For most B2B SaaS companies, the SDR function is the daily engine of pipeline creation. For one Apollo.io customer, that engine had become fragile: over-reliant on email, constrained by tool sprawl, and misaligned with how modern buyers actually want to engage. What started as a narrow search for a fix to email deliverability became a full-scale rebuild of the customer’s sales development motion on Apollo.
A Legacy SDR Engine Starts to Strain
Apollo’s customer helps organizations deliver personalized, data-driven video experiences at scale, thereby increasing engagement, conversion, and long-term customer value. After nearly two decades in market and a long-established SDR organization, the customer had a mature outbound motion that had been refined over many years. But by early 2024, the cracks were hard to ignore. The SDR team ran a familiar playbook: high-volume email and LinkedIn outreach, supported by a stack that included ZoomInfo for data, Groove for sales engagement, and Gong for call recording.
On the surface, nothing appeared catastrophically broken. Reps were experienced and disciplined. They knew their tools and their accounts. Yet under that familiarity, performance had begun to stall. Email deliverability was deteriorating. Domain health scores were slipping. The team could send more, but fewer messages were reaching inboxes, and fewer replies were turning into pipeline.
When the customer’s SDR Team Lead first stepped into the organization, he quickly saw the pattern. The motion was heavily weighted toward email volume in a world where inboxes were crowded, filters were less forgiving, and buyer behavior had shifted. As he put it, “We were looking at our email health, and it was not good. That was really what kicked off the entire thing.”
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