Dreamforce 2024 | Matt Curl | Apollo.io

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Matt Curl

Chief Operating Officer

Apollo.io

play_circle_outline Relationship with Salesforce: providing data solutions and integrating with CRM

play_circle_outline Empowering all businesses to utilize modern go-to-market strategies, even non-tech companies

play_circle_outline Ideal customer persona: shifting over time, includes first-time founders and mid-market

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Matt Curl | Apollo.io

Matt Curl

Chief Operating Officer Apollo.io

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>> Hello and welcome back to Dreamforce 2024 live from the NYSE studio, just up the street from Moscone. We're in the afternoon getting through, digging in deep into the ecosystem, and people who are really building businesses around Salesforce, and around sales automation and go to market. And I think really I'm excited to have Matt Curl, who's the COO of Apollo.io on board with us now, to talk into how they're helping enable customers get more out of their investment. So why don't you tell us a little bit about Apollo.io? I know, again, recent add, you've been there a little bit over 90 days around that. So again, what's Apollo.io up to and what are you helping with?

Matt Curl

>> Yeah, definitely a veteran. But interestingly have used the product before for a lot of years. Really I think Apollo.io is about fulfilling the mission of making go-to market technology accessible for everybody. And that's a pretty big statement if you think about it. So many different places, so many different industries. And I think really tech has led the way with how to do modern go-to market, and there's just huge opportunity to take that approach into the world and make it accessible for everybody and solve the problem every company has. How do I generate revenue? How do I get more customers? And revenue is like oxygen. You know that, so you can't live without it.

>> I love that revenue is like oxygen. I would agree. I've never been the CRO, but I've been partnered up on executive teams with the CRO, and go to market. I've run product marketing and marketing. So having campaigns, and building that into how the sales funnel goes. How are you guys really helping on top of Sales Cloud? And really what's the relationship with Salesforce and how does that work together?

Matt Curl

>> Yeah, if you think about Apollo's history, really even rewinding the clock 10 years ago, the US had a monopoly with data where there's really one, maybe two data vendors that actually exist. And so what that puts you in is really an environment where even Salesforce has to rely very heavily on data providers. And you think about the first thing you're going to do with any company, any product, who am I selling to? What are the companies? What is it about those companies that make them interesting to target? And then the question that's always next, "Okay, well who in those companies am I selling to?" Both of those things are core foundations of data. And Apollo really entered the market with that problem statement of how do we create another great quality data source that can exist? And that's really how it starts the relationship with the CRM. From there, when you look at what has happened in the CRM space, it's really just turned into a lot of tools that have been plugged into the CRM, but they don't think about one another and they don't unify one another in a tech stack at all. And that creates a lot of challenges, but also a lot of opportunity. And I think Apollo is firmly in the ability to take data and do a lot of things in the go-to market tech stack that is both complementary to a CRM, or could even potentially facilitate as one if you had a simpler use case.

>> So the big announcements this week are shockingly, AI. And I'm blown away, Jensen's on stage later today, the leather jacket makes another appearance. And they're a Salesforce customer. I know that from, we were talking with a lot of the execs from Salesforce earlier in the day and yesterday. How do you see AI playing a role in the go-to-market space? Because to your point, having that intelligence about who you're talking to, the right times, where they are in the funnel. How does this really work? And how does Apollo really play a role in that?

Matt Curl

>> Yeah, I think the AI and RevTech has been around actually for a lot longer, even though it's becoming very vogue and there and a sexy term. It's really coming into market all over the place. And when I think about where it plugs into the go-to-market tech stack, there's a bunch of obvious adjacencies. The first are, how do I generate content? How do I do messaging? How can I do things that normally take a lot of time much faster? I see a lot of problems there that are happening, but there's that whole content creation mode that LLMs are amazing at. The second part is really how can I use AI to augment the human? How can I use AI as an augmentation? I think a lot of people are going towards replacement. I think augmentation is going to occur before replacement. And really there's a lot of places you can augment the entire go-to-market tech stack with AI, you can speed things up, you can make people a lot more effective. And that's always depending on where you want to focus in the tech stack, it could be as mundane or as simple as I'm going to just do simple note-taking for you, going to save you all that time and I'm going to do notes. You could also take that and say, "I'm going to go from notes and now I'm going to generate the next best email for you to send, and I'm going to automate that entire process." So it's really where do you fall, and what part of the tech stack do you want to attack? And you're seeing a lot of entrants in the market on different places in go-to-market tech, whether it's sales coaching, you see it in note-taking, you see it in automated email generation. It's all over the place, and I think that makes it particularly interesting but also very difficult to navigate and to think about what's best for you.

