Transcript for "Builder's Guide to GTM with Apollo": to be handing the mic to Sean from ClearBox, Willie from GTM Factory, and they're going to be building some really, really cool headless GTM plays right here with you. So Sean is gonna be talking about the API and CLI. Willie's gonna be talking about the MCP. But before we do that, I want to set up why all the stuff matters, some of the changes that we've seen in the past few months. It's been a really crazy summer in terms of headless GTM. And I think that it's really important to just talk about this stuff, before we dive into the demos just so that you can understand kind of, like, our thinking behind it. And so let us do that. And before we get started, let's do a quick little poll for everyone. Okay? So where does your GTM work actually happen? Is it in Apollo? Is it, you know, in another UI? Is it in an AI chat like Claude or ChadGPT? Is it in the terminal? Go ahead and check out that poll listed out there, or throw it in the chat if we have something, if you're doing something that we don't have listed in the actual, in the poll here. This would be really interesting. Across AI tools and automations seems very, very prominent, mostly in the Apollo UI coming in at second. Wow. It's, like, kind of, like, a perfect first, second, and third here. And then the API, CLI, and custom workflows. We got a pretty decent amount of people doing that too. Hopefully, we can get some more people in the API, CLI, and custom workflows. We got a a lot of really cool demos to kinda give you some inspiration. And, yeah, it'll be cool to give you a little bit more of what you can actually do with those, and so excited for that. Okay. So let's do some quick housekeeping. Okay. So, yes, you will get the recording. I promise you, you will get the recording. Check your email in the next two days or so. We'll make sure we send it over to you. And if you have a question, please make sure that you put it in the q and a tab. On the right side it should be the right side of your screen. There should be a q and a tab. Throw them there. It's really hard to go through the actual chat and find all the different questions and address them. So the q and a tab is much more helpful to us, and we'll make sure we'll we'll get to you and answer all your questions. And here is where we're headed over the next forty five minutes or so. So, a few minutes from me. We'll talk about the reality of GTM today, what's changed, and what Apollo has recently shipped. And then, again, like I said, we'll do a live demo from both Sean and Willie, and then we'll do some q and a, to make sure that you all have what you need to start building. And I think that's pretty much it for the agenda. It's a packed agenda. Okay. And then ground rules. So we got two of them here. First, no spam, and that includes dropping your LinkedIn in the chat. Please don't do that. We have a sales community for that. I'll talk about the community here in a second. And then the second point here is let's, let's not be rude. You know? Let's all be kind to each other. Pretty straightforward. And then, yeah, I mentioned the community. So, the community right here. Scan that code or go to apollo.io/community. Apply to join. You can hang out with all the other builders and continue the conversations that we're having here today. And then the last piece before we dive in, resources. And so everything that we mentioned today is going to be I think it's in the docs tab. Yep. Here on the right right next to the q and a tab. We're gonna throw a bunch of different resources there for you to check out. Some really cool stuff to just take with you after we're done here, talking here just to make sure that you have a good starting point for playing around with, Apollo. If it's your first time in the API, CLI, or MCP, highly recommend you go into those docs and take those with you before you leave. Okay. Let's get into the meat of the webinar. Okay? So, let's talk about what's actually changed, you know, in the past few months because a lot of stuff, at least from my perspective, has has changed quite a bit. So, the popular version of the story that I see or that I saw, you know, over the past few months is that AI has gotten so advanced, and it makes all of our workflows a lot faster. And I think that that's true, but, I want us to go a little bit deeper than that. I'm going to explain that, by sharing a story from our CEO, Matt Kurl, Apollo CEO. So earlier this summer, Matt built a custom sequence analytics dashboard, and then he deployed it to everyone at the company. And it took him about thirty minutes to build on his own. He didn't have a team or anything with him, and it cost him roughly about $30 in tokens. Now back when Matt was running GTM ops before he was CEO at Apollo, he was at a different company doing GTM ops, that same project would have meant hiring a rev ops analyst or two, and a data engineer, standing up a warehouse, wiring ETL until the data was actually trustworthy, and buying a Tableau license or something on top of all of that. And so you have headcount plus months of work before anybody saw anything. And that's not even including any, like, maintenance to just make sure that's accurate over time. But what changed is that Matt can now deploy that in thirty minutes at a super affordable rate. And it's not just because he's working, you know, faster or he has a lot more knowledge. You know, it's that he has a single place where all the GTM intelligence sits. And so he didn't stand up a warehouse or wire a single pipeline, and that's because the plumbing already existed in Apollo. All he had to do was point the Apollo CLI at it and describe what he wanted, which was that dashboard. And so what I'm getting at is the barrier to actually building really cool stuff yourself is basically gone. You don't need all of these different things, to to at least stand something up. And we wanna make sure that everyone has access and the ability to build those types of solutions like Matt did. And so that's exactly what we're gonna be talking about today with our latest launch. So Apollo is the GTM API for builders. And with Apollo's API, you'll get the same system that your sales team uses. So that's the contact data, enrichment, sequencing, outbound history, analytics, a lot more cool stuff. But the important thing now is that it's all callable from any tool or agent or workflow that you build, and you don't have to jump into Apollo's actual platform, the UI, at