Name: Apollo In Claude: A New Way to Power Smarter Growth
Uploaded: 2026-10-15T19:30:45.547Z
Duration: 57 min 16 s
Description: Apollo In Claude: A New Way to Power Smarter Growth

Transcript for "Apollo In Claude: A New Way to Power Smarter Growth": Hello. Hello. Hello, everyone. Welcome. I'm Andy McCarter Bicknell. I lead product marketing for Apollo's AI suite. I'm really glad that everyone is here. We've got a really, really cool session today. I'm joined by Adam Carr, Apollo's chief revenue officer, and Lina Ackman, who leads S and D at Anthropic. And in a little bit, we're gonna be sitting down for a fireside chat and talking about what AI actually looks like for small businesses right now, including what Lena specifically learned talking to more than a thousand business owners this year. So it's gonna be really exciting. Would love to just kind of quickly introduce both you, Adam and Lena. So, Adam, do you wanna do, you wanna quickly introduce yourself? Yeah. Happy to be here. Adam Carr. I'm the CRO at Apollo. I've been here for about, eighteen months now. And, yeah, excited to have this conversation with Lina today. Awesome. Lena, how about you? Hi, everyone. Just to say, Matthew, yes, we are real humans. My name is Lena Ochman. I am the head of SMB at Anthropic. My job is to listen to small business owners, learn from them, and be their voice in... Inside Anthropic. We've been on the road with small businesses here at the wall one at a quad, and a lot of businesses are looking to grow, which we see Apollo being a really great partner for. So I'm excited to be in this room, chatting with all of you, learning how to leverage Apollo and Quad for Small Business both. Thank you for having us. Awesome. We will hear more from Adam and Lena here shortly. For now, I'm going to do a quick warm up question just to make sure everyone is feeling good in the chat. So first off, why don't you tell me really quickly, what is the last thing you asked Claude to do? What is... And it doesn't have to be business related. It can be anything related to your personal life. I personally... I just bought a house, and so I'm dealing with a bunch of different contractors right now and a lot of different documents floating around. And so I'm using Claude to kinda help organize everything and make sure that I'm staying on top of stuff. I'm seeing demo review, review inbound leads for ICP fit, create presentations. Okay. So we're going we're going on the business side. I love it. Okay. Oh, travel itinerary. I love that. I've used that quite a bit as well. Very, very cool. And while we're at it, why don't any... Anybody, share where you are, watching from? Any, like, city or country? I'm personally in Traverse City, Michigan for my Midwesterner, folks. See here. Wow. People from all over. Very cool. Awesome. London, Turkey. Very cool. Very, very cool. Okay. So great to have everybody here. I'm gonna go ahead and jump in, and we will start to dive into some housekeeping. Okay? So number one, what can we expect with this session? So number one, yes, you will get the recording. Yes. You will get the recording. And, yes, you will get the recording. I promise we'll send you the recording within a couple days at the very least, so don't worry about it. And if you have any questions, please put them in the q and a tab. You'll see that in the top right section of your chat... Or excuse me, not in the chat. There's a tab next to the chat tab that says q and a, so go ahead and throw them in there. That's where we're gonna be looking when we go into the actual q and a portion, down the... Down towards the end of the, session. Okay? So throw them in there while we're going at it, and we will be sure to answer all of them. And then next, let's talk about spam. Please don't spam the chat. It's okay. We can we can all be adult. We know what spam is. Don't be throwing your LinkedIn and all that kind of stuff in there. You know, we have a community actually for all those types of things. And so if you want to connect with other people, please join the Apollo community. I have another slide all about that, and so we can dig into the community and you can share and connect with other people there. But please don't spam the chat for the time being. And, also, don't, you know, let's be nice to each other. You know? Let's be adults. Don't be rude. We're all friends here. We're trying to learn about go to market. We're trying to be, great small business owners trying to learn. So everyone, please be kind. And, hey, here is that link for the Apollo community in Slack. And so if you do wanna connect with other, other business owners, other GTM practitioners, this is a great place to do that and drop your LinkedIn link. So please go ahead and check that QR code, and you can join the community as well. Completely free. And resources. Okay. So everything we mentioned today is going to be in the docs tab, on the top right of your screen, I believe. So that includes a write up on what 1,000 small business owners taught Anthropic about AI, which I'd really recommend that you take a look at. So make sure you check that out before you leave today. Okay. And so here is what's in store for us today. So I'm gonna introduce, oh, excuse me. I already introduced, Adam and Lena. So you're all set there. So we took care of that. We took care of the house housekeeping. So I'm going to then now go into pretty much what Apollo and Claude... What what the point of it is, what the value is, and kinda introduce to you really, how you can make the most of the integration. We're going to do a little live demonstration of how it works. And then after that, we'll get into the best part, in my humble opinion, which is Adam and Lina's fireside chat and the q and a. K? So let's get into it. We already did the introduction. So let's talk about Apollo inside Claude. So three things in this section that, I'd like to, go through. So number one, what Claude for small businesses brings to your workday, number one. Number two, what Apollo brings to the table as part of that. And then number three, obviously, I'm gonna show you exactly how all of that works. So let's take a look here. K. So, what Apollo brings to your workday. So let's start with this. So cloud for small business, because I think it's pretty new to a lot of folks here. You might not have seen it yet. So, Anthropic launched this back in May, actually. It's 43 ready made workflows inside cloud built with tools a lot of you already use, like QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, and DocuSign. Everything from back office work, like reporting and invoices, to growing your pipeline, and that's where Apollo and tools like Apollo come in. And the really cool part here is that it has passed 900,000 installs since launch. And the part that I personally really like is that you, the user, are still the approver here. So so Claude is not going to, execute anything on your behalf without you, approving. You know? It's going to give you a lot of recommendations on a lot of tasks, but it defaults to waiting on your okay before anything sends, posts, or before