How Leadium 3x Annual Revenue Using Apollo’s Open API

Leadium approaches sales differently, and it’s working. 

Kevin Warner, founder and CEO, established his B2B lead generation agency in 2015 with a clear vision in mind: create a low-risk efficient outbound system that seamlessly serves all industries and stages of growth. Since then, Kevin’s techniques of prioritizing client revenue goals and hyper-personalizing outreach have put Leadium ahead of the game.

“We’re a long-standing leader in SQL appointment setting and revenue growth,” Kevin explained. “And we have over 500 companies that would agree.”

That success certainly didn’t come without challenges along the way. As with any lead generation agency, half the battle was creating and managing a sales system free of redundancy and wrought with automation wherever possible. This process took Kevin down paths he never expected (like, spoiler alert, getting rid of Salesforce).

But this same grueling process also led Kevin to discover what would eventually become Leadium’s backbone to success: Apollo—and the efficiency, scalability, and flexibility that come with it.

But first, let’s backtrack a few years.

Great agencies need great software

By 2019, Kevin knew it was time to scale, but also felt that Leadium didn’t have the proper tool for the job yet.

Kevin said, “We’re a service-based business, but you can’t do this business without great software. We asked ourselves: what do we need to build an enterprise-grade system that works not only for our clients but for our needs too?”

Their search led to Apollo, which had “...more features built-in for an agency like ours”.

This felt appropriate for Leadium’s early-stage, top-of-funnel growth production.

But best of all? Apollo could serve as a centralized source of truth, offering comprehensive data visibility while connecting their most important tools through API access.

Kevin knew that an open API would allow Leadium to make Apollo their own, and to customize their internal systems to the extreme. It was time to get to work.

Cutting the fat: ZoomInfo and Salesforce

Over the next few years, Kevin and his team embarked on a journey of cutting the (software) fat and streamlining processes.

Take ZoomInfo, for example. It was only a matter of months before Leadium realized the long-standing B2B database wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. 

Kevin explained, “We actually started using ZoomInfo while we were an Apollo user, thinking Zoominfo would be better considering how much they market their data quality. But after three months it wasn’t true. It was just too much of a redundancy to what we already had with Apollo, where we’ve never had a data quality problem.”

So ZoomInfo was out. And, as Leadium continued to scale, it didn’t take long for Salesforce to go too.

With Apollo automatically managing lead contact records and task management operating seamlessly with an integration through ClickUp, Salesforce simply had no place. Kevin knew it was time to part ways, making Apollo the “one true” CRM of Leadium.

Revolutionizing sales development with open API

With ZoomInfo and Salesforce gone, Kevin continued to focus on getting the most out of Apollo’s open API by integrating anything and everything he could.

Nooks is Leadium’s dialer that allows SDRs to call multiple prospects at the same time.

Instead of manually exporting and uploading information between Nooks and Apollo, Kevin has all 80+ of Leadium’s Apollo instances embedded into the tool, allowing all of Apollo’s contact data to seamlessly push and pull out of their powerful dialing tool.

As cool as data synchronization was, Kevin knew this was merely scratching the surface. Apollo’s open API meant a world of opportunity for optimizing Leadium’s sales motion. Remember that hyper-personalized outreach we mentioned?

For Leadium, the personalization begins as soon as a prospect fills out a web form.

 

Thanks to an integration with Webflow, Apollo can take charge right away—creating, enriching, and segmenting an account automatically. The segmentation occurs across multiple layers, including day and time of form submission, the prospect’s budget, location, and, taking it one step further, even personality type.

More efficiency = more revenue

For Leadium, Apollo’s open API was a game changer—opening the door to more customers without requiring additional staff, software, or data. Redundancies were decreased, profit margins increased, and SDRs’ work days were optimized to hit client goals—leading to a 5x increase in meetings booked via phone and 3x in annual revenue.

Kevin said it best: “Apollo allowed us to scale our operation exponentially. We can 3x our annual revenue without any decrease in efficiency because we can build the fundamentals around Apollo and the additional integrations we have at the same profitability rate we had.”

As for the future? Leadium is just getting started exploring the possibilities with Apollo’s open API.

“Every client is different. But Apollo’s broad scope of features and functionality allow us to pick and choose what’s needed for each one. It’s our single source of truth and essentially the backbone of how we run our company. Apollo is our product.”

To learn more about how you can use Apollo to help your company scale, visit Apollo.io.