>> Yeah, I couldn't agree more, and I totally agree and I think actually Salesforce's talk track around AI agents and stuff has been exactly what you said, which is its additive not subtractive to the human experience. It's how do you enable people to go faster? How do you enable them to be smarter and have more intelligence? And that would seem to play right to where Apollo is about enabling the go-to-market and how people are going to move through that stack.

Matt Curl

>> Yeah, absolutely. I think even just back to the foundations of how do you do go-to-market. And thinking about that very first entry point, I talked with you. Let's imagine you and I started a new company. One of the first things we're going to discuss is who are we going after? What are we targeting? Think about a default today. You go in and you basically have to configure all of that from scratch, and plug it all in and build the whole thing yourself. Why can't you just say, "I want to target these types of companies, I'm looking to do this type of sales motion, configure it for me." And I think this is where you're going to start to see a lot of really interesting AI use cases that can really speed up people. And I think what's going to happen is it's going to democratize technology. Where tech has been held the power of you must have a Salesforce admin, you've got to have a Rev ops team that can stitch this all together. We're not very far away from someone that perhaps is in a more traditional industry, that can just pick up some AI empowered features, or products, or programs, and type in a couple very quick things about what they want do and boom, they've got rev tech in a box. And I think Apollo can play really squarely in that space, and I think we're extremely well positioned to do that.

>> So let's talk about your go-to-market motion. I think that again, I've been told that there's a community led, product led growth or PLG motion. How do you really engage with your customers as well?

Matt Curl

>> Yeah, the heart of PLG, I think many companies will now say they are PLG and there is pseudo PLG, or even PLS, product led sales and there's true PLG. Apollo is really true PLG. And so that means the vast majority of our OPEX goes into R&D. It goes into development, and I think you have to honor certain principles of product-led growth, which is usage comes first, monetization comes second. How do you build amazing products that people want to use, that are very valuable that they want to try? And then you worry about monetization curves and those types of things later. It's a different type of discipline that you have to build into a company. It also attracts a different type of talent, and a different type of person that you look for on your go-to-market sides as well. And it's really about augmenting and speeding up this time to value, starting with free uses, generating features that are really widely adoptable, very important and people want to use these products. And then you figure out the motion of how to perhaps do large deployments in the enterprise later. That's really what differentiates PLG. What it does for a company like Apollo, is it lets us test a lot of products at scale really quickly. There's millions of users of the product. That's an incredible asset for us, and it's a really great motion to be able to perfect, and try things and it's a big way we've grown over time.

>> So you were a user of Apollo before going there, and you talk about millions of users. Typically, what kind of company, or verticals, or what have you really come to Apollo to help them with their go-to-market? Because not everybody is into the PLG thing. Like you said, there's a reason why there's a lot of consulting around Salesforce, to put it mildly. What deos the ideal customer look like or persona that's coming in?

