Apollo
Build a €0→€1M Apollo pipeline
Saved searches, Clay curation, a 12-touch ladder, then 28-day warmup. Apollo is not a phonebook.
The loop
- 01Write the ICP before you search1 industry, 1 size band, 2 titles, 2 triggers, 3 disqualifiers. Tier 1 >5,000 means go back.
- 02Curate in Clay, not in the sequencerNews, hiring, tech stack, Claude fit 1–10. Drop below 7. Push a static list back to Apollo.
- 03Run the 12-touch ladderEmail + LinkedIn across 60 days. Three-touch sequences are why nobody replies.
- 04Warm secondary domains 28 days2–3 lookalikes, 3 mailboxes each, rotate 9. Hard cap 30 cold sends/mailbox/day.
- 05Kill losers weekly, then scaleSubjects <35% open and openers <4% reply die. Promote winners to Tier 2 and a second vertical.
Most Apollo accounts produce nothing because their owners treat it like a phonebook: export 10,000 CFOs, fire a generic five-step “Hi {{first_name}}” sequence at 500/day, watch a 1.4% open rate, blame the tool, churn to Lemlist. Zack Deris’s write-up is a 90-day workflow — saved searches, list curation, sequence structure, deliverability — that built €1.2M in pipeline for a recent client. Apollo isn’t the problem. The workflow is.
Week 1 is ICP on paper before anyone opens the database: one industry, one size band, two titles, two triggers, three disqualifiers, then three named saved searches. If Tier 1 returns more than 5,000 contacts, you have not narrowed enough. Clay scores fit 1–10; drop everything below 7 and push a static list back. The ladder is 12 touches, not three. Cold never leaves the primary domain. Cap 30/mailbox/day after a 28-day warmup. Kill subject lines below 35% open and openers below 4% reply, then promote what works.