all to get any of that stuff anymore. So we call this, headless GTM. So, again, that's the API, the CLI, the MCP, and the docs that hold it all together. Okay. And this is, this is really interesting to me. Like, when we were talking about actually shipping this update, the interesting thing for me is that we didn't just, like, recently ship all this stuff and then go and find a bunch of builders to share it with. We've had an API, and we launched our MCP originally, I think it was earlier this spring. And we have a bunch of people that are using it already. So we have over 500,000 teams on the API, 40,000 teams on the MCP. Our API is getting called 230,000,000 plus times per month. So this isn't a completely new motion for Apollo. We've been we've been around the block a little bit, but we are investing a ton into this because we know how important it is for people, and we know just how important it is to continue improving it so that it can do what people want. Okay. And so like I mentioned, the API, the CLI, the MCP, those are what those investments look like. That's what what headless GTM is for us. And so, the API, some improvements that we made to the API is now publicly documented with a machine readable open API spec. The CLI runs headless and scheduled. Again, no UI, no session state. That's what Matt was using when he built out that sequence analytics dashboard. And then the MCP is now native in Cursor, Replic, GitHub Copilot, and n eight n. Plus, we launched a standalone connection for any MCP client, so it's all the places essentially where folks are trying to build. Okay. I'm gonna dive into each one of these just a little bit more, and then we'll go into the demos, talk about the API first. And so first, our API has 70 plus rest endpoints across search, enrichment, sequencing, and analytics. And the important point here is that it's the only GTM API that exposes execution endpoints. What do I mean by that? I mean, we're not just sharing a bunch of data with you. You can also take action on that data. Those data vendors are going to sell you the records like the contact info, the company info, enrichment, that kind of stuff. But we're also giving you the ability to create sequences, enroll contacts, and actually send your emails to people. Okay? The other update here is the open API spec, so you can hand it to Cloud Code or Cursor and it'll actually write the integration for you. So you're not reading API docs line by line anymore. Now the CLI. So first off, what is the CLI? I think it's important to define that. So the Apollo CLI is Apollo as a command line tool. So you install it and you run Apollo commands straight through your terminal. It's gonna be the same Apollo underneath that you would access, through the actual platform. But, again, no browser and no UI are is gonna be in the loop. You're gonna be accessing it from the terminal. And what you use it for is really anything that needs to run without you sitting there and watching it. And so scheduled jobs, scripts and CICD pipelines. It's also the most token efficient path if you're making a bunch of different agent calls. And it's also a native tool in Cloud Code. So again, like I mentioned, this is the one that Matt used when he built out his dashboard. The cool part about the CLI is that once you've got a workflow that you actually trust, the CLI is how you can deploy to run on its own efficiently. And then the last piece here, so the MCP. This is the fastest way in. A lot of you have probably already used the MCP. If you do one thing after this session, I would recommend you just start here if you're especially if you're new to building or, you know, headless GTM. So that endpoint there on the right hand side of the screen, the httpsmcp.apollo.io, you can drop that in any MCP client, and, that's it. You know, sixty seconds, no API key. You can get connected to all that Apollo has to offer. And what you get is essentially 50 plus different Apollo tools scoped down to your own permissions. And so it can't do anything in Apollo that you couldn't do yourself. So things like searching, through contacts, building lists, enriching at batch scale, creating different sequences, enrolling contacts, and querying different analytics. It's all gonna be available in any of these different tools, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, wherever you're building. So, again, just copy that URL, and then make sure that you are pasting into whatever your MCP, client is, and then you can get started. Alright. Let's do it. So we are ready. Okay. Sean, do you wanna come on up and join? So Sean is the CEO and founder of ClearBox. He's going to start on the API and CLI and show you what that looks like when you're actually building with it. And so we're not doing just, like, you know, a a bunch of more slides. She's actually gonna walk through the real thing. So, Sean, you you feeling good? You want you ready to take it away? I'm ready. Andy, you actually handed off an amazing way. Just hearing, like, the whole backstory from you guys and, like, knowing what I've been doing. So just a quick backstory on me. My name is Sean, and I'm, I'm from a I was a plumber for ten years, then SDR, and founding BDR and, you know, go to market engineer, worked for a rev ops agency to building my own consulting and, my own, now SaaS platform or product, which is a Reddit growth, product called ClearBox. So backstory better or more importantly on what we're doing today, which is the Apollo API. And that's really what I work with. The CLI is really new, and I'm actually more excited to start testing that. But, as Andy mentioned, the Apollo API has been around, and we builders have been building with it. Me specifically, I would say everything kinda started around January where, you know, cloud code got a lot smarter. A lot of, the builders here can probably relate to, like, around that time where you could really feel, like, the difference. And at just at that time, I also started to realize, like, hey. This Apollo API with cloud code is actually making GTM fun for me again. This is my best way to put it. It allowed me to do a lot more with just natural language once I understood how to use the API. The thing I like about it is there's iterations. So you get a you get a result or an output, and it's not as good. You critique it. You tell Todd what worked, what didn't work, and it iterates on that, and it builds. And that's how you build your skills. That's how you build your scripts. So