Matt Curl

>> Yeah, like happens with PLG, the more you develop, the more that shifts and moves over time. I would say if you were wound the clock on Apollo five years ago, a lot of people came there for data. And it was how do I get this data asset and use it really well? I was previously at Checker, leveraged a lot of Apollo data for different parts of the tech stack predominantly on SMB data enrichment. It was a great, great way to do that. And I think that's five years ago. Fast-forward to today, we've built a lot of products. There's conversational intelligence, there are deal intelligence. How do you move deals across the pipeline? We're doing a lot of this stuff inherent in the platform. That attracts now a slightly different persona. So we see a lot of our first time founders, companies coming out of Y Combinator or other incubator programs that are really amazed and saying, "Oh my gosh, this is everything I need, to do everything I need to do for go to market for the foreseeable future." And we're starting to see that shift and that's very exciting. Additionally, what we're also seeing is back to this data point of when you think about this sales tech stack and how fragmented it's really become. Because we're doing so many of the core pieces, the contact data, the company enrichment data, email engagement, conversational intelligence, you don't lose the data going from vendor A, to vendor B, to vendor C to vendor D. It's all inherent in the platform. And so we're starting to see a lot more deployments of our product into mid-market and lower ends of enterprise, where people are wanting to deploy the product. And I think you saw those same type of burgeoning motions happen at most PLG companies, likely Atlassian is a good example of starting with a bunch of deployments, and then it sprawls out. And we're seeing those same things. And we're very excited to be there with those companies and help them and be a part of that journey for them.

>> A big piece of PLG is also time to value and seeing that. What's a typical engagement? The customer comes in, they're self-starting, they start in with a particular use case in mind. What's usually the time to value quotient for that customer?

Matt Curl

>> We see that time to value as sub-30 days. It's really about if the product's working as intended, you should be able to pick up the product, get everything you need, boarded in there in a very easy to go wizard, and you should be able to start generating meetings in your first month. That is our key metric of success. If that's what go-to-market is, can I take something, can I deploy it and can I get meetings with customers? That's our key success metric and we target everything sub-30 days on that. We think that's the right time to value. If you go longer than that, I think you really start to draw questions into is the approach working? Is this right for my business? Or maybe even product market fit questions. Is my messaging actually resonating with the market? Which is not necessarily an Apollo challenge, that's more of a founder issue to weave through there.

>> But to your point, I think are you able to say, "Hey, here's where in the sales cycle people are getting stuck." Because like you said, if you're coming out of Y, and you're trying to figure out do you have product market fit, I may want to figure out, "Okay, I have my people who are leaning in. I have also the first set of non-traditional leaner ins, and I want to see for the ones that we close versus the ones we didn't, where I'm getting stuck in that go-to-market cycle." Is that something that Apollo helps with as well?

Matt Curl

>> Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Tracks all of this natively and yeah, exactly. It does exactly this, which is if you're sending thousands of emails and no one's responding, you're going to see it right there in response rates. And we track a lot of these core metrics, so taking a more traditional channel like email, you can see the number of emails sent, the deliverability rates, the open rates, the read rates, the response rates, how many convert to a meeting. All of that's right in front of you, which opens what is happening. And there's so many benchmarks you can find on the web that are easily available about, is this a good open rate? Is this a good response rate? And I think that really gives founders a lot of feedback, and go-to-market teams a lot of feedback about whether their approaches are working.

>> Yeah. How long has Apollo been around, just out of curiosity?

Matt Curl

>> It's been around for about eight, nine years.

>> Okay.

Matt Curl

>> Yeah, I'm trying to think. It was Five Star is where I was before Checker was YC 2012, and I want to say Apollo came out of YC in 2014.

>> Okay,

Matt Curl

>> Maybe a decade then. I guess I got that wrong.

>> Yeah, maybe a decade. Yeah.

Matt Curl

>> I had to go back and think about-

>> It's getting later in the day. We're doing a lot of hiking around here to put it mildly. But I think what's really fascinating is that it's the idea of full cycle sales too and what Apollo is aiding in that. And talk a little bit about where Apollo is for that and why people should really embrace that.