you pay for anything. And the most relevant piece that I think, to what we're talking today is that when Lena's team asked business owners what they wanted help with, a third of them said growth. So in other words, you know, increasing and handling leads, dealing with inbound, managing proposals, and that is where Apollo comes in. So let's talk about that really quick. So Apollo's connector brings our data and our tools right into cloud, and it does four things to help you. So the first thing is it helps you find leads. So all you have to do is really describe your ideal customer in plain English, and Apollo turns that into a list of real people and companies. Number two is research. So sometimes, you know, you need to learn a little bit more about a company or a contact before deciding if they're actually worth reaching out to. And with Apollo Connected, you can actually ask Claude about any account or a person and get the contacts that you'd otherwise have to spend a lot of time just manually digging for. And so that is where I'm specifically seeing a lot of value right now with a lot of our customers. Number three is prioritizing. So Apollo can help you uncover buy intent specifically, like, through different signals. For example, I know a lot of people are getting a lot of value from website visitors and form fills to really just see who's interested in the problems that you're solving right now. So those are, like, the hottest leads that you can really act on immediately with a higher chance of success than if you're just reaching out cold. And so prioritizing all of those leads over the others. And then lastly, we have drafting or reaching out. So you can use Apollo to essentially build an entire outreach campaign, or you can use a... Excuse me. You can use Claude to draft your emails and then push it into Apollo for sending. And, again, you approve everything before anything goes out, so you are the ultimate approver. Okay. And we get this question a lot as well. It's a very, very important question. It's something that I'm sure a lot of you are thinking right now. Is my data safe in cloud? And this is a very fair question. So half the business owners surveyed named data security as their biggest hesitation. So two things I wanna make sure that everyone's aware of. First, you're always in control of what runs. Everything starts in approval mode as well. So Claude does the prep work and then waits for you to actually give it the green light and go execute. So, again, nothing happens without your okay. That's the first thing. Number two is that Claude only sees what you can already see. So it works inside your existing permissions, and same goes with your team. So if you or your team can't see in Apollo or Salesforce or any of the other connectors that you have set up today, then you won't be able to see it in cloud either. So, hopefully, that's helpful. Lena's gonna go deeper on this in the fireside chat as well. So, definitely stay tuned for that. And now how Apollo moves through Claude. So here's what everything really looks like end to end. And like I said, I'm gonna show this on the actual demo here shortly. So you connect Claude... Or excuse me. You connect Apollo to Claude with your own account. If you don't have one already, you can get an Apollo account for free. Claude works inside the access that you already have as well. And so once Apollo is searching, researching, and enriching within your plan, you can simply approve. And then, again, nothing posts, sends, or you pay for anything without your okay. And so you can go through this whole flow of, again, finding, researching, and creating sequences or outreach all through Apollo using the connector, with Claude. And before we jump into the actual demo, I wanna share one more framework that comes straight from Anthropic's AI fluency course. It's called the four d's. And I think it's the most helpful way to really just think about working with Claude, especially if you're just getting started. So the first is delegation, which is really just about deciding what you hand off to Claude and what you keep for yourself. So something like building a prospect list is a really great fit, but then deciding who your best customer is, that still really needs your judgment. So definitely keep that in mind when you are working with Claude. The second one is description. So this is how you brief Claude. So think of it like onboarding a new hire. You know, you tell it who your ideal customer is, what tone you want, what a good list looks like, and what it should really steer clear of. The third piece is discernment. Oh, excuse me. Third piece is diligence, which, again, that's you owning the outcome. So, like, spot checking your work before anything goes out and making sure that you wouldn't actually send anything that you wouldn't wanna put your own name on. And then the fourth piece is discernment. So this is the piece where, essentially, it means looking at what you got with a critical eye. Right? So, like, are these contacts actually a really good fit? And does that draft sound like something that you would actually write? So just making sure that you are, again, just comfortable with the... With all the content that you're putting out into the world and that actually represents you or your brand. So it's one continuous loop, and you're going to see all four of these pieces on the demo. Okay. So let's see it in action. So I think now is the time where I should be able to share my screen. Fabulous. Okay. Cool. This is going to be a very short demo like I mentioned. I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen, and I'm gonna kinda get you started in how to, plug in Apollo with Claude. So here we go. Okay. So just confirming everyone sees my screen. Can I get a quick thumbs up in the chat? Fabulous. Okay. Cool. Thanks, everyone. Okay. So the first things first, I wanna make sure that we're all connected to Apollo. Okay? So in order to do that, you're gonna be in Claude, and then you're gonna wanna go to customize, and then type in Apollo under connect. Oh, it should come up automatically. But if you go to connectors, you'll see Apollo right there. And you can go ahead... I'm already connected, so you'll see it says disconnect here. But if you have an account, you can go ahead and click connect, and you'll go through the, authorization phase to just connect to Apollo. It's very, very simple. And then if you wanna go through the actual process of setting up the small business plug in, then you can just do the same thing. Type in small business, and then you'll see the plug in right here at the top. And then you can actually try it in Coburg, and it's going to start a new window, to really kick off the process. I'm gonna go ahead over on the left hand side here, though, first because I actually already went through the process just to show you what it looked like so we didn't have to waste a bunch of time waiting for responses here, but it will actually go ahead and tell you to, okay, get me started with small business. And then it will give you a few prompts for you to get started. Try