I don't write Python, but the repo that I'm gonna share with you, the demo, the API is all working through Python scripts that have been predesigned based on my outputs that I've either liked or didn't like and then reiterated on. So, sharing now the actual repository. So everybody can see the GitHub repo from here. Just confirming. Okay. So screen. Sorry. Share screen. There we go. So this is the, out of the box repo that I built for Apollo workflows. And the specific workflow that we're working is a extension of a outbound prospecting list that I actually originally generated by exporting a list of go to market engineers from Apollo. So we actually started from the UI. We pulled a list of go to market engineers that we actually queried using the Apollo search, exported it. And from that list, we were working it. I was working as a go to market engineer. I, ran a headless scrape so that I can connect with further go to market engineers. Hey, Sean. Before that yeah. don't mean don't mean to interrupt you. Could you zoom in just a little bit or, like, go full screen so that folks can see? Absolutely. My man. Okay. I would go me see if I can even think that's a. little bit. yeah. That's better. But then zoom in, like, a little bit more. Little bit more. I'll do one more. Let's see if that that's perfect. Okay. You're good. Alright. Thanks, Awesome. bro. So this is the repo out of the box. So I like to also explain certain things so you guys can know what you're spending money on, what you're not. The beauty of the API, as also Andy noted, you get a lot of endpoints, and you get a lot of data that you can just work with and then build off. So my key with the API is building, getting as much inference or understanding of either the company, the persona, the data, and then revealing whether they're worth, spending credits or reaching out to or, you know, pulling into the UI and sequencing. So this is a really, cool way to start that out or build that out that process. So, for example, this is a list that we already started working on. I actually already predrafted or pre started the repo, session so that just so we don't run out of time. So I'll share the actual hold on. Let me just do this. Sorry, guys. One moment. There we go. Sorry about that. Okay. And the terminal oh, it's a switch. So sorry about the video difficulty. One moment, guys. Sorry about that. There we go. Yeah. Because it's on full screen. That's why. Sorry. I wanted to share my terminal and that I can't do that on full screen. Sorry about that, guys. Alright. We're back. So I already started the session, and the way it starts is you're basically going to clone this repo. And once you do that, you're going to run cloud, and it's going to already open up in your Apollo prospecting repository. That will be cloned into your GitHub. So assuming you're using the API and you're using it as a developer, you should already have that kinda set up. You should already have a knowledge base, and this is, like, how you can extend further with Apollo skills and further developing, like, your Apollo API, motions or eventually connecting it as a CLI. So what this does is first step is it's going to confirm that you have all the dependencies and that your API key is protected. And the way to do that is twofold. So first step is your ENV file, which is the way that GitHub is going to store it but not ignore it. So, basically, it will never be shown. But you can take that a step further, and that's what I do here. And also share as well is basically level up is where you take this and you take your API and you store it in a SQLite database. And this is where it completely is not in the repository. So this way, the API just gets queried anytime it needs to be used. And this way, you don't have to rotate it, and it's double protection. So I'm very much adamant that if you know, I know there's people here that have you are already using the API, and they probably it's like a no brainer. But if you're trying to learn it and you're trying to build on it, I can't stress enough, like, start working with the understanding of the security. Make sure you're not exposing any client data, anything that could, potentially, you know, be something that would hurt you guys or hurt your reputation. So configure that first. Learn what an ENV file is. Learn how to use git ignore. Learn how to then potentially store it into SQLite database. So that is the first step. And in this case, it has been confirmed. Also, I, in this repo, we are connected to Google Drive so that we can create Google Slide Sheets and or Google Slides or Google Sheets. So the Google Sheet that you have here and the source list is already been preconfigured. So it's color coded. There's a specific way that it's scored. You see what the costs are if you are to reveal an email or a mobile. It's basically what the data that's available, and it's also been prescored. So I had already started the repo, predrafted this setup. It was initially at 25 companies and about, I think it was about a 100 personas. And I told it where is it? Right here. Grow the list. I basically told it to extend the list to over a 100 companies and find further personas. So the key here is that when you're using Apollo API, you don't wanna burn credits, but you also wanna use it correctly. And that's another, like, learning curve. So I kinda wanna, you know, help you guys get through that process if you're really trying to learn how to build with this or just, you know, extend your skills with it. So right now, I had started with 25 personas that had already accepted my, LinkedIn request, and, I had further, connected with them. And now I wanted to extend the buyer committee, and that's what this script does. So it's a Python script inside of Claude right here. There's actually two. There's a waterfall for the personas, and then there's one for the actual, companies themselves. So if you go to claudemd sorry. Read me. This is the scoring for the personas, and this is the signals that we're finding in order to waterfall the companies. So it's kind of like working together to ensure that we're building a buying committee, but we're also, like, extending, like, a lookalikes for the companies. So, you know, I wanna extend the reach of the current companies and also the personas in this case. But the beauty of this also is that you can change the logic around. So maybe you guys wanna keep the scoring rules but change the personas. You can do that or vice versa. The Google