Matt Curl

>> Yeah, I would think about if you've worked at a tech company or not, I think there's a difference between I've been in a tech-enabled go-to-market motion or I haven't. So I'll speak probably more to the audience, and to yourself having been in these tech environments, and we can think it through. And I think this will help explain where Apollo's really helping customers find a lot of value. It goes back to this, how do I go to market? And how do I do this? And that takes a lot of coordination. It's about the messaging to the customers, getting that messaging into the market, "Okay, I've got to send these emails at a velocity that makes sense." Now what happens? I have to get an SDR or a salesperson on the phone perhaps making dials, doing contacts to these people. Then they respond, I've got to go do a demo with them. I've got to hold these demos with them, and make sure that they see value in the product. Then I've got to progress them further into the pipeline, and I've got to make sure that we can get to a contracting stage and then I close one or close lost this deal. That's the end-to-end process. And then when you look at the soup du jour tech stack that a lot of companies might have to pull that off, it's like 10 tools. So that's a lot of complexity. And I don't know if the value's there. Apollo's approach is really, let's simplify this and give it to you all in one. How do we let you do all of that inherently in the platform by itself? You can do every piece of that in the platform today. And what that results in is number one, a way more simplified tech stack for the users. Two, the data problems don't occur, because number one, we're the source data. Number two, the tools are all developed first party. So the data's hopping built to handle the data in the same formats, with the same design, with the same engineers. Versus company A, and company B and company C. You could pick Gong, Outreach and let's take Calendly, as meetings, call intelligence and outreach. Those three didn't have a council where they get together and talk about how they're going to handle data and handle these objects. So with all that being built in-house with Apollo, it makes it way easier to understand, the data's a lot fresher, it's up-to-date and it's all contained in a really nice shell for a person to understand how their go-to-market is actually working and make smart decisions off of that. And that's really what we mean by empowering everybody to use modern GTM. Now on the non-tech version of that, let's imagine you and I just wanted to run a traditional business to sell cookies. We could run the same exact approach. These tools exist in tech for a reason. They're really good and they help. So how do you go deploy that if you're not in Salesforce or HubSpot today? How do you gain access to Gong, and Outreach, and SalesLoft, and Calendly and ChiliPiper and all of these other amazing tools if you're not in that tech ecosystem? And then how do you stitch that together? It doesn't really exist in the market, and I think that there's just a big opportunity and a big appetite for that.

>> Yeah, talk about PLG. Cookies are definitely PLG.

Matt Curl

>> Cookies are PLG. Yeah.

>> Definitely. I look at it and I go to me, again, having been in sales a long time ago, but for a little short stint and was very curious, once one of my companies was acquired, they put me into sales, which was fascinating. Because I was a product guy.

Matt Curl

>> It's good to spend time in sales no matter matter who you are, it's great.

>> It gave me appreciation for the go-to-market aspects, and I've used multiple different CRM systems over the years, and in fact transitioned between them. How do you see just the whole market evolving around this piece? It would seem like everybody wants it to be simpler. That seems to be a core message this week is, and it seems to be what you guys are doing, is bringing a simpler all-in-one, come and consume from here type of approach to this problem.

Matt Curl

>> Yeah, I think that's the million or billion dollar question I think is really the one you're asking there, of how do you do this and simplify it? And I think that, again, tech can really focus on tech. And tech is a huge part of our domestic GDP. It's a huge part of our ecosystem, especially in the Bay Area where I live. But it is not every segment. And I think when you look at a lot of businesses, they don't deploy modern tech stack, and it's for the exact reason you're talking about. Either it wasn't built for the type of CRM they're on or their platform, so just wasn't built for that purpose. Or the second is it would require so many custom integrations, and so much complexity that you start to wonder if it's really worth it. So I really do, even though it's a little bit in jest, that idea about even if we were to sell cookies, pick a business model that you would think about starting from scratch. Whether it's a tech business or not, and think about how would you go today to market? And how would you do it at scale? And is there a great option for you outside of building something yourself on an Excel spreadsheet? And I think that's a huge latent opportunity, and really where you're going to see this consolidation occur.

>> Yeah, I think again, it's one of those things that, like you said, if it's pizza, it's cookies, it's whatever versus tech. I think you all have emotion, you all have offers and all of that. And like you said, do you go to a whole variety of a tech stack or do you go to all in one? And I think that's the key with customers. Well Matt, I really appreciate you coming on board because I think this is really exciting, and it's absolutely something that I think AI will impact, and that customers are really looking for an easier consolidated way to do this as well. So thanks for coming on board.

