How Apollo.io Improves CSM Efficiency & NRR with Vitally

About

Apollo.io is a leading sales intelligence platform trusted by over 160,000 companies, including Autodesk, Rippling, Deel, Jasper.ai, Divvy, and Heap.

Linnea Olson, Customer Success Operations Manager at Apollo, spoke with Vitally about the impact our Customer Success Platform has had on Apollo’s team efficiency and revenue growth.

Challenge: Difficulty Prioritizing Daily Work with Existing Tools

Apollo’s Customer Success team is critical in helping customers get the most out of the platform. They provide training, support, and guidance to help customers achieve their sales goals. However, Apollo's Customer Success team faced challenges in effectively managing their growing customer base before implementing Vitally.

How come? Apollo's Customer Success team lacked a comprehensive system to organize customer data, track interactions, and automate repetitive tasks. The team had tools like Zendesk and Intercom, but these were more suited for ticket management rather than customer relationship management. This resulted in inefficiencies and difficulty in prioritizing daily work.

“Vitally has been adopted org-wide – used by multiple departments across Apollo. It’s our source-of-truth reporting for many of our OKRs, and we use it to drive initiatives forward.”

Linnea Olson

Customer Success Operations Manager

Solution: A Centralized Space to Manage Customer Relationships, CS Workflows, and More

To address these challenges, Apollo implemented Vitally, a Customer Success Platform (CSP) that provides a centralized space for managing customer relationships, tracking key metrics and trends, and automating workflows.

Apollo Teams in Vitally: Customer Success, Onboarding, Sales, Product, Leadership

Key features that have helped Apollo include:

• Opportunity Indicators for Upsell and Cross-Sell: Automated alerts are sent to the CSMs based on product usage or customer relationship data. Apollo’s CSMs can now successfully manage Expansion Opportunities and Renewals with the help of real-time indicators in Vitally.
• Hubs for Prioritization: CSMs can quickly understand where they need to focus their time and how to address customer needs and issues with dedicated Hubs in Vitally. Tailored Hubs help guide Apollo’s CSMs and Onboarding Managers in their day-to-day work, and focus on activities that help drive the retention of customers.
• Playbook Automation to Save CSMs Time: Apollo has set up 140 Playbook automations to reduce the number of clicks and the manual work their CSMs do daily. Automating actions like customer segmentation, communication, and assigning key roles has freed up time for the CSMs to spend on more strategic activities like building customer relationships and identifying improvements with key accounts.

“Vitally was the front runner for our CSMs’ user experience. [If] you're going to have successful end customers, that comes from great CSMs managing those relationships and they can’t do that without the right tools they want to work in.”

Linnea Olson

Customer Success Operations Manager

Business Outcomes

The implementation of Vitally led to significant improvements in various aspects of Apollo's business operations:

• Efficiency Gains: Apollo’s CS team has achieved the same results without needing to add headcount with the help of Vitally’s automation.
• Increased Retention & ARR: Apollo has seen an increase in both net revenue retention (NRR) and annual recurring revenue (ARR) since the implementation of Vitally. The CS team has become more proactive – identifying and resolving customer concerns before renewals.‍
• Achieved Expansion Goals: Since implementing Opportunity Indicators, the CS team has met their quarter goal for expansion in the first month of the quarter.

Why Apollo Recommends Vitally: Easier to Use Without Need for Admins

For Linnea, Vitally was the obvious choice: "I would absolutely recommend Vitally. I think that as an admin…it is a simple tool, but it's really powerful at the same time. You can do a lot without having to have a huge team doing an administration on the backend.”

“Previously when I was working with Gainsight, I had a team of eight admins, six program managers, and two engineers to run a system for our organization. Where I had eight Gainsight admins previously, I'm doing the same types of CS motions with just one admin in Vitally today.”

Linnea Olson

Customer Success Operations Manager