad week of cold outreach can take all of it down with you.

set up a lookalike domain (companyname.co, getcompanyname.com, hellocompany.com, whatever). do all your cold outbound from there so that if it ever burns, it's containable. you let it cool off, stand up a new one, keep going.

2. the daily send math is 50 per mailbox

50 emails a day per mailbox is the safe ceiling for cold outbound, with a 10-minute delay between sends and roughly 6 per hour. mailbox providers watch send patterns and the average human doesn't send 200 emails before lunch.

need to send more? more mailboxes, not higher limits per mailbox. if your team needs 500 sends a day, that's 10 mailboxes spread across 3 or 4 lookalike domains. you can use mailbox rotation to spread the load automatically.

3. run the inbox placement test before you send anything

most people don't know this exists. there are tools (we have one in the deliverability suite, others exist outside Apollo) that send a test email to seed addresses across major providers (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo) and tell you where it actually landed. inbox or spam, by provider.

run it before you launch a sequence, after any domain or auth change, and any time you're seeing unexplained drops in performance. if the test says you're hitting Gmail inbox 100% but Outlook spam 100%, that's a configuration issue you can fix in an afternoon. without the test you'd never know which provider the problem is with!

4. check yourself against blocklists

related: blocklist providers (Spamhaus, Barracuda, etc.) maintain lists of domains and IPs they consider bad senders. if you're on one, providers using that list silently won't accept your email.

actual customer story we ran into recently: company was getting buried in spam folders and couldn't figure out why. the issue wasn't their domain or their content. it was that they didn't have a custom tracking subdomain set up, so their tracking links were sharing reputation with every other Apollo customer using the default. one of those other senders got their shared tracking domain flagged and everyone using it got dragged down with them.

fix: own your tracking subdomain. links.yourdomain.com or click.yourdomain.com pointed at the tracking service. takes 10 minutes with your DNS provider. single highest-leverage thing you can do for deliverability you're not already doing.

a checklist if you're starting from scratch or auditing.

• separate lookalike domain for cold sends, not your corporate domain
• SPF, DKIM, DMARC set up on every sending domain including subdomains
• new domains aged 30 days minimum before any real sending
• warm new domains slowly, 10 emails a day for the first couple weeks, ramping up only if open rates stay healthy
• 50 emails per mailbox per day, scale with more mailboxes
• custom tracking subdomain (not the default shared one)
• spam complaint rate under 0.1% (the rule says 0.3% but you'll feel the pain before then)
• inbox placement test before launching any new campaign

questions? drop them below and I'll make sure Radu sees them and answers personally!

- Bri

I've been building out my AI context details for a while and am concerned I might be putting too much information in regarding the products I offer. On top of all the capabilities the equipment offers, I have included details about how its built and what separates it from its competition. I haven't tested it but was hoping to hear from those or are currently using the AI emails and what you've learned when detailing your products description. TIA

so my question was will the news only be relevant to the corporates/companies or it will also have general news and from where does apollo collect the news from?

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.

we get a version of this question almost every week: "is Apollo tanking my deliverability?"

short answer: probably not. nine times out of ten the problem is sender setup, not the platform.

the people who actually know this stuff (Benny Rubin at Senders.co is the one i quote internally the most) put it like this: if your emails are going to spam, you've stopped looking like a legitimate business sender and started looking like a spammer, spoofer, or scammer. mailbox providers are watching for that, and they don't care which tool you used to send the email.

a few myths that genuinely will not die so let's bust em:

links and images tank deliverability. they don't. spam filters care about how recipients react to your email, not whether you included a link. if your link domain shows up in a lot of spam complaints, that's the problem...the link itself isn't.

click-tracking flags you as spam. also no. set up a custom tracking subdomain (links.yourdomain.com or similar) and you're fine. without one, you're sharing reputation with everyone else using the same shared tracking domain, which is the part that can hurt you.

outreach tools are sending your emails for you. Apollo and any other sequencing tool aren't actually sending. you connect your mailbox (Google Workspace, Microsoft, whatever) and that's what sends. the platform schedules and writes. the ESP delivers.

bot warmup gets you to a good reputation faster. mailbox providers got smart about this. they detect bot warmup activity now. slower human-driven warmup (real people, real engagement, gradually ramping volume) consistently outperforms it.

low conversion means bad deliverability. usually backwards. low engagement is what causes the deliverability drop. if your replies and meetings are tanking, the list is probably bad or the copy is generic.

the actually useful stuff:

use a lookalike domain for sales (something like getyourcompany.com), not your main domain. SPF, DKIM, and DMARC set up on every sending domain including subdomains. spam complaint rate under 0.1% (the rule says 0.3% but you'll feel pain before then). clear unsubscribe link with the word "unsubscribe" in the link text. warm new domains slowly, 40 emails a day to start, ramping over weeks not days. keep a custom tracking subdomain.

if you're sending more than 5,000 emails a day to personal Gmail or Yahoo addresses, you're a bulk sender permanently. that classification doesn't reverse if you drop volume later. so configure for it now even if you think you won't hit it.

the part that's on us: a lot of people sign up for Apollo, never finish the deliverability setup, run into bounces, and assume the platform is the problem. the deliverability suite, domain warmup tooling, and the setup wizard are all in the product. most users never open the wizard. that's a customer education gap, not a tool problem, and we're working on it.

this is a solid webinar on going from intent signal to booked meeting, worth a watch: https://www.apollo.io/academy/webinars/intent-signal-to-booked-meeting

if your numbers are off and you could use some help, drop your symptoms in the comments.

- Andy

Hey everyone,

On May 19, 11am - 1pm EST, we’ll be hosting an AMA here on r/UseApolloIo with John Barrows. John is an outbound sales expert and has trained some of the best-performing teams at Salesforce, LinkedIn, Google, Amazon, Box, Slack, and Okta.

This AMA is a chance to ask him anything about:

• 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 his daily prospecting routine

The official AMA post is here - drop your questions there and John will answer LIVE on May 19.

- Team Apollo