Sheets, out of the box, comes color coded in that method that I preconfigured, and that's after multiple iterations where I was like, oh, I can now build this out, and then I have what's called SQLite where it's locally kind of running the system. But then I use Google Sheets as kind of like that output UI that before I would, like, put into a sequencer or back into Apollo. So the final step on this prompt that I was gonna do is I'm just gonna tell Claude, continue the run. I wanna reveal the, enrichment or the email and the mobiles for the personas that scored over 200. I actually already told it and then pause it just in case. That's why. K. So what's gonna happen now is these personas, We I think we lost your screen. share. See that. So right now, it's basically looking at this Google spreadsheet right now. These personas, anyone that scored over 200, in a few moments, it's going to run a call and reveal the emails. Emails for all 21 already in. Mobile's coming in. So this is a good way to, like, build out guardrails for yourself when, running enrichments through the API. You know, when you have the UI and you're working with that, you're obviously a lot more visible. You're in the space. And there's a huge there's reasons to be in the UI, and there's reasons to be outside of it. I believe both work together. And I think this is also gonna be a great way to segue into where Willie's case is and where he's gonna be working with the MCP because I do believe that the API has the use cases that are awesome. The CLI, which is new, is absolutely, and then the MCP where you're actually, you know, working with the configurments that you might have prebuilt or, you know, pass the outbound, you know, pass the top of the funnel. So right now, it is calling Apollo one more time. It's running a command. And, again, these are all scripts that have been preconfigured in here. So you have what's called waterfall Python. And, again, I never wrote a line of code in my life. Right? Maybe hello world a few times. But I've reiterated with Claude code enough times on Python scripts to understand what I want as a final output. And I think that's kind of where you you can really if you have a fear of that learning curve or, like, fear of messing up, just work with it with, like I said, the steps. Make sure you're protecting your API key. Make sure you're not revealing any sensitive data. And then don't fear the mistakes or iterations because that actually builds the skills and the scripts that you can create for your teams or your future you know, anybody else that will be, working on these workflows that you've already configured, which is why you're building from the API usually. So let's see if our Google Sheets is pretty much revealed. Probably refresh in a moment. That's one. And one more batch or one more call. Usually, it will refresh on its own, but let's see. One moment. And this is why I kinda wanted to speed up to this part of the demo just in case. Last time, it actually did all three of these in eight minutes. So, I guess there was a good call getting to this point. But any moment now, in the meantime, do you guys have any questions for me that I could answer? I can check the comments too. So is this for enriching the lead list based on potential personas? So we already defined the personas. And, yeah, it's basically saying we wanna put a guardrail so that we only use the credits on the ones that we wanna reach out to today or right now. So maybe you're building out a full database with the API, and, you know, you can use the API to reveal endpoints that tell you first, you start with a company ID. So that's the one thing I also stress is, with the Apollo, API. Make sure once you have the Apollo company ID for that company, you can find the personas. You can find their, LinkedIns. You can get a lot of that data pulled. But when it comes to email, when it comes to mobiles, when it comes to intense signals or exports, that's where you're spending the credits. So here we are fully enriched. So there was an error on the mobile. So that's, again, one thing that I will iterate on for the next session, but let's see why the mobile didn't actually run. So twenty seven and twenty nine have direct numbers. So it's actually just gonna rerun it. It's actually gonna refresh with the mobiles. So that's the other thing. Cloud will kind of, like, make its own mistakes and then reconfigure it. The mobile enrichment is done. And another tool I use is, Super Whisper's agent, which actually can give you the outputs of the terminal. So if you're using dictation and Super Whisper, this goes great with the terminal also. Does it favor favor. Does it favor Python? I think most machine learning tools it's not even that it favors it. It's just faster. Like or it's like it it like, I built with Rust apps, but I think it just connects better with Python and especially with the scripts. But I wouldn't I I mean, I honestly, I haven't tested it, Apollo's API with Rust, so, I can't fully answer that. I would just say that if it ain't broke, don't fix it, and the Python scripts do work. Awesome. Let's see. Sean, So we actually do we, hold on. Let me see. Do we have, the results here? Because we're just running out of time here, I think. Yeah. We have the full results. I think something with the mobile might just have triggered one compliance. Yeah. Curious why the mobile didn't. So, again, this I'll just end it with, like again, there's always gonna be iteration. So what I would do in this session is I would ask the question, why didn't the mobile's output? Why am I still on error if you're saying that you were able to find it? So this will, like again, for a next session, I learn what I could do better or what Claude could do better. So if there's always an an output, like I said, that didn't finish the way you want it, let's figure out why and let's make sure it doesn't happen. And also figure out if we wasted credits on, error, which is another good call, which I don't think we did. But another reason why I built a gate. So imagine if it did cost me the credits for the mobiles and I enriched all of them. And that's another reason why you wanna build these scoring gates. And, again, I'll just cap it off by saying, you know, with the Apollo API, you can be very custom and you can kinda build out. So I built the repo. I'm sharing it with you guys. DM me if if you have any questions, but it's really out of the box for you guys to kinda work around it or build off of it and get