Matt Curl

>> Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

>> And thank you for watching this episode of Dreamforce 2024, live from the NYSE. We got more coming to you this afternoon. Stay tuned. We'll be back.

Matt Curl | Apollo.io

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>> Hello and welcome back to Dreamforce 2024 live from the NYSE studio, just up the street from Moscone. We're in the afternoon getting through, digging in deep into the ecosystem, and people who are really building businesses around Salesforce, and around sales automation and go to market. And I think really I'm excited to have Matt Curl, who's the COO of Apollo.io on board with us now, to talk into how they're helping enable customers get more out of their investment. So why don't you tell us a little bit about Apollo.io? I know, again, recent add, you've been there a little bit over 90 days around that. So again, what's Apollo.io up to and what are you helping with?

Matt Curl

>> Yeah, definitely a veteran. But interestingly have used the product before for a lot of years. Really I think Apollo.io is about fulfilling the mission of making go-to market technology accessible for everybody. And that's a pretty big statement if you think about it. So many different places, so many different industries. And I think really tech has led the way with how to do modern go-to market, and there's just huge opportunity to take that approach into the world and make it accessible for everybody and solve the problem every company has. How do I generate revenue? How do I get more customers? And revenue is like oxygen. You know that, so you can't live without it.

>> I love that revenue is like oxygen. I would agree. I've never been the CRO, but I've been partnered up on executive teams with the CRO, and go to market. I've run product marketing and marketing. So having campaigns, and building that into how the sales funnel goes. How are you guys really helping on top of Sales Cloud? And really what's the relationship with Salesforce and how does that work together?

Matt Curl

>> Yeah, if you think about Apollo's history, really even rewinding the clock 10 years ago, the US had a monopoly with data where there's really one, maybe two data vendors that actually exist. And so what that puts you in is really an environment where even Salesforce has to rely very heavily on data providers. And you think about the first thing you're going to do with any company, any product, who am I selling to? What are the companies? What is it about those companies that make them interesting to target? And then the question that's always next, "Okay, well who in those companies am I selling to?" Both of those things are core foundations of data. And Apollo really entered the market with that problem statement of how do we create another great quality data source that can exist? And that's really how it starts the relationship with the CRM. From there, when you look at what has happened in the CRM space, it's really just turned into a lot of tools that have been plugged into the CRM, but they don't think about one another and they don't unify one another in a tech stack at all. And that creates a lot of challenges, but also a lot of opportunity. And I think Apollo is firmly in the ability to take data and do a lot of things in the go-to market tech stack that is both complementary to a CRM, or could even potentially facilitate as one if you had a simpler use case.

>> So the big announcements this week are shockingly, AI. And I'm blown away, Jensen's on stage later today, the leather jacket makes another appearance. And they're a Salesforce customer. I know that from, we were talking with a lot of the execs from Salesforce earlier in the day and yesterday. How do you see AI playing a role in the go-to-market space? Because to your point, having that intelligence about who you're talking to, the right times, where they are in the funnel. How does this really work? And how does Apollo really play a role in that?

Matt Curl

>> Yeah, I think the AI and RevTech has been around actually for a lot longer, even though it's becoming very vogue and there and a sexy term. It's really coming into market all over the place. And when I think about where it plugs into the go-to-market tech stack, there's a bunch of obvious adjacencies. The first are, how do I generate content? How do I do messaging? How can I do things that normally take a lot of time much faster? I see a lot of problems there that are happening, but there's that whole content creation mode that LLMs are amazing at. The second part is really how can I use AI to augment the human? How can I use AI as an augmentation? I think a lot of people are going towards replacement. I think augmentation is going to occur before replacement. And really there's a lot of places you can augment the entire go-to-market tech stack with AI, you can speed things up, you can make people a lot more effective. And that's always depending on where you want to focus in the tech stack, it could be as mundane or as simple as I'm going to just do simple note-taking for you, going to save you all that time and I'm going to do notes. You could also take that and say, "I'm going to go from notes and now I'm going to generate the next best email for you to send, and I'm going to automate that entire process." So it's really where do you fall, and what part of the tech stack do you want to attack? And you're seeing a lot of entrants in the market on different places in go-to-market tech, whether it's sales coaching, you see it in note-taking, you see it in automated email generation. It's all over the place, and I think that makes it particularly interesting but also very difficult to navigate and to think about what's best for you.

