I have a lot to say about outbound outreach tools. Having spent 11 years in lead generation roles within healthcare, and several years consulting for B2B businesses, I’ve tried a lot of tech, banged my head against the wall hundreds of times, and learned SO much from these technologies. Outbound is trendy, and so is outbound sales enablement tech – (l’m leaving AI out of this conversation for now). B2B platforms are popping up with these capabilities left and right.
Here’s my experience and review of three of them.
High Velocity Sales Cadences (Salesforce’s Sales Engagement), Apollo Sequences, Hubspot Sales Hub Sequences.
- Apollo Sequences ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
- Hubspot Sequences ⭐ ⭐ ⭐
- High Velocity Sales ⭐ ⭐
Apollo Vs. Salesforce
I have to admit, I’m an Apollo fangirl. It’s one of the easiest platforms to use, program, scale and report with, and for a seriously great value for both small and large orgs. With extremely reasonable per-user pricing and with the cost of finding email addresses basically moot, my only concern with Apollo is that they’ll start breaking out and surcharging for their sequencing tool. Because it’s that good. Why?
I transferred a team of six reps from High Velocity Sales (Salesforce) Cadences and immediately saw an uptick in meeting generation. We’re talking 60%+ increase in rates of cold outbound outreach resulting in meetings with execs. Furthermore, having prospecting and sequencing in the same platform made it seamless for reps to find the right person and contact them in a matter of minutes. Scheduling follow-up emails and creating sequences is so easy, reps were able to innovate and create their own outreach methodologies. Then – as a leader and consultant? I got to look at the data and help them figure out what worked best and how to scale it.
I love Salesforce but…
High Velocity Sales was a nightmare. And I’m a diehard Salesforce fan too. Just … a fan of their CRM and really not a fan of the bolt-on pieces like HVS and Pardot that never felt like they were actually integrated into Salesforce.
The first issue I had with HVS cadences was programming the emails to look like they came from Outlook. As a buyer, when a rep contacts me and I see that it’s a mass email (because of the look/fonts/signature) or sent from a prospecting platform, I’m immediately turned off. It doesn’t feel personal. It feels like I’m a small fish in a very big pond. Cold outbound is so much more effective when the recipient feels like they matter and the rep took the time to send a personalized message.
The only way I was able to program HVS cadences to have the look and feel of an Outlook email was by hard coding an HTML signature in every email template. Which meant every rep had to have emails programmed separately and in separate cadences. Yes, you can put your signature in Salesforce native signature tool. Yes, SF emails can pull in your signature. But it never pulled in the signature seamlessly enough to look like it was sent from Outlook. And this mattered to me. I wasn’t going to have our potential clients thinking that reps were sending mass emails when they worked so hard to target, segment, and personalize messages while moving as quickly as possible.
Okay – before you tell me I was doing it wrong… If you know me, you know that I love technology challenges and I don’t give up without a fight. I want to find the best and most efficient way to do something. I’m driven to that. This was not solvable, and yes I had help from other Salesforce experts.
The second issue with HVS? Reporting. This was a nightmare. I could not pull a report to tell me which people at which accounts were opening which emails sent from which reps. Seriously. To pull opens, we had to have reps manually go through their engagement alerts and tell me who opened. It was a massive time suck. (Yes, I had help from other experts, to no avail…) But we needed the data. With Apollo? There are so many ways of getting ‘opens’ information you practically stumble upon it without looking for it.
Not even looking for a replacement to HVS, I stumbled on Apollo when onboarding with them as a replacement for ZoomInfo (driven by cost savings – and I never looked back).
Me, being the tech sleuth that I am dove into Apollo immediately to see what it could offer. And when I saw there was an HVS alternative that was FREE with the basic platform that allowed searching and finding email addresses? I had to try it. It took maybe a month to transition the team and early adopters were already seeing higher meeting generation rates – which made the other reps eager to learn the new tool.
Apollo vs. Hubspot Sales Hub Sequences
I won’t repeat all of the ways that I love Apollo. It IS still easier than Hubspot Sequences. Hubspot is much more intuitive and scalable than HVS, but still lacks the ease of use and scalability of Apollo. With Apollo, you can rotate and program follow-up email sends – for example – from different reps without the rep lifting a finger. (Still not as good as personalizing each email!!!!) But, one use case for that is for busy business development teams that are travelling and leveraging relationships but need to make sure prospecting messages are going out. BD approves the list and copy. Marketing programs the sends. Meetings come in.
Hubspot is not terrible by any means. It doesn’t suffer from the same reporting challenges as HVS, and getting emails to look well… like emails… was a piece of cake.
Hubspot Sequences success story:
I recently consulted for a client that needed outbound outreach FAST. I configured & wrote outbound emails, programmed them in Hubspot, trained the reps and even did the segmentation and targeting too (I’m a sucker for segmentation). Of about 500 prospects, we secured 5 meetings. That’s pretty darn good for a pilot program.
With the same client we ran another very small pilot in Apollo. Low and behold – 107 emails sent – 3 meetings generated. With less than 3 hours of work between us. Again, Apollo outperforms. (I’m sorry Salesforce, but HubSpot and Apollo are still winning in this scenario.)
Helping reps send without much of a lift is still possible with HubSpot sequences, but it’s much less intuitive and requires the help of workflows.
I have another rant about workflows that I’ll get to eventually. I recommend to every client to avoid workflows unless every other standard option of a CRM tool has been exhausted. Why?
Workflow management can get messy. One thing changes in your business and multiple workflows need to be untangled and reconfigured. Someone leaves your org? Hopefully they weren’t the only one familiar with your workflows. I digress.
But YES if you’re wondering, I do also take on clients with workflow nightmares. Call me your master untangler. (:
Need meetings fast? I’m your girl.
DM me on LinkedIn to see how I can help you:
- Empower reps with outbound tools – that they’ll actually use
- Maximize efficiency with your sales and marketing tech stack
- Conduct writing, targeting, and segmentation workshops
- Pull hyper-targeted lists
- Generate meetings (not just a list of interested folks!)
- and most importantly, give you peace of mind…