Elto Blog
The Best Dialer for Apollo.io - Apollo's own dialer, or a parallel dialer?
What's the best tool for cold-calling with Apollo.io?
Apollo.io has quickly become the tool of choice for sales teams of all sizes. By integrating high-quality data and prospecting software with email sequencing and dialing, it's the one-stop shop for the entire sales journey, from finding and enriching leads to managing outreach and closing deals.
When it comes to cold-calling, though, sales development teams often turn to us with the same question: what's the best way to dial using Apollo.io? On one hand, they offer their own dialer at a higher tier, and it seems tough to go wrong with a native offering. On the other hand, though, it's missing modern features like parallel dialing and AI human recognition, which have become table stakes for maximizing daily connects. Furthermore, despite the crowded landscape of third-party dialers, it's not easy to find one that fits cleanly into Apollo.io workflows, given their recent rise and small partner ecosystem. How can Apollo.io users stay savvy on the phone while making use of their excellent sales platform, then?
(No need to hold your breath — the answer is Elto, but more on that later on)
Apollo's Dialer
Apollo offers a power dialer that lives within their platform, and thus integrates natively with the workflows you already have in the product. To use the dialer, you'll need to be either on the Professional or Custom tiers. Furthermore, Apollo limits the number of minutes to 10 minutes per dollar spent on domestic calls, and 3 minutes per dollar spent on international calls (international calls are only offered in the Custom tier).
While Apollo's dialer is a great power dialer, it isn't a parallel dialer, nor does it have the AI for detecting human pickups/voicemail drops/etc. that make parallel dialing so efficient (still fuzzy on the difference between power dialing and parallel dialing? Check out our explainer here).
While Apollo's dialer is a well-made product and a cost-effective add-on for teams that don't rely heavily on cold-calling, it may not be the best choice for teams with demanding dialing quotas and long lead lists. For those users, it may make more sense to look into a third-party parallel dialer.
Using Parallel Dialers with Apollo
For sales teams who turn to third-party parallel dialers, there are ostensibly dozens of options. When looking for one that works with Apollo, though, the pickings become slim; Apollo's integration infrastructure is still nascent, which means that fully and natively integrating with sequences, contacts, call tasks, dispositions, etc. on the platform is much more involved than with other CRMs and sales engagement platforms.
Using a parallel dialer that doesn't integrate with Apollo is definitely not advised. Without an integration, you'll be forced to manually update call tasks, manage dispositions, and ensure that contacts move through sequences properly; one misstep, and you could end up missing an important prospect, or (even worse) calling a prospect who already opted out.
Elto solves this dilemma, with the most native and advanced 2-way Apollo integration on the market. With Elto, sales teams can import sequences and contact lists, sync dispositions, and automatically write back call tasks & notes as Elto parallel dials through due tasks. Elto's AI recognizes voicemails, dial trees, and human pickups, and automates the busywork of triaging & dispositioning the 95%+ of calls that don't get picked up, without wasting your reps' time by forcing them to listen to dial tones and voicemail inboxes.
Want to join the 50+ (and growing fast) sales teams using Apollo.io with Elto? Learn more here, or get started here.
Picture credits: Mike Meyers on Unsplash