to really understand your context as a small business and any of your biggest day to day headaches that you want to really start tackling. These are literally just point and click out of multiple choice questions, and it's just trying to get you started. And it's gonna, like I said, try to get an understanding of what your business is. And so in this case, I said commercial HVAC contractor. And, I said I really wanted to find new leads from Apollo, and so I wanted to find 10 prospects. And then went ahead, called Apollo, and then it gave me 10 leads to work with and why they might be a fit here. And so that is a very, very short example of how the plug in could start working out. Of course, I am just scratching the surface, and remember the plug in uses multiple different connectors. And so in this case, I'm just highlighting Apollo. And so keep that in mind. The more connectors that you add into, Claude, the higher the likelihood that you'll get more value out of this plug in. But then let me go into actually, like, a full on demonstration of that end to end flow that I mentioned, earlier in the presentation. So let's say, for example, you know, in the previous example, I was saying, right, that I was in, what was it? It was an HVAC... Commercial HVAC contractor. Right? So in this case, let's change the setting up a little bit, and let's say that, I run a commercial cleaning company in Columbus, Ohio. Again, the point of what I'm trying to show here is that end to end flow of finding leads with Apollo and Claude, researching them to find and prioritize really good fits, and then create email copy to then reach out to those great fits. And so I have a prompt here, to find Columbus area companies with 50 to 500 employees in professional services, health care clinics, and property management. That is my ICP. Again, that's... I'm trying to use the AI fluency piece that Anthropic shared, the four d's. For each company, give me the one person most likely to buy cleaning services, preferring facilities, office, or practice managers. Skip anyone without a current company and rate by best fit. So I went ahead and called Apollo, and you can see if I scroll down here, it pulled 19 Columbus area contacts from Apollo, and you can see why some of them are strong fits. So you can get all that information there. You can see which ones it deprioritized and why you might wanna skip them. And then great. Okay. So we just found a bunch of really good leads for our commercial cleaning business. So now I'm asking them, hey. Okay. Can you please use Apollo to tell me about, the top five companies? Anything recent, like new office expansions or hiring that makes them a good time to reach out. Again, the point is to now really try to prioritize the top leads, maybe someone that might really value our services more so than the others. And so it says, okay. We found no new offices or expansions at the time, but there is some companies that are experiencing really big headcount growth, which which could lead to someone valuing our services. And so it highlighted these top businesses here, and then I said, great. Okay. Let's draft a short friendly email to the top contact at each of the five businesses. I wanna sound like a local business owner, not a marketer. Please don't send anything. When approved, I would like to send them via Apollo. And so, again, now it's writing five customized emails to each of those five high prioritized businesses. So someone from Casto, NAI Ohio Equities. Again, these are all custom emails tailored directly to my, directions that I gave Claude. And so from here, we can push these directly into, Apollo. We can send the emails, as well, or we can continue to work in the chat here on the best way of moving forward, if we wanna, like, tweak any of the messaging. Okay? Okay. So that is a very quick demonstration of how you can use Apollo and Claude. Hopefully, that was clear for everyone. If you have additional questions, please throw them in the q and a. But for now, I think we can move on to the fireside chat with Adam and Lena. So I'm gonna go ahead and stop sharing my screen here, and I'm gonna go ahead and invite both of them back onto the stage, and we'll kick it off. Okay. Welcome back, Adam and Lena. Did I do an okay job of, of demoing there? That was amazing. Okay. Thank you. Okay. I just... I... You know, I'm always a little bit nervous when I have, when I... When we have the partner or the or the vendor and the actual audience. I'm like, okay. I really hope I'm doing this right. Okay? So really appreciate it. So why don't we go ahead and kick this off? I'm gonna start with Adam here. So I would love to kind of understand, you know, what were the... Really the driving forces behind Apollo and Anthropic and just the relationship between, the two companies. Yeah. I mean, funny enough, the... Our relationship, started way before this partnership with Lina and I. We worked together at Arrow for, over five years. So this this particular partnership is a little bit extra special to me personally. But honestly, like, we're both looking at the same problem. And historically, building connected go to market systems has been extremely difficult. And only, you know, the top 1% of business had had the infrastructure, had the budgets, had the resources to build, and do this well. And so what we believe is important is to make sophisticated go to market accessible to all businesses, not just the ones with the biggest budgets or specialized teams. And our partnership with Anthropic on Cloud for Small Business and our MCB connector allows small businesses to be more successful. And our whole mission is to make world class go to market accessible for every single company. And a big reason for this partnership made sense is that we want to meet people where they already work. And and what we're finding is that often that's inside of Claude. And so now a business owner can find, can enrich, and reach prospects through Apollo without ever leaving Claude. And then... Sorry about that. So, Lena, what is it about Apollo that really drew you to us as, you know, as a partner? Echoing Adam, this partnership is definitely extra special given the history. And, honestly, small business owners picked this one for us on our spring tour. So we just went to 10 cities across the country in the spring and met with over a thousand business owners. We just did six more cities. I've actually headed on a plane to go to Baton Rouge to to go lead a workshop tomorrow. And we asked small business owners, what is it that you want out of AI? What what do you... How do you wanna leverage Claude? How can we help you? And a third of them asked for help growing the business, leads, inbounds, proposal. In a 15 person company, the owner is the sales team plus 10 more jobs, and prospecting happens at 9PM after the real work is done. And so Apollo has the two things that the owner is missing, the data to know who to email, who to call, who to follow-up with, and the tools to actually reach them. And we wanted to make sure that small businesses had access to these tools, knew about