creative. So I'll hand it off. My man, Sean, thank you so much. I appreciate it. Yeah. And, folks, let me just also clarify too before I introduce, Willie, that we are going to be diving into more the API, CLI, and MCP components of Apollo. So we're not really gonna be diving into the actual platform side of things. This is gonna be a bit more of a technical, overview of these solutions or these parts of Apollo. And so if you have any problems, you know, understanding kind of the things that we're talking through, make sure that you get the recording afterwards. And you can plug in some of the transcript into, you know, something like, Claude to help, you know, break down certain topics. But the goal here is to make sure that folks understand pretty much what you can do with the API, CLI, and MCP and a couple of different ways that you can play around with it. And so, Sean, really appreciate you jumping in and and showing us kinda how you're messing with the API and CLI. It was super, super helpful. The next person that I'm going to invite up is my friend, Willie. He is the CEO and founder of GTM Factory. Willie, what do you got for us? I think you got a pretty cool MCT workflow that you're gonna be sharing. Yeah. Yeah. Let's, do it. thanks so much for for for showing us a bit of the, API CLI use cases. I think that, programmatically, if you wanna go ahead and build some stuff and use, Apollo as the underlying enrichment tool, sequence tool. Right? Like, it's a great way to do deterministic flows. What I'm gonna be showing is a little bit different, everybody. It's it's using the MCP to create some really interesting workflows, and I've been working directly with the product team, to do some testing on, like, some of the things that I would want as a rep. By way of introduction, I'll go ahead and share my screen now. If I can get a thumbs up or, confirmation that you could see it, let me know. And I know it's, like, infinite screen at the moment. Awesome. Thank you. And then is this a good size for everybody? I'll I'll go back to my slide and then make sure that okay. Cool. So, my name is Willie Hernandez. I'm the founder of the GTM Factory. My background is eleven years in sales, and I've sat in every sales seat that you could think of from SDR to enterprise AE, from Siri or seed companies going from zero to one all the way to, you know, working at places like Celonis and Salesforce. Over the last three years, I've dove really deep on the RevOps GTME or go to market engineering side of the house to build really cool things with AI. And I'm really excited to partner with Apollo because I think they've done tremendous work to make, their platform accessible by the developer. K? Now today, what we're gonna show you is is a bit of how to work with the MCP, which is a bit different than APIs and CLIs because it's it's it's fairly easier to kinda develop workflows, agentically because it, you know, it's going through context as opposed to, programming, you know, directly with API and JSON and Python and all that. Right? And so what we're we're gonna start in the end result of what I built, and then we're gonna go into Cloud Code as the second part of this demo to show you, like, more or less how Cloud Code developed this. And so to kick it off, I'll go into Apollo. Everybody knows the u the friendly UI here. And what I've built is a, champion job change play. The reason I built this was because at a former company, every time I had a a a a customer of mine, right, that had a really good experience and they would move from one job to another, the easiest way to break into a net new account was to look at folks that have already used a product of ours that was, like, yeah, you know, having success, and they wanted to continue to, working with working with us. And it was the easiest way to get a net new account to work with us. And so I was like, how do I build that type of a play inside of Apollo? Well, turns out Apollo has now, the ability to do workflows within the platform. And as you'll see here on the side panel, if you go to workflows, you'll see here I built the actual end to end workflow, using cloud code, and I'll show you how I did this. You could do this, manually, but I actually did it programmatically using MCP. Now, I I was asked earlier by Mike, can you create sequences with the with MCP? The answer is yes, and that is the beautiful part about this. Right? What you're gonna see here with the workflow is that we're looking at a trigger event. It's actually gonna look at, in this case, my CRM, that's connected to Apollo for contacts that have changed jobs. And if a contact does change jobs, then it does all of this. The first step in this, workflow is to research that particular person. And this prompt that you see here, this this essentially is saying, hey. You know, go give me a brief explanation of the the customer's, like, new company. Do they have pinpoints? Or do they fall within ICP? It's using perplexity as the the, LLM of choice to do this. And then not only that, well, you know, there's other instructions in here of what it will do to feed into the next subsequent part of the workflow, which is a, fit score or scoring check. Now all of this, the the prompt rate, this was actually done by my, instance of Cloud Code, which has also a context operating system, to be more technical. And this actually knows my business very intimately. Now if you don't have this, that is alright because inside of, Apollo, there is a section where you can actually and I'm a leave for a second, but there is a section where you it's called AI contact center, where you can actually give Apollo context on your business, and you don't need a context operating system. But the point is is that, like, the MCP was able to create this very rich research agent based on how I go to market and how I do business. And so once once that research comes in, we go through that fit score that I that I'd, mentioned where it's checking the ICP, it's checking for pain points. It's it's weighing out all these different things. And then either, if it fits, it's gonna go into a a sequence. And, Mike, this is where I could show you, like, you know, Cloud Code made this from scratch for me. Or if it doesn't fit, we just add it to a nurture list. For if in case later down the line in the future, this particular context moves to somewhere where, you know, they're a fit, it goes through this whole process again. And at the end of this, you end up getting a