>> Yeah, I couldn't agree more, and I totally agree and I think actually Salesforce's talk track around AI agents and stuff has been exactly what you said, which is its additive not subtractive to the human experience. It's how do you enable people to go faster? How do you enable them to be smarter and have more intelligence? And that would seem to play right to where Apollo is about enabling the go-to-market and how people are going to move through that stack.

Matt Curl

>> Yeah, absolutely. I think even just back to the foundations of how do you do go-to-market. And thinking about that very first entry point, I talked with you. Let's imagine you and I started a new company. One of the first things we're going to discuss is who are we going after? What are we targeting? Think about a default today. You go in and you basically have to configure all of that from scratch, and plug it all in and build the whole thing yourself. Why can't you just say, "I want to target these types of companies, I'm looking to do this type of sales motion, configure it for me." And I think this is where you're going to start to see a lot of really interesting AI use cases that can really speed up people. And I think what's going to happen is it's going to democratize technology. Where tech has been held the power of you must have a Salesforce admin, you've got to have a Rev ops team that can stitch this all together. We're not very far away from someone that perhaps is in a more traditional industry, that can just pick up some AI empowered features, or products, or programs, and type in a couple very quick things about what they want do and boom, they've got rev tech in a box. And I think Apollo can play really squarely in that space, and I think we're extremely well positioned to do that.

>> So let's talk about your go-to-market motion. I think that again, I've been told that there's a community led, product led growth or PLG motion. How do you really engage with your customers as well?

Matt Curl

>> Yeah, the heart of PLG, I think many companies will now say they are PLG and there is pseudo PLG, or even PLS, product led sales and there's true PLG. Apollo is really true PLG. And so that means the vast majority of our OPEX goes into R&D. It goes into development, and I think you have to honor certain principles of product-led growth, which is usage comes first, monetization comes second. How do you build amazing products that people want to use, that are very valuable that they want to try? And then you worry about monetization curves and those types of things later. It's a different type of discipline that you have to build into a company. It also attracts a different type of talent, and a different type of person that you look for on your go-to-market sides as well. And it's really about augmenting and speeding up this time to value, starting with free uses, generating features that are really widely adoptable, very important and people want to use these products. And then you figure out the motion of how to perhaps do large deployments in the enterprise later. That's really what differentiates PLG. What it does for a company like Apollo, is it lets us test a lot of products at scale really quickly. There's millions of users of the product. That's an incredible asset for us, and it's a really great motion to be able to perfect, and try things and it's a big way we've grown over time.

>> So you were a user of Apollo before going there, and you talk about millions of users. Typically, what kind of company, or verticals, or what have you really come to Apollo to help them with their go-to-market? Because not everybody is into the PLG thing. Like you said, there's a reason why there's a lot of consulting around Salesforce, to put it mildly. What deos the ideal customer look like or persona that's coming in?

Matt Curl

>> Yeah, like happens with PLG, the more you develop, the more that shifts and moves over time. I would say if you were wound the clock on Apollo five years ago, a lot of people came there for data. And it was how do I get this data asset and use it really well? I was previously at Checker, leveraged a lot of Apollo data for different parts of the tech stack predominantly on SMB data enrichment. It was a great, great way to do that. And I think that's five years ago. Fast-forward to today, we've built a lot of products. There's conversational intelligence, there are deal intelligence. How do you move deals across the pipeline? We're doing a lot of this stuff inherent in the platform. That attracts now a slightly different persona. So we see a lot of our first time founders, companies coming out of Y Combinator or other incubator programs that are really amazed and saying, "Oh my gosh, this is everything I need, to do everything I need to do for go to market for the foreseeable future." And we're starting to see that shift and that's very exciting. Additionally, what we're also seeing is back to this data point of when you think about this sales tech stack and how fragmented it's really become. Because we're doing so many of the core pieces, the contact data, the company enrichment data, email engagement, conversational intelligence, you don't lose the data going from vendor A, to vendor B, to vendor C to vendor D. It's all inherent in the platform. And so we're starting to see a lot more deployments of our product into mid-market and lower ends of enterprise, where people are wanting to deploy the product. And I think you saw those same type of burgeoning motions happen at most PLG companies, likely Atlassian is a good example of starting with a bunch of deployments, and then it sprawls out. And we're seeing those same things. And we're very excited to be there with those companies and help them and be a part of that journey for them.