these tools, and knew how to leverage them, especially in Claude, like Adam said, where this work and orchestration does happen. And lastly, Absolutely. we're really, yeah, we're really aligned with Apollo from a values and usability perspective. You built your product to be as helpful, as easy as possible. Those are principles of ours as well. And on the integration side, quad drafts, and the owner decides who hears from them. And so that gives the owner control too, which is an important principle for us. Absolutely. I think that, you know, whenever I see, some of the most advanced AI users or just AI adoption in general, a lot of it comes from small businesses. And so I would love to... You know, Adam, I know how often you're talking to all of our customers right now. What are some of the trends that you're seeing in terms of just AI adoption among small businesses? Yeah. I I I love the research that was done by Lina and and her team. And we did a lot of research too. What we keep hearing lines up with a lot of what Lina and team is seeing, but like we're seeing it on more on the sales side. In our own survey that we're doing, almost every team we've talked to is using AI now. The number one way they're using it is finding net new customers. And more than half said that the real results are happening actually only a few months. And so the owners understand the importance of AI which is super important. What they're asking for is how to actually make it run seamlessly to support their business. Interesting. So can you maybe share, I think to follow on that, Lena, like, maybe just some interesting, like, insights that you really learned from that SMB tour that you were on, like, that might tack on or kind of complement what Adam's mentioning there. Yeah. Absolutely. So first is who showed up. Most registrants ran companies less than a 100 employees in size, and what was really awesome is they skew towards the physical economy. We had owners from construction firms, from manufacturing, logistics, the trades, and most of them were chatting and were really agent curious and looking to, bridge that gap between the two and know how to transition, to running workflows through agents. And so the three things that released the account with me were first is that people with zero software background are building their own very, very specialized schools. We had the owner of a trailer manufacturer in Indiana built a reconciliation tool for a newly acquired factory in, like, fifteen minutes that would have taken thousands of dollars and weeks of time in the past. Two, about two thirds of what owners were asking for were running the business. And as I mentioned before, about a third was about growing it, and that's why we're here today. And then three is the biggest question that everybody has is, I don't know what I don't know. Help me to get started. And that's why we build Claude for Small Business to give owners that starting point with the prebuilt skills and workflows, to just simply install it and get running and have it be your agenda starter pack, so to speak. Absolutely. You know, to continue on that, Lena, I'd love to understand, you know, outside of just, like, getting started, because I do think that that is really, like, the... That is the most important piece. Like, you can't really make progress unless you get started first. But what advice would you have for, you know, running and growing a small business with AI today? Hi. So... And I'm so sorry about the background noise. I see some of the comments, so apologies, about that. So the advice for running and, for running and growing the business and when you're starting to... With AI is first is don't start with an overwhelming strategy, and don't try to reinvent your whole business. Just choose that one workflow that you really dread doing or that is super repeatable. Reporting is one of the biggest asks that we have and synthesizing it from all of the data sources and then figuring out what to action on. And so that's built into Cloud for Small Business. It's called the Monday brief. It pulls your cash, your sales, your pipeline, your overdue invoices on one page and telling you what to go, do next. The second is Claude is only as good as the context you give to Claude. It has some of the best frontier models in the world. But to personalize it for your business, you wanna connect your tools, and you wanna give it context and make it even smarter so that it can actually take your voice. It can, build your trust and get smarter. And then the third is build the muscle of talking to Claude and delegating work to it. The... I, on the tour, when I speak to small business owners, they always think that they need to have these really intricate prompts. And what I just say when you're stuck, just talk to it. Tell it what you want it to do. It'll help you, and it'll collaborate with you on figuring out the solution of how to carry out the action that you want. And so those would be the three, big ones that I would say that you can kinda start with today. Love those. Yes. I couldn't agree more too with just, like, finding things that, you struggle with or that are frustrating you on a week to week basis. I definitely try to use that whenever I'm trying to think of, like, oh, like, what should I work on in Claude? Or, like, what, like, problems should I solve? Because then it becomes the easy thing, and it just makes my work week that much better. Adam, I'm gonna punt it over to you now too. Like, what are some of the top Claude for small business use cases that you've seen, and what role specifically, like, is Apollo playing in them? Yeah. I, I'm... You know, I mean, if you read read... If you read the blog article, there's a lot of great examples that... Of of what's happening and what's great, within the use cases. Two in particular that stick out to me, and I'll relate it back. I like, what does this look like now if you're able to have access to Apollo? The first one was how AI levels the playing field for the nontechnical entrepreneurs and employees. And, you know, Lina's talked about that, you know, that there's, you know, a father who built a 100 person commercial cleaning company on paper schedules. And he went to one of the workshops with his daughter who took... Who's taking over the business and they automated the scheduling altogether. And so if you think of back in time, like, if you're a 100 person cleaning company and you wanna win more office contracts, you're relying on referrals or knocking down on doors. Or, Mina said, spending, you know, after hours trying to figure out how to how to get more customers. And the go... The kind of go to market tooling that tells you which buildings to go after, who the facility manager is, how to reach out to them with what message based on what signal, it really only sat with companies that had big sales teams and large budgets. And so companies like this one, now have access, to world class go to market tooling right inside Cloud, supported by Apollo. So they can... You can ask in plain English for prospects in your area based on your ICP and get the