notification, saying, hey, Willie. You know, John Doe, Johnny q just moved to a new company. You should probably reach out to them. Or, hey, Willie. Johnny q moved to a new company, but not a fit. Don't worry about it. Right? And so you might ask I I would show you, like, an example of this in my CRM, but it's a production instance, and I have sensitive data in there. And blue of that, I will show you what that might look like as an output when you run a particular contact, in here. And I don't know if I'm supposed to do this, but I'll get I I'll give you guys a sneak peek of something that Apollo is working on called AI Studio, which I am a big fan of, because, basically, you're able to kinda show your your your outputs in a tabular way and do a lot of cool things in here. But for the sake of this demo, you'll see here. Here's the name of my champion, the prior company that they were at, the prior relationship that I had with them pulling from the CRM that that I have, right, which is Clarify. Awesome CRM. You guys should check it out. And then what's the new company that they went to? What's their title? When did they change? Right? All of these things are rich, rich, context on why I should be reaching out to this person at this moment in time. And here is, an example of the research that the perplexity agent went ahead and grabbed for us. Now the reason this is important is because a lot of the the writing that we do for emails will stem from this this research that that, you know, you're you're gathering through perplexity. And then from there, you know, obviously, you're able to kinda write really, really neat emails that are custom tailored to that particular person that just moved. So that's the demo all in all. After the call, I'm gonna go ahead and share the play with you guys. It's actually in the resources section. And if you guys have any other questions in terms of how to stand something like this up, there I mean, there's so many plays. Right? But if you have questions, you can book a call. You can get started with Apollo quickly by hitting this button. You can connect with me on LinkedIn. We will figure out a way to kinda help you with your with your business. And, and, yeah, like, I I'm I'm oh, the last thing I wanna show you guys before I forget, because it is a builder's guide. This is my instance of, go to market factories or the GTM factories context operating system. I do wanna show you something very cool. So the the play is already made. Here's a play in ASCII, layer one, you know, doing the signal and research. Layer two, the the actual play. And then layer three, how will the actual rep, get this information and do something with it? All of it has been end to end, built out by the MCP. And if you're asking, like, oh, well, what what type of things did the MCP touch? It touched, contact, tracking, you know, enrichment, job postings, AI research, lead scoring, sequences, workflow, notification, and it built this under five minutes. Last thing, just because we are showing off the MCP, if you go to, the actual cloud, apollo.io NCP server. Right right now, officially, there are 61 different tools in there. They are building a lot a lot. I mean, they're at 61 publicly, but right now, we're testing about 90 different tool sets that you can use. And, Yeah. I just think it's you know, kudos to the product team, kudos to the engineering team. I think this is gonna change a lot of people's way of, like, saying, hey. I wanna run this play. Apollo, go build it for me. That's really all I got for you guys, though. So thanks for the time. Appreciate everybody. And, yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn, and, happy to help where I can. Love it. Willie, my man. Okay. Appreciate it. Alright. Let's move on to the q and a. Sean, you wanna jump back onto the stage? We'll throw some, questions your way too while we're doing this. Okay. So, what we're gonna do is I have a a handful of questions here. I'm gonna throw them over to Willie and Sean, kinda depending on on what I feel like was most related to the thing that they were talking about. Mhmm. And let's go ahead and get started. Sean, do you wanna jump up on, onto the stage? Maybe? There we go. Now. There got it. There is. he is, Perfect. my man. I must say, There is am. your question. No. You're good. Okay. So the first one, when do you use the Apollo UI? And this actually was super important because I feel like I saw a lot of people that were asking this. Like, when do I use the Apollo UI? What like, when would I use an API or CLI? Like, when would I go headless? Like, all that stuff. So what is your what's your response to that? When would you use the Apollo UI versus all the other headless services? So I would look at it like this. When you're building out your motion, the core builder, the developer, the first person that's built the the engineer or the go to market person that's really building out your database and the functionality and the relationships, that's where you want the API to live and work with. But once you're actually now in the motions, you're champion tracking, your your sequences are firing off, you're actually you have relationships, that's where the Apollo UI is actually where you wanna be. For example, right now, I'm using the API to build out this motion and make connections with people. The next step is, like, real sequencing and cold calling. I'm hopping back in the UI for that. So, my best way of putting it is build in the API and the CLI, work in the actual UI, especially when it comes to real account. Like, we wanna use AI for a lot of things, but when it comes to real relationships, champion tracking, like, your real warm people, you wanna put in all that effort because, like, as we know, like, you can spend hours or weeks building campaigns, sending a 100,000 emails. But, you know, five cold calls to the right people at the right time because we built everything for you, that will catch you a lot farther. So that's kinda how I look at it. Nice. Perfect. Okay. Next one. And, again, I think that we had a lot of people here that weren't that don't consider themselves super technical, and so they wanna know exactly where do they wanna start, the CLI, the API, or the MCP. Willie, do you have any recommendations there? I I would say that that depends on your your appetite for learning a new language and or learning something conceptually new. Right? And if you're on more of the side, no. I just I just wanna easily build things, then I would