Kinsta's Apollo-Powered Sales Team Grows by 350%

Nicole Coetzer, Head of Sales Development at Kinsta, and her team are at the forefront of her company’s efforts to lead growth via outbound sales.

Here’s how her team used Apollo to grow their team of SDRs by 350% and achieve a 36% connection rate across all outbound calls in only 7 months.

A Home for Modern Web Apps

Kinsta is a cloud platform built on the idea that hosting should be feature-rich, powerful, fast, and secure with exceptional support.

They help companies and dev teams ship and manage their web projects faster and more efficiently, offering application hosting, database hosting, and managed WordPress hosting to over 55,000 users.

And if you know anything about hosting, you know that a single minute of downtime can cost companies thousands of dollars. Kinsta boasts a 99.99% uptime guarantee supported by a diligent and knowledgeable support team that responds to any inquiry in under 2 minutes.

“Our claim to fame is our speed, support & security.  And at the core of our success is our people, we have the best engineering team and the most experienced developers in the industry,” says Nicole.

And for her, being in a leadership position at a company so undeniably exceptional is something she takes a lot of pride in.

“The number one thing I look for in a sales position, is if it’s a product I can be proud of,” she says, “I’m fortunate to say I’m at a company that I feel a lot of pride for.”

Shifting to Outbound Sales

Kinsta had always been an inbound machine.

With phenomenal marketing and SEO tactics, the sales team always relied on the resulting top-notch inbound leads to drive their growth.

But, when they did chat with outbound leads, they noticed that a lot of people were unaware of Kinsta’s competitive value. With the pace of their growth, they knew they needed to expand their outbound efforts to break into a new segment of the market.

“Our big aim was growth. We wanted to get our ICP really strong and get the message out to more clients and bring them on board.”

And Nicole knew all too well the pains of conducting outbound sales with an outdated process.

“In my last role, we had an outbound reach, but it was a very manual process,” she said, “You know the days of getting a list and manually having to scrub it and then upload it into your CRM. It was very old school.”

To shake up their go-to-market, they needed more data, more automation, and more functionality.

Using Apollo to Build Lead Lists that Convert

Nicole and her team found Apollo and they started small.

In their first month using Apollo, they built 10-person lists, testing the data quality and playing around with advanced filters like technologies and revenue to reflect their ICP.

“When we started with Apollo, it was trial and error,” says Nicole, “We learned that it’s a really user-friendly tool and that you can’t really do anything wrong in Apollo.”

Their confidence grew. They started building out bigger and better lists, targeting people who use specific coding languages and frameworks and creating saved searches based on job changes and buying intent triggers that constantly ran in the background.

They were filling their pipeline with the right leads in less time.

Soon, Nicole developed a surefire system for generating outbound pipeline.

At the start of every month, she thinks: What do I want the team to do this month? Where do we want to go? Who do we want to reach out to? 

Then, she creates customized target lists for each of her SDRs in Apollo, taking into account their assigned territories and leveraging their individual strengths while making sure there is no overlap.

“It’s so lovely, I can do everything in an hour, an hour and a half tops, and then we are set up for the whole month. SDRs know where their focus is, and which leads to reach out to. It really saves a lot of time.”

Next, she seamlessly imports the lists into HubSpot, where the SDRs can start building their outreach sequences with reliable data on high-intent, high-value leads.

A Bigger, Stronger Outbound Team

Nicole supplies her reps with lists for larger campaigns, but that doesn’t mean Kinsta reps aren’t hands-on in Apollo.

They create their own shortlists, enrich inbound leads, gather additional emails and mobile numbers — Apollo is their ultimate prospecting hub.

“We give them a lot of autonomy to jump into Apollo, play around with it, and test different things,” says Nicole, “SDRs use it a lot if they get a lead and they don’t have all the information.”

With access to the industry’s largest B2B database, Kinsta’s SDR team is maintaining a 36% connection rate across all outbound calls.

“My favorite, favorite part about Apollo is when someone asks me, ‘What’s your connection rate?’ and I can consistently say, over the last seven months, it’s at 36%,” says Nicole, “Apollo has increased the likelihood that we are going to get someone on the phone or we are going to get someone to reply to an email.”

That success has translated into incredible growth.

Before Apollo, Kinsta had two SDRs.

Now, with more leads, higher revenue, and a greater reach into the market, Kinsta grew their team to seven, a 350% growth in only 6 months.

During this time, they’ve exceeded their quota every single month.

And not by blasting the market, but by doing what Kinsta does best — delivering thoughtful, personalized, efficient service, backed by world-class data.

“We are definitely not subscribing to the high-volume game. We don’t need to. If we really take time to make our outreach highly personalized, we just get better results…We want to make sure that even potential clients are getting that personal touch and experiencing the Kinsta service.”

Next Stop: More Success

With their outbound sales motion dialed in, Kinsta is growing — fast.

In the last few months, they’ve broken into a new frontier, launching both App and Database Hosting.

“It’s really exciting to be at Kinsta at the moment. But we don’t want to rest on our laurels. We want to continue growing. We know our product is really, really good.”

According to Nicole, Kinsta has only scratched the surface of what they can achieve with Apollo. In fact, next month, they’re planning to explore Apollo’s CRM enrichment capabilities.

If you want to experience exponential growth like Kinsta, contact Apollo today.