names, get their contact information, and you can start a conversation that same day in a multi step sequence. And so for similar use cases, Apollo helps with data enrichment, can help with outreach, all where the teams are working, which is inside of Claude. And so the second area that that stood out to me is around the importance of having proper guardrails and governance, especially when you think about the importance of the human in the loop components. Another example that was mentioned, from the tour that Lina did, is that, you know, there's a a small, business, husband and wife, branding agency, based in New Jersey. And they automated their whole proposal to contract workflow. But they kept... It kept having a person that's honestly reviewing every single one hitting the send button because the human move does matter and they wanted to make sure everything was was done the right way. And honestly, that that is the right instinct, especially in sales. Like, your reputation your reputation is everything. Your brand, your email domain, and the trust you build with your customers. Like, you can't just blast your outbound. And so, like, a good example of this, using Apollo inside of Cloud is that you're able to set up the right human in the loop checks and balances as well have reliance on enterprise grade guardrails that we have spent personally many years building around deliverability and compliance. The key takeaways of these two areas of focus that at least I believe they're really important within the SMB community is that there's a lot of value unlocked and Klon and Apollo gives small businesses access access to prospect data and outreach tools that once required is bigger teams. And you can stay in complete control with approval steps before outreach ever goes out to make sure that message is the right message, that leads in the right way. And, we bring the right safeguards around, you know, deliverability to make sure that your domain is protected and the reputation that you worked so hard to build last. And the combination with these areas helps small businesses pursue new opportunities, help these businesses grow, by putting the customer trust at, you know, right at the forefront. So super excited about the potential here and how these use cases will continue to evolve. And I love hearing these stories. I think that's the best part about all of this is hearing the stories around the impact that this is having. Love it. And, before we... You know, I also... I realized maybe this should have been, like, the first question, to be honest, but I think that it's really important to ground everyone too because we keep on talking about, like, MCP. And I think that, Leena, if you could just... If we could take a step back and just share to our audiences who might be a little bit less familiar, like, what is an MCP specifically and how it really just helps create really powerful connections with companies like Apollo. Yeah. Absolutely. So MCP stands for model context protocol, but you can forget that immediately. I would think about it as a universal adapter that lets Claude plug plug plug in to any of the software you already run. We have tons of connectors that have been approved in our connector marketplace. They've been vetted by us, fully secure, and you can just connect them. You, you you you find them. You sign... You put in your credentials, and then it hooks up to Claude. Without a connector, Claude knows what you paste in. But with one, Claude can work in the tool. So for instance, in Apollo, the product, it could look a prospect, enrich the list, draft the outreach. And so everything Apollo knows about your market shows up inside your conversations. You don't need extra tabs, exports, CSVs. So you don't have to build anything. You just sign in once, and that gives Claude the context and the reach to be able to take actions. And I'd love to talk a bit more too about just trust, get, and control because I know how important that was to all the small business owners that you had interviewed, Lena. Can you just talk to me a little bit more about how Anthropic has really approached that? Yes. Absolutely. That's a really great question and a really great next question after we talked about connecting to your tools. So, in all of our research and in every conversation, the first question that always comes up is, is my data safe? Is it secure? And so, really, what, when we dig into it a little bit more, what we see is owners ask four things. Are you training on my data? Is it actually... Is the platform safe and secure? What can Claude see? And who presses send? So trading, you control whether your conversations are used to improve cloud, and this is your prompts. On the team and enterprise plans, we don't train on them by default. When you connect an MCP, which is your business data, that's never included in any model training on any plan. Is it secure? Yes. We have the highest grade certifications. We're SOC compliant. We're ISO compliant. There's a multitude of other certifications. You could find them all on trust.anthropic.com. We have some of the most highly, highly sensitive, data sensitive organizations as our customers. So safety, security is, front end mind for us. So what can Claude see? When you sign in to Apollo yourself, and Claude works through your account, it works with your permissions. If an employee can't see it in the tool today, they won't be able to see it in Claude, and they won't be able to see each other's data first. You can disconnect it at any time. And before you take action, the default is to ask you for permission first. Love it. And I think that that's too... I mean, from an Apollo perspective. I'm gonna punt it over to you, Adam, here in a second because, naturally, trust and and compliance and security control, that is a huge part of not just Apollo with cloud, but Apollo on its own. And so I know that you, I'm sure, have a few details to add from a from an Apollo perspective on Yeah. And and a big part of our mission and vision is bringing, you know, what world class go to market looks like. for the largest enterprise in the world, but for the small business. A big piece of that is security, is compliance, and we know it's top of mind. And every action that you do take gets recorded back into Apollo. So you can see what went out and to whom, and you can get the right level of reporting analytics. And from a data perspective, our data is verified, and we spend a lot of time and we have a lot of resources, when it comes to our data. You know, with 98% email accuracy, you're not... Your... Our job is to make sure you're not sending emails to bad email addresses, and you're not sending emails to folks that are gonna hurt your domain. And so this is really important for us and as... And we take a lot of pride in our ability to be able to make this happen. And, you know, we believe you can't you can't outsource your entire customer relationships to AI, and you and you... Nobody would wanna do that. The best results come from the the owner and and Claude, you know, working together and say that you can stay