>> A big piece of PLG is also time to value and seeing that. What's a typical engagement? The customer comes in, they're self-starting, they start in with a particular use case in mind. What's usually the time to value quotient for that customer?

Matt Curl

>> We see that time to value as sub-30 days. It's really about if the product's working as intended, you should be able to pick up the product, get everything you need, boarded in there in a very easy to go wizard, and you should be able to start generating meetings in your first month. That is our key metric of success. If that's what go-to-market is, can I take something, can I deploy it and can I get meetings with customers? That's our key success metric and we target everything sub-30 days on that. We think that's the right time to value. If you go longer than that, I think you really start to draw questions into is the approach working? Is this right for my business? Or maybe even product market fit questions. Is my messaging actually resonating with the market? Which is not necessarily an Apollo challenge, that's more of a founder issue to weave through there.

>> But to your point, I think are you able to say, "Hey, here's where in the sales cycle people are getting stuck." Because like you said, if you're coming out of Y, and you're trying to figure out do you have product market fit, I may want to figure out, "Okay, I have my people who are leaning in. I have also the first set of non-traditional leaner ins, and I want to see for the ones that we close versus the ones we didn't, where I'm getting stuck in that go-to-market cycle." Is that something that Apollo helps with as well?

Matt Curl

>> Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Tracks all of this natively and yeah, exactly. It does exactly this, which is if you're sending thousands of emails and no one's responding, you're going to see it right there in response rates. And we track a lot of these core metrics, so taking a more traditional channel like email, you can see the number of emails sent, the deliverability rates, the open rates, the read rates, the response rates, how many convert to a meeting. All of that's right in front of you, which opens what is happening. And there's so many benchmarks you can find on the web that are easily available about, is this a good open rate? Is this a good response rate? And I think that really gives founders a lot of feedback, and go-to-market teams a lot of feedback about whether their approaches are working.

>> Yeah. How long has Apollo been around, just out of curiosity?

Matt Curl

>> It's been around for about eight, nine years.

>> Okay.

Matt Curl

>> Yeah, I'm trying to think. It was Five Star is where I was before Checker was YC 2012, and I want to say Apollo came out of YC in 2014.

>> Okay,

Matt Curl

>> Maybe a decade then. I guess I got that wrong.

>> Yeah, maybe a decade. Yeah.

Matt Curl

>> I had to go back and think about-

>> It's getting later in the day. We're doing a lot of hiking around here to put it mildly. But I think what's really fascinating is that it's the idea of full cycle sales too and what Apollo is aiding in that. And talk a little bit about where Apollo is for that and why people should really embrace that.

