When would I use Apollo or ZoomInfo?

Picture this…Your business is at an early stage. You want a good source of company and contact data for sales and marketing. Here’s your flow:

1. You are on LinkedIn or a company’s website and you find a great prospect. They are your ideal customer persona
2. You want to find out company revenue, employee count or headquarter location. You want the email/phone number of the CEO, CIO and VP IT
3. You click a shortcut and a sidebar opens with their company and contact data
4. You can now email or call them, or put them in a campaign sequence. All of this syncs to your CRM

Or…

1. You want to get the email addresses of all Buying Vice Presidents in the US from companies with 51-100 employees in the apparel & accessories sub-segment of retail
2. You want to go into a database tool and apply these filters
3. You export the list of, say, 3000 contacts, direct to an email sequencing campaign

Which tool is better value…Apollo.io or ZoomInfo?

At this stage of growth, no one wants to be spending $15K+ per year on a prospecting data source. Apollo has a free plan which gives 10 email credits a month. You will likely reach that limit quick. The Apollo paid plan starts at $468/year per user. This gives you 200 monthly email credits per user, email sequencing, two way native integrations with Hubspot and Salesforce, and even…intent signals (see article on leveraging buyer intent data).

Quite frankly, I am shocked at how all these features are available for about $2,340 per year (for a team with 5 users). It is likely you will need more email credits (did someone say unlimited credits!), and so you can upgrade to $79/month per user. Like for like with 5 users you’re at $4,740 per year.

How does ZoomInfo compare?

A similar ZoomInfo plan with 2000 monthly email credits per user will cost between $15K-$20K per year. This gives you the raw basics (without intent data or alerts on items like job changes).

I admit, I do have a slight bias, due to my experiences. I used to use ZoomInfo and then switched to Apollo. The key reason for this was sheer value, but there was another reason. ZoomInfo used what I perceived as dodgy upselling tactics.

In my team we were repurposing licenses for different users due to team member changes. ZoomInfo took this to mean that many users were using the same license, and threatened legal action. Now, there was slight unintended overlap. Yet, SaaS best practice would be to inform and encourage user behaviour change. It is definitely not to threaten customers.

They then put me onto what was obviously an automated upselling email cadence. It first came from (when I say came from, I mean it was their signature in the email) someone at the director level. Then someone at the C-Suite level saying how excited they were for the new agreement. It had almost identical copy so it clearly was not an actual personal email…eh hem…a bit obvious guys come on!

What about data quality?

For data quality and coverage, ZoomInfo’s North American data is superb. So, if you operate only in North America and have a bigger budget, then it is definitely an option to consider. Outside of North America the data quality and coverage is quite weak. Apollo claims to have 156 million verified emails and 120 million verified phone numbers. This compares to 129 million and 50 million, respectively, for that of ZoomInfo. My guess is that a lot of this coverage is global (think Europe, APAC and LatAm).

What other options are there?

They are more expensive. That is the real truth. At this point in your business, you are looking for decent value. You want the ability to create lists for email campaigns, cold calling & warm follow ups. You want data for top funnel outreach, nurture touches and various other cadences for lead gen and mid to bottom-funnel activities. This is as true for mass outreach as it is for a more sniper-like account-based marketing or an account-based sales approach (ABM/ABS).

I will refer to other options such as Sales Intel, Demand Science, Cognism, ClearBit, LeadIQ, Lead Genius and Slintel in other articles. For the most part, you need a bigger budget to consider these options.

For the moment, Apollo can give you a massive boost in your marketing and sales efforts, and they keep adding new features.

I will repeat this once more, Apollo is such…good…value.