in control. But I think the poor... Important piece here is that you have the confidence and you have the trust with the infrastructure behind the scenes. I think that's what Lino is mentioning from, you know, what... The the the importance around security and compliance and what we have to offer as well. I'd love to kinda close things out really just to kinda... You know, we've talked about really what small businesses have been doing with AI lately. Lena did that massive, tour to get an understanding of where business owners are at today, what they're concerned about. I'd love to understand from you, Adam. Like, where do you think AI for small business is heading, you know, over the next year or two years? I'm sure you have a lot of different thoughts on kind of, the landscape and how things are changing. I I think the most important thing is accessibility. You can... It's democratizing intelligence. Everyone has has access. And I think the most important thing is just getting started. Like, it it just it just takes one problem that you wanna focus on and just get your hands dirty. And so I I would encourage everyone to add cloud for small business to a paid cloud plan and connect a free Apollo account. You can get started for free via Apollo, which is amazing. And if you wanna talk to our team, our team is here to help you. The quickest way is either via chat, or you can go to our website. But, ultimately, it's just that it's democratizing. It's making what, you know, what would normally really tough to go do. It's making it accessible to all, and it's putting a lot more time back in your day too. So, excited for what's to come here, and, excited to help everyone here. I could take more advantage of both both worlds. Awesome. And if you do want to see how Apollo could work for your business, we're gonna show a poll on the screen right now. Just respond there, and someone from our team will follow-up. You'll find it between, like, the messages panel and the docs tab. So it might take a second to pop up, but then go ahead and respond there when you have a second. Okay. Let's get to some questions here. So please keep them coming in the q and a tab. We'll do... We'll be, reviewing those shortly. Ajay, do you wanna go ahead and put, these slides back up till you go to the q and a? Alright. Fabulous. So let's talk about the first question here. Everyone's talking about AI transforming sales, but what's one thing that businesses should actually stop doing manually today? Okay. I love I love the the framing of this. Stop manually doing. So I'm gonna I'm gonna kick it over to Adam first. What what are your thoughts here? It's hard for me to tell you what's one thing you should stop doing for your business outside of of... You know, personally, for me, I think the right framing of this is writing down the things that you're doing every single day, and this is where you can engage with Claude. That's the best thing about it. You can actually talk to Claude and help Claude unpack where are things that you can help automate. Where can you remove a lot of the manual work? Instead of you trying to think yourself, engage Claude and ask the questions. Have Claude interview you and ask you the questions. And so there's a lot of value in to be able to... Leveraging Claude to be able to help you unpack where the opportunities are. That's that's my point of view, but there's lots of ways to get started. So, Lina, I'm curious how you how you would answer that. Yeah. This is a good one. The first thing that came to mind when I saw this, was stop manually building your reports. Most of the small business owners work through so many different tools and platforms and, have to go context switch between them in order to get the the data that they need. And so, this is one of the core... For cloud for small business, this is one of the core functionalities. There's a there's a a marketing brief. There's a business pulse report. There's a few different other reports. And so if you connect your MCPs, Claude can do the recordings for you and even create a dashboard for you, send you a weekly or daily note, and, tell you what to prioritize and maybe what you even missed too. I couldn't agree more. And that marketing brief piece is super crucial, especially to marketers out there. Like, as a product marketer, I'm writing a lot of different documents and briefs, and it would take forever for me to put even just a couple of them out per week talking about different product launches or things that we're working on. But that is now one of the easiest things that I can get out there using Claude, and so I highly recommend using that skill for sure. Alright. Let's move on to the next question. What is the biggest challenge you see teams facing when trying to incorporate AI into their sales workflows, and how can they overcome it? So, Lena, I'm gonna throw this one over to you first. This, also, very, speaks speaks to my heart because this is something that I did at the beginning is I did not train Claude on my voice. I did not give Claude the relevant, like, context or product docs, and I didn't give it access to the information. And so all of the emails that I was sending initially were really generic. And so the power move here is to try to, sound different. Right? But help Claude get you 90% of the way. And the way to do that is to give it insight into your voice. Have it scan your email so it could, like, pick up how you like to write your emails, give it context about your company, have Claude interview you. There's actually an SMB onboard skill after you download the plug in, after you install the plug in where Claude interviews you and then captures your voice. And then, all of the messaging and, all of the iteration and the content that you build with Claude will sound more like you and different to your audience. Nice. What about you, Adam? Yeah. I, I can relate to that a lot with me. This is referencing. Like, I have, I have... Majority of my calls that are recorded and I I have it feeding Claude, every every week. And part of that is to train the voice, train the way that I frame things so that it's evolving and it's finding context, which I think is really important, which Lina mentioned before. Because if you don't do that, it's just more it's just more fluff. And I I call it like a little bit of AI slop in some ways. And I think that's where the biggest challenge comes into place is the importance of the human in the loop, part of things. And that's what I'm seeing more and more is like, how do we make sure that, you know, AI can do the best possible, messaging in the world and still need that human judgment? And I think a lot of companies miss the human judgment and you start to blast outbound for the sake of outbound. So so tailor in a way where you're able to use AI to automate a lot of the tedious tasks, and such as, like, list building, such as doing research. When it comes to that message, it's always important to have a human human to loop piece of it, especially until you teach it, until it learns what good looks like. And I think that that interactive loop