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Salesloft and Apollo are two of the most popular sales engagement platforms on the market, helping businesses to reach and inform their target audience and (hopefully) close the deal.
But which is best for lead gen agencies?
And, more importantly, are there any better options available?
To answer those questions and more, dive into our comparison of Salesloft vs Apollo for agencies…
Salesloft for Agencies: Key Features
Speed up the email creation process by using generative AI to draft attention-grabbing outreach emails at scale.
Optimize outreach sequences with analytics and A/B testing.
Cut down on low-value “busywork” by automatically syncing buyer data to your customer relationship management (CRM) platform.
Access your outreach campaigns wherever you are, even on your mobile device.
Track your sales team’s revenue performance via a single dashboard.
Apollo for Agencies: Key Features
Build automated outreach templates combining cold emails, sales calls, automated LinkedIn tasks, and more – or create your own, with support from the built-in AI helper.
Keep on top of email deliverability with guided mailbox setups, DMARC and DKIM authentication checks, one-click unsubscribe, deliverability scores, and more.
Leverage AI recommendations on email personalization and copy, backed by a database of 270M+ contacts and millions of sales engagement data points.
Find verified prospect phone numbers in a single click and call them within the platform using Apollo’s built-in dialer.
Collect verified email addresses and phone numbers directly from LinkedIn.
Why QuickMail is the Best Choice for Lead Gen Agencies
Sure, Apollo and Salesloft are both perfectly good tools.
But they fall short on many of the basic features lead gen agencies need to deliver results at scale for clients. Things like:
Email deliverability
Advanced analytics
Client reporting
Streamlined outreach workflows
Agency-friendly pricing
Fortunately, there’s another solution: QuickMail.
QuickMail is a dedicated cold outreach platform built with lead gen agencies in mind. Let’s see how it compares to Apollo and Salesloft for those agency-critical features:
Deliverability Solutions
With Salesloft
Email deliverability is one of the most important factors in choosing a cold email tool for agencies.
Unfortunately, Salesloft falls short here, with no inclusive:
Email verification
Email warmup
Inbox rotation
Given that email you send that doesn’t reach the main inbox is a missed opportunity, this is a big problem.
With Apollo
Apollo fares a little better on email deliverability than Salesloft – but it still lacks some critical functionality.
For instance, it doesn’t offer inclusive email warmup, which leaves you with two choices:
Pay for a third-party email warmup subscription
Spend hours on manual email warmup
When margins are tight, neither option is good.
It’s also worth noting that we’ve heard from some ex-Apollo customers who were unhappy with email deliverability on the platform. For example, Avadel founder Dave Valentine said:
"Apollo's deliverability was really poor. Our open rates went to a near-zero, our click-through rates were abysmal, and our meeting book rate was nonexistent."
Learn more: Find out how Avadel added $347,000+ in MRR with QuickMail.
With QuickMail
At QuickMail, our #1 goal is to ensure agencies like yours hit the main inbox time and again.
Despite recent updates from Microsoft and Google, our users enjoy a 98% inboxing rate – that is, the percentage of emails that don’t bounce – across all email service providers and millions of sends.
So what’s our secret?
It starts with effective inbox warmup. All QuickMail customers get free access to MailFlow, one of the best email warmup solutions.
But, however much warmup you do, not all inboxes will perform equally. That’s why we built Deliverability AI, our proprietary inbox rotation tool. Deliverability AI monitors deliverability across all your accounts – and if deliverability drops on one inbox, we’ll automatically swap it out for a higher-performing alternative.
Again, Deliverability AI is included as standard with all QuickMail agency pricing plans.
And because deliverability is an ongoing battle, we’re regularly adding new features like Rewording with AI, which uses AI to ensure that every single email you send is unique – thereby reducing your risk of being flagged as spam.
All of which means sales professionals can spend more time optimizing cold email campaigns and following up with high-value prospects, and less time worrying about email deliverability.
Learn more: 10 Best Email Deliverability Tools
Advanced Analytics and Client Reporting Dashboards
With Salesloft
You need advanced, agency-friendly analytics to effectively optimize your outreach efforts.
Salesloft hypes up its reporting and analytics features, but it doesn’t include send-day attribution (learn what that matters in our article: Why We’re All Wrong About Open Rates: QuickMail’s Deliverability-Based Perspective).