I would, you know, kind of steer you towards doing MCPs. You know, the thing is MCPs can get very expensive because of token cost. Right? And that's why developers and builders rather work with, like, APIs because it's just calling the service that doesn't have an additional cost typically to it. Right? So, but I would say it depends on your appetite of of wanting to learn how to programmatically build stuff. If the answer is, yeah, I wanna learn, go with API CLIs. If, if you just wanna, you know, easy way to verbatim tell, you know, one of your LLMs, hey. Build this for me. Use MCP. Yep. And I would also say, no shame if you don't know any of this stuff. Like, I didn't know any of this stuff, like, three months ago, and I'm quickly getting up to speed on a lot of, like, Yeah. what you can do with APIs and CLIs. MCP, it's, I would say it's probably the the easiest to get started just because it's you're just talking to to Claude or ChatGPT, and you're able to access whatever Apollo can can help you with. And so you can just kinda, like, chat with Apollo through the MCP. And a lot of people work in Cloud or ChatGPT. It's like their main surface anyway, and so they wanna be able to call Apollo without having to tap switch over to something else. But, yeah, don't feel like, like you're crazy behind with any of this stuff. There's it's it's evolving so so quickly. And so that's the point of us putting this all together so you can see what's possible. And, it's also good for us to understand where people are at too so that we can make content for you, you. know, in the future. Okay. Let's do this next one. What does the API actually cost? This is a good one. Sean, do you wanna talk through, like, how you've how you've kind of worked out the API cost into all of your workflows? Yeah. Absolutely. And it it goes also with the out of the box repo that I built, and it's why I built it this way. It's basically when you're searching at once you so it all starts from having a Apollo company ID. You have the Apollo company ID or you have a company domain and you search for the ID, then you can start to build out the rest of the searches, whether it be personas or, you know, demographics, firmographics, things like that you can expose. When it comes to emails, when it comes to mobiles, when it comes to actually exporting lists, that's when you're gonna be spending credits. So that's why it's very key with the API to build guardrails, to understand what you're using and because, again, you don't want nobody the Apollo team doesn't want you to spend 10,000 credits on nothing because Claude set it was running the wrong script nor do you. So it's just about, like, you know, testing and building these guardrails so that just can't happen. Right? Like, you know, I can't reveal a score if the script is intended not to reveal it without having the score of a 200, which is what I have it at. Again, that's custom, and that's just an out of the box example. You guys might already have knowledge bases and repositories or briefs on how your companies or your scoring models work. Claude can read that, ingest that, and compare it to this repo and build off that. So that's a great way to actually char do what I call as cherry pick a repo, where you pick out the processes that look good or that work for you, and you have Claude kind of build out. So another thing, go from plan mode to, you know, building. And, yeah, that that's kind of, like, in a nutshell, the API. Nice. Appreciate it, dude. Okay. Next, how do we keep the API key safe? And where this is another one for you, Sean. We're gonna lob this one right back over at you. Okay. So how do you keep the API key safe, and where does that data live? Right. So that was the first part of the repo as well. So you have what's called a e n d file. So every, file or script or pattern that Claude is gonna read is either an ENV or an MD or a Python script. The ENV is where you keep your keys that you don't want revealed, that don't want the GitHub to release. So when you look at my GitHub, you won't see my API key. And I actually have developed it one step further for protection where I keep it in what's called SQLite. SQLite is a local database. So you have, like, Supabase you guys might know of or Postgres. The SQLite is the local version of that, and Claude can read that, and you can also store information data in there. And then that becomes like your own secret vault. So the instructions are also in there on the repo on how that came to be. There's a whole origin story behind that, and it really comes down to me just saying, if I'm gonna learn how to use an API, I'm not a I'm not a software engineer by trade. I'm gonna make sure I do not reveal any of my client secrets or anything like that. So, again, that's just where I say learn that first and test. and build. You know? Absolutely. It's it's one of those overlooked things that I feel like people rarely talk about even though it is so important. So I appreciate you touching on that. Okay. Next one. Do I need a special plan or enterprise tier to use the API, CLI, or MCP? Willie, how about this one for you? No. That's the beautiful part about it is that, Apollo wants you guys to use, all these tools, right, so that, it helps you on your day to day operation. And and, you know, traditionally, Apollo had been known as an enrichment tool, but now that you can sequence, now that you can build workflows, that you can build, you know, ABM plays. Right? Like, all these different things through the actual API, CLI, MCP. It just makes the the tool so much more powerful in my opinion. So, yeah, no. Get in there and start start building. Yes. Please do. And that the funny thing is that a lot of people, have been just joining Apollo without even jumping into the platform. Like, they're. only using the MCP or the or the CLI, like, just without even jumping into the platform and but they're starting on the free plan. And so, yeah, I mean, you guys can try this all, like, for free. Obviously, the more that you move up into the tiers, like, we'll give you, like, more credits or access to different, you know, filters and things like that. But you can absolutely try. Like, we want to give everyone the tools to at least try things and see what can be valuable. And so, yeah, definitely. And to us know. me, if you're to me, if you're an organization, by the way, that that's going from zero to one, you just started. Right? Apollo is like your deal execution engine in terms of doing all