of the learning is super important. And that's what will will take some time, but over the course of time, you'll get better and better, and then you can rely on it. You can be more independent. Absolutely. It goes back to, you know, the four d's of, AI fluency that are... That was in the presentation. We talked about that a few slides back. And so if you haven't, if you joined late, then make sure that you go back and check out those pieces. That's a really good thing to kinda keep in mind as you're getting started. Alright. Next question. So looking ahead, what part of the sales process do you think will look completely different a year from now because of AI? Adam, I feel like you have some opinions here, so I'm gonna throw this one over to you. I do have opinions. I think that the sales process will not go away. I think the sales process is a framework that matters, like... And there's there's objective, there's activities, there's extra criteria. I think what will what will change here is is the way that you, today, reps right now fill out a ton of fields. I'd say that's a legacy way of thinking about things. You fill out fields in a CRM. I think that'll be going... That'll... That is gone. Like, there is no reason for anybody to fill out manual fields anymore. And I think that's... It's one way for us to be more intelligent and be more accurate in what's actually happening, with our opportunities. At the same time, it'll allow ourselves to run what what... Instead of a manager's chasing reps to fill things out, they'll be more focused on driving better pipeline reviews and better coaching, a lot more accurate information. Because a lot of times the fields are what the reps believe you wanna hear versus what the react... Actual reality is of the deal. So I think that is one thing that'll be materially better, with the evolution of AI. I I think the other part of it from a sales process effective is a lot of the tedious things that, you know, like, Nina was mentioning about, like, how can it surface up a a brief? How can it recap the conversations you had yesterday? How can... You know, for me personally, I have a I have a CRO morning brief that I wake up to every single morning that's generated via cloud. And it makes my day 10 times more effective because everything is surfaced to me in the way that I wanna receive information. And so I view that as going to help enhance the sales process, help drive better conversion rates when you start to look at how can that be related back to an individual. So I have lots of feedback on this one. Very passionate about it. I mean, I know we share a lot of the same, thinking here. I'm curious what you what you would say. Yeah. I think I agree with what she said. I'm gonna... The way I frame it, from my perspective, it's it's it's gonna become actually way more human centric. And we're gonna be in front of customers and in front of our peers and together so much more because we're gonna have the time to do that because Claude and AI in the background is gonna background is gonna be doing all of the other tedious automated tasks for us, the research, the scheduling, the booking, etcetera. And we're just gonna be out talking about, like, our thought leadership, about, about our products, about what we're seeing, teaching each other, giving each other best practices. And it'll be so much more human centric because that's the... What we have is that human relationship, and that... That's something that can't be replaced. Absolutely. Okay. Really quickly, I'm going to pivot from our regularly scheduled programming, and I'm going to... I saw in the chat that a lot of folks, either joined a little bit later or they want just a quick recap on how to connect Apollo and check out the plug in, the use cases. So I'm gonna do a quick recap of it. It's not gonna be the exact same demo, because, again, we are recording this. We're gonna send this over to everyone after the fact, but I'm just gonna do a very brief, recap of how all of this works. So, again, just double checking. I'm sharing my screen. Fabulous. So I'm in Claude. Here's how you can, connect Apollo. Just go over to customize on the left hand side. First, make sure that you have a free Apollo account at the very least. Just type in Apollo in the top right side here, and then you'll see the Apollo connector. I'm already connected. If I wasn't, though, this button would say connect, and then I would just sign in to my account. Very, very simple and straightforward. Once you're there, you are connected to Apollo, and you can, essentially call for any of the tools to find, research, or reach out to your prospects. K. So that's how to connect Apollo. Now if you want to start using the SMB, plugin, then very similarly, again, we're just in the customize tab here on the left. You can just type in small business, and then you will see the plug in, small business, and then you can just go ahead and click try and co work. And that's gonna kick off the process for you to say, hey. Get me started with small business. Start the task, and it's going to essentially onboard you onto using this plug in. And, again, the plug in, is compatible with dozens of different tools that a lot of small businesses are currently using, not just Apollo. And so the more tools that you connect, the more possibilities, with the small business plug in. Now, here's a quick brief of how this actually looks. I just went ahead and kind of demoed how this would look so that we don't have to wait for different responses, but I essentially said, hey. I'm evaluating the plug in. My biggest day to day headache is acquiring customers or growing my pipeline. I'm a commercial HVAC contractor, and I'm just looking to, get some leads right now. And so these are just multiple choice questions that I'll present to you. And then it went ahead, pinged Apollo, and it gave me 10 leads for my HVAC business. And then I also went ahead here to... If you're just trying to see, like, okay. How do I use Apollo in an end to end flow? Here's an example of this. So this is separate really from the SMB plug in piece. But in this case, I'm still trying to, pretend like I am a small business owner. Let's say that I run a commercial cleaning company in Columbus, Ohio, and I'm trying to find leads. I gave it, essentially, a prompt of who my target audience was. Again, trying to think through the four d's of AI, fluency, and it went ahead, pulled 19 Columbus area contacts that I can reach out to. It told me why those are good contacts and why it deprioritized some other ones. I told it to conduct some research on the top five companies and try to help me prioritize even further, and then use that research to help me draft a short friendly email to each of the contacts for me to then eventually kick off the outreach. Okay? So that's a very short, like I said, a recap of really what we talked about with, with the with the demo. But, again, feel free to check out the recording as well. After the fact, we're gonna send that over probably in the next day or so, and you'll get some more information there. And, also, in the docs