Matt Curl

>> Yeah, I would think about if you've worked at a tech company or not, I think there's a difference between I've been in a tech-enabled go-to-market motion or I haven't. So I'll speak probably more to the audience, and to yourself having been in these tech environments, and we can think it through. And I think this will help explain where Apollo's really helping customers find a lot of value. It goes back to this, how do I go to market? And how do I do this? And that takes a lot of coordination. It's about the messaging to the customers, getting that messaging into the market, "Okay, I've got to send these emails at a velocity that makes sense." Now what happens? I have to get an SDR or a salesperson on the phone perhaps making dials, doing contacts to these people. Then they respond, I've got to go do a demo with them. I've got to hold these demos with them, and make sure that they see value in the product. Then I've got to progress them further into the pipeline, and I've got to make sure that we can get to a contracting stage and then I close one or close lost this deal. That's the end-to-end process. And then when you look at the soup du jour tech stack that a lot of companies might have to pull that off, it's like 10 tools. So that's a lot of complexity. And I don't know if the value's there. Apollo's approach is really, let's simplify this and give it to you all in one. How do we let you do all of that inherently in the platform by itself? You can do every piece of that in the platform today. And what that results in is number one, a way more simplified tech stack for the users. Two, the data problems don't occur, because number one, we're the source data. Number two, the tools are all developed first party. So the data's hopping built to handle the data in the same formats, with the same design, with the same engineers. Versus company A, and company B and company C. You could pick Gong, Outreach and let's take Calendly, as meetings, call intelligence and outreach. Those three didn't have a council where they get together and talk about how they're going to handle data and handle these objects. So with all that being built in-house with Apollo, it makes it way easier to understand, the data's a lot fresher, it's up-to-date and it's all contained in a really nice shell for a person to understand how their go-to-market is actually working and make smart decisions off of that. And that's really what we mean by empowering everybody to use modern GTM. Now on the non-tech version of that, let's imagine you and I just wanted to run a traditional business to sell cookies. We could run the same exact approach. These tools exist in tech for a reason. They're really good and they help. So how do you go deploy that if you're not in Salesforce or HubSpot today? How do you gain access to Gong, and Outreach, and SalesLoft, and Calendly and ChiliPiper and all of these other amazing tools if you're not in that tech ecosystem? And then how do you stitch that together? It doesn't really exist in the market, and I think that there's just a big opportunity and a big appetite for that.

>> Yeah, talk about PLG. Cookies are definitely PLG.

Matt Curl

>> Cookies are PLG. Yeah.

>> Definitely. I look at it and I go to me, again, having been in sales a long time ago, but for a little short stint and was very curious, once one of my companies was acquired, they put me into sales, which was fascinating. Because I was a product guy.

Matt Curl

>> It's good to spend time in sales no matter matter who you are, it's great.

>> It gave me appreciation for the go-to-market aspects, and I've used multiple different CRM systems over the years, and in fact transitioned between them. How do you see just the whole market evolving around this piece? It would seem like everybody wants it to be simpler. That seems to be a core message this week is, and it seems to be what you guys are doing, is bringing a simpler all-in-one, come and consume from here type of approach to this problem.

Matt Curl

>> Yeah, I think that's the million or billion dollar question I think is really the one you're asking there, of how do you do this and simplify it? And I think that, again, tech can really focus on tech. And tech is a huge part of our domestic GDP. It's a huge part of our ecosystem, especially in the Bay Area where I live. But it is not every segment. And I think when you look at a lot of businesses, they don't deploy modern tech stack, and it's for the exact reason you're talking about. Either it wasn't built for the type of CRM they're on or their platform, so just wasn't built for that purpose. Or the second is it would require so many custom integrations, and so much complexity that you start to wonder if it's really worth it. So I really do, even though it's a little bit in jest, that idea about even if we were to sell cookies, pick a business model that you would think about starting from scratch. Whether it's a tech business or not, and think about how would you go today to market? And how would you do it at scale? And is there a great option for you outside of building something yourself on an Excel spreadsheet? And I think that's a huge latent opportunity, and really where you're going to see this consolidation occur.

>> Yeah, I think again, it's one of those things that, like you said, if it's pizza, it's cookies, it's whatever versus tech. I think you all have emotion, you all have offers and all of that. And like you said, do you go to a whole variety of a tech stack or do you go to all in one? And I think that's the key with customers. Well Matt, I really appreciate you coming on board because I think this is really exciting, and it's absolutely something that I think AI will impact, and that customers are really looking for an easier consolidated way to do this as well. So thanks for coming on board.

Matt Curl

>> Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

>> And thank you for watching this episode of Dreamforce 2024, live from the NYSE. We got more coming to you this afternoon. Stay tuned. We'll be back.