the things that you need to to get some business going. So, you know, like, if you're at that state, like, yeah, definitely get in there and test everything out. Absolutely. So do your magic key right now. Yeah. Absolutely. Oh, hold on. Okay. There we go. Okay. Now, we have this screen here. Just, if anybody's interested in talking to our sales team to learn more about, about, the API CLI, MCP, or just how you can use some of these more technical capabilities in addition to, using the Apollo platform itself, definitely feel free to reach out. If you say yes, we'll figure out a way to get ahold of you, and we will, get you all squared away. The last question I actually had, this is completely completely separate actually from, the talking to the sales team. This is a question for you, Willie, because I think that this is also very important, because I think that a lot of people see all these capabilities, and they're not sure exactly where to start. And so if you, if you're new to to Apollo or to GTM, how do you even recommend to people, like, coming up with their first play that they want to run? Like, how do you try to figure out, like, oh, yeah. I'm going to do this play, and I'm actually gonna test against it or something like that? I think it's a lot of that, what you just said. It's testing. Right? As a as a, boutique consulting firm, right, my my job is to listen to what you're trying to do, understand what what you bring as value to to the market, and then just test plays. Right? I've been fortunate enough to, follow some really good, I guess, experts in the field like Helen Kasepeer or, just others. Right? And then also, I read a lot. Apollo released a book called Outbound Sales. Highly recommend you guys pick this up. It was written by, Joshua Garrison, Carly Stone, Sher Dang. And in here, there are a bunch of plays that you can pick up that, you can implement really, really quickly inside of Apollo. And, I think that the number one thing, though, is that, and I hear this from my friend, Calvin, all the time is that the market exists whether you are you do or not. Like, just go out there and and and test things and see what works and then scale it. It's called outbound it. sales. Outbound sales. Yes. Outbound sales. I think you can you can get it on Amazon. I'm pretty sure. Sean, I'm actually gonna allow this one over to you. Do you any any advice for people to, like, just get started with some of this stuff or, like, plays that you recommend people starting to run? Absolutely. So, like, as somebody right now, I'm I'm a go to market consultant for, you know, startups and companies that are trying to scale, but I'm also trying to build and scale my own startup or bootstrap it, actually, not even scale it. But, so what I'm doing is I'm being very human and personal, but I'm also using the developer. But if I was to start right now, you can go into the UI and say, hey. Who is my target audience? Don't even focus on the companies. Focus on the personas that you're targeting, specifically. Who are your buyers? Who are your and if you don't know it yet, that's, like, may maybe the first thing you need to figure out. So you can go buy different personas, and you can actually in natural language, which is what I did to start this campaign. I said, hey, Apollo, find me all the go to market engineers that you have in your database, and you can build from there. You can start by cold calling them. You can reach out you you know? And, again, sometimes, like, that peer to peer relationship works. So, again, if you're in rev ops and you're targeting other rev ops or vice versa, it's really about, I think, using it where you can hit your quickest wins and learn. And, again, it it really depends on your process. But I would say this, like, never before could you have not been a developer and learned how to, like, code in a weekend, and you can. I I was a plumber for ten years. So it's really more about having curiosity, having taste, and having that ambition to, like, say, you know what? Even if this messes up, I'm gonna learn from it, and I'm gonna keep building. You know, there's this thing. It's time in terminal. Like, Claude code and all this stuff, it's still very new. We're still very early. You know, eight months ago, you not none of us were doing this. So, you know, if you're in this call and you're figuring. to learn this now, dude, just take a weekend and run with it. Work the fork one of our repositories or his MCP script and play around. Get your. hands dirty. Absolutely. And so on that note, before we wrap up, everyone, I would just again call you to click on the docs tab that should be on the right side of your screen. It's next to the Q and A tab. There's a bunch of different resources there, some that Willie uploaded, some that Sean uploaded, and some just from Apollo that you can use to help you kinda get started and on the right track. And there's also a link to some of our daily trainings here at Apollo. I had a lot of people, in the q and a asking, hey. Like, just I'm completely new to Apollo. Like, what what how do I get started? How do I see what, what y'all have available? I'll go to those daily trainings first to kinda just get your bearings on what Apollo is and and how you can get started. And then you can go into some of these, you know, MCP use cases, the Apollo for developers landing page, you know, some of Willie and Sean's resources, and you kinda build on that foundational knowledge. And then you'll also see the slides that we went over here. And then the last piece is, again, we will be sending out out the webinar. And so what I would recommend you do when you get the webinar, you can just download that video, and you can just upload it into Claude. And then you can hear you can just chat with it about, like, hey. I didn't understand this thing that that someone said. Right? Can you dig into, like, this topic a little bit more? And you just talk with it and try to, like, have a better to to get a better sense of, like, what we went over here so that you can, you know, get started off on the right track. And so, that is all for me. That's all from us. I wanna thank Willie and Sean for joining us. I wanna confirm I don't have any other slides here. Just triple checking. I think that's it. Yes. And so I'm gonna leave it at that. Again, please hit up Willie or Sean if you have any other questions down the road. Thanks, guys. And, yes, we will see you at that next webinar. Have a great rest of your afternoon. Nice.