tab, we have even further resources, and so you'll see, a blog that was written a couple months ago. It's the top 10 use cases of Apollo MCP. And, hint hint, we use all those in Claude. And so all of that is very possible and definitely recommend you check that out if you're looking for some more inspiration. Alright. Let's go back to the q and a. Adi, do you wanna pull the slides back up? Okay. Fabulous. So we just answered that question. Let's go to this next one. Oh, sorry. Got it. Here we go. As AI takes on more of the prospecting process, where do you think human involvement matters most? Okay. Lena, I'm gonna throw this over to you. I'm sure you've got some opinions on this one. Yeah. Well, I think I addressed it in the prior question. Right? It is in the sharing of best practices, helping with the use cases, really thinking through those first workflows, the the ideas, the creativity, the steering of the AI. There's so many... The the final check and say, vote yes before something sent, something important gets sent to a customer and and the and the the co relationship with the the AI that you're working with. So lots of. lots lots of places to to plug in there, but it's... That's kind of the the human centric approach to it of working with the AI to stay human centric. Yeah. What about, you, Adam? What are your thoughts? yeah, I I I believe, the thing that matters most right now that could be most human, you know, involvement that matters is the phone call, picking up the phone. You know, I believe AI should help you understand the right signals. Signals should be then helping you create the right list. Those lists should be curated with right... With the right type of messaging based on the right relevancy for you then to reach out and make the phone call. And, you know, we're spending a lot of our time, especially on on our human level efforts of of phone calls. We believe phone calls are where the best connection rates happen as well as, what will lead to the most meetings. We're seeing that in data. So we see that majority of our meetings that are booked are happening via phone calls. Doesn't mean we don't do any emailing or any other sort of, multistep different, outreaches, but we're finding phone calls is what it really matters. And it's the human connection that makes a difference. But it only makes a difference if you are leveraging the right signals, and the right messaging, to be able to land that message, appropriately. Absolutely. And then the last piece here. I think this is the last question that we have today, and so we'll go out with a bang. So as AI becomes more capable, how do you see the size and structure of sales teams changing over the next three years? Now this is actually a super, super hot topic. I've seen a lot of different responses here. I've seen on one end people thinking, oh, sales teams is gonna be smaller because naturally, they'll, AI might replace sale... Sellers. But I've also seen the other... The flip side of that. I've seen a lot of people saying we're gonna increase the size of our sales teams because we're gonna be even more capable, and so why not just, just continue to invest there? And so, Adam, I'm gonna throw this right back at you. I'm curious what your thoughts here are. Yeah. I personally believe that, you'll be able to do more with less, but it doesn't mean that we're gonna see sales headcount decrease. I think that you're... We're gonna continue to see more and more sales professionals, from a role perspective. You're gonna see them be more efficient with their time and more productive, most importantly. I think one of the best metrics that you'll find is that, you know, I think the industry standard is, like, 60%, of reps hit their number, and that's, like, considered good. I think that's that's so flawed in so many... For so many different reasons, that you're gonna see more reps being successful. And I think that's one of the the most important metrics that, you know, I personally care about is, like, how do we make sure our teams are set up for success? And I believe AI is a is a is a superpower to be able to make that happen. And I believe in the in the next phase that we're gonna go into is that, you know, the the the reps are gonna be managing multiple agents, and those agents are gonna be doing work on their behalf. And so it's just gonna make them more effective in their day to day, and they're gonna be able to close more revenue, and have higher bookings per head. But it's not gonna hold back the number of reps that we're gonna need. You know, I I see that we're... You know, all of our example, like, are... We're always on hiring, and we're gonna continue to be hiring, because of of the massive opportunity ahead that we have. I see the same thing at Anthropic. I mean, they're still... That's... I feel like that's kind of a great example of, okay. Like, what what does the future look like? And so we look at, companies like Anthropic. Like, what what is happening there? And I still see a lot of hiring going on, and I would love to kind of understand, like, how do you see the structure of sales teams changing, Lena, on your end. You know, my focus is small businesses and really helping small businesses and small business owners with skill right now. They have so much on their plates. I don't think they're thinking about this particular topic, and they're just thinking how do I do more with the less that I have. And so I don't have a good point of view on this right now. That makes sense. It's all good. Okay, guys. Well, that's really our time here. So I really appreciate everyone showing up here and the quality of the questions today. If you wanna get started, go ahead and add Claude for Business to a paid Claude plan and connect to your Apollo account, even if free one works. It takes about a minute to get set up. And, again, everything's linked in the docs tab. And I know that everyone was really curious about, you know, the demos and different, use cases. I think a great, way to apply some of this is ask Claude, really, like, hey. How do I how do I do x, y, or z thing? You'd be surprised at how, quickly you're gonna be able to get some different ideas and inspiration. And luckily, you know, being a connector with, with, Claude, it has access to all the different capabilities that Apollo has as well, and so it'll give you some great ideas on different use cases you can try out, again, given your specific context. And so thanks to Adam and Lena. Thank you for bringing your expertise, and thanks to everyone who came. Really appreciate your time. Thanks all. Thank you so much. And, just lastly, we're also... A call for small business is built with and for users, and the direction that we wanna take it is going to be very much influenced by what all of you need. So, my DMs are open on LinkedIn. Always looking for feedback. Please feel free to provide it because that'll be the next... The future direction of where we take this. Thank you so much, team Apollo, Thanks, Lena. for, having us, and we're really excited about the partnership together. Likewise. Thanks again. Bye, everyone.