And with no client reporting portal, sharing sales outcomes with clients is way more time-consuming than it should be.
With Apollo
Apollo makes it difficult to access key campaign data. The analytics features are pretty messy, and some users complain that the reports lack the depth of other platforms:
You can create custom reports and dashboards on higher-tier Apollo plans. But these aren’t organized by client, so it’s tricky to figure out which are performing well – and which need a little TLC.
With QuickMail
Because QuickMail is designed for lead gen agencies like yours, we track all the key metrics you rely on to make informed decisions, like…
Opens
Clicks
Replies
Bookings
Bounces
…and more.
We also go way beyond the basics, because we’re the only cold emailing solution to offer time-based data – capable of tracking deliverability back to the day an email was sent. That way, if your bounce rate spikes, you’ll be able to see exactly when it happened, making it easier to resolve.
And, to save you sinking hours into tracking down business-critical data, we let you build a customizable agency dashboard with up to 20 custom tiles. That way, your most important lead gen metrics are only ever a click away.
We even let you segment the results by email provider to give you the clearest possible picture of sales performance.
Learn more: How To Choose the Best Sales Analytics Tools for Your Agency
Client Outreach Organization and Workflows
With Salesloft
You need to maximize efficiency to generate leads at scale – so you can’t afford to waste time on repetitive tasks like organizing client workflows.
Salesloft gets a black mark here because it doesn’t have a unified inbox. That means there’s no easy way to view and respond to prospect replies.
With Apollo
Like Salesloft, Apollo doesn’t offer a unified inbox – an essential tool for any lead gen agency.
And with no client reporting portal, sharing results with clients is way more time-consuming than it should be.
With QuickMail
The fact that QuickMail has a unified inbox already puts us ahead of Apollo and Salesloft. But this isn’t just any unified inbox – it offers a bunch of advanced features. For instance, you can:
Respond to prospect replies from any inbox
Read, label, and triage replies without marking them as “read”
Instantly see how long prospect replies have been waiting for a response from your sales reps
Assign follow-ups to the most appropriate team member
Smart stuff, huh?
But that’s not all.
QuickMail also makes life easier for sales leaders by offering a changelog, which tells you about any edits made to your email outreach campaigns – including who made them, what they did, and when.
That way, you can easily see when any mistakes were made, which can help you identify training opportunities.
Agency-Friendly Pricing
With Salesloft
Salesloft doesn’t publish pricing information, which is always a red flag as far as we’re concerned.
They also charge per user, making Salesloft super expensive for larger sales teams.
Beyond that, we can’t tell you much about Salesloft’s various packages, because their pricing page is pretty vague. You’ll find lots of buzzwords, but no specifics about cold outreach functionality – like how many emails you can send per month, or which outreach channels it supports.
If you want to learn more, you’ll have to reach out for a custom quote.
With Apollo
Apollo also charges per user, so again, it’s not a great fit for any agency with more than a couple of reps.
To give an example, Apollo’s entry-level Basic plan costs $59 per user per month. That’s almost $600 per month for a 10-person team – yet it only includes one mailbox per user and two email sequences.
Frustratingly, Apollo users can’t share logins, so if one of your reps is editing a campaign and a colleague logs in, they’ll be booted out – and all their changes will be deleted.
That’s annoying enough if you have a small team. For larger agencies, it’s totally unmanageable.
With QuickMail
At QuickMail, we believe in transparent, agency-friendly pricing.
Our prices range from $399 – $799 per month. Whichever plan you choose, we’ll give you access to all our email performance-enhancing tools, including:
Deliverability AI
Advanced analytics
Email warmup
Plus all our plans allow you to add unlimited team members and email addresses.
If that sounds good, you can check us out before you buy by signing up for a 21-day free trial.
Forget Salesloft vs Apollo – Switch To QuickMail Today
By this point, it should be clear that QuickMail is the only one of these three platforms to offer a truly agency-grade outreach solution.
But what if you’re stuck in a contract with Apollo or Salesloft and can’t get out of it?
Don’t worry – we’ve thought of that too. Just sign up for your QuickMail trial and send us a receipt from your current platform, then we’ll credit your account with however much you’re paying per month.
Not completely satisfied with QuickMail after your trial finishes? No bother – you don’t have to pay us a cent. But if you are ready to switch, those account credits will give you a big discount on your first QuickMail invoice.
So what are you waiting for? Switch to QuickMail today!
