Plug Apollo Into Claude and Skip the Front Desk

In the last track, we built a list, and then we researched companies. You might have researched one name, or ten, or twenty, or a hundred. And most of them probably didn't have an email address. Like I said, the phone number on their website works fine, and it does. But it's also a front desk, or a phone tree, or a receptionist whose entire job is keeping you away from the person on your list. By the end of this video, you'll type a sentence and the verified work email of the exact person you're trying to reach will come back. It won't be guessed. It's not going to be scraped off a signature somewhere. Verified. As in, this email exists and answers. Now, it's going to cost a credit, and I'm going to show you exactly what a credit is, because it's the only real new idea we're going to cover in this whole track. But it's the same rules as the last track, and really the same rules as every video in this archive. It all ends with something you use the same day, and this track has exactly that one piece of setup. So in this video, and it's shorter than a lot of what's out there, we're going to do some setup. After that, it's all just using. You'll never have to learn Apollo's interface. I'm going to show it to you once, right now. It's a cockpit with 400 switches in it. It looks like the inside of a 747. If you ever looked at that and closed the tab, don't worry. I would have too. But Claude is the pilot for this Apollo thing. You just talk to it, and it works. So, first, you're going to need an Apollo account. Go to Apollo.io and sign up. They have a free plan, so you don't need a card, I don't think. The free plan gives you a small monthly allowance of credits. What does it say here? On monthly billing you get 75 credits free, and the paid plan I'm on is 2,500 credits per month, which works out to 30,000 per year. See, I'm not an Apollo expert. I'm on the $69 plan and I never, ever, ever use up all those credits. On the free plan you get 75 lookups per month per seat, and that works out really well for a lot of people. Then we're going to connect it to Claude. After you sign up for free and go through the setup steps, we're going to do the same thing we normally do. Go over to Claude, go to Customize, go to Connectors, and set it up. So why don't you pause the video if you don't already have an Apollo account, go set it up, and I'll meet you right back here. Okay, so now I'm logged into my Apollo account, and I've moved back over to Claude Desktop. Customize, Connectors, and I want to connect to Apollo. So I'll go over here to Browse Connectors and search for Apollo, and look, Apollo.io comes up. There are five prospecting and other tools in here that you might be using, but I'm going to use this one to connect Claude to Apollo. It's made by Apollo.io, it falls under sales and marketing, and look, it was just published in 2026. We're going to connect this to Claude, and voila, that should have done it. Now when I go to my connectors, we've got Apollo here. For anything that writes, I'm going to leave it on "needs approval." For anything that's read-only, I'm going to go ahead and set it to "always allow." You can leave it all on "needs approval," and that's fine. For me, I only want approval prompts on the things that write or delete. Now, reads can still cost credits, so you might not want to do that. If you're on the 2,500 credit plan like I am, it's probably not a big deal. If you're on the free plan with 75 credits, well, your mileage may vary. And now we can see that Apollo is connected. Now that we've got this set up, Claude can ask questions of Apollo and get direct answers. So I can say something like: look up this person at this company in Apollo. I want their verified work email and their current title, and I want both on their page in my Targets database in Notion. Just tell me whether the email came back verified. Don't print the address here. I don't want to be putting people's email addresses in a video I'm creating to help people learn how to do this, so I'm going to try to protect the innocent person's email. I did pick somebody real. It was a target from an earlier queue. I picked them because it's a publicly traded company, and, well, if you're the CEO of a publicly traded company, at least I can search you. So this is going to enrich the person, and it's going to cost a credit. And that's fine. Okay, Apollo returned a record, and now it's going to look them up in Notion. It says it's going to go find them in the database. I'm just going to say, add a new contact and update. It said it didn't find that person, and it needs to add those properties. So we're going to add email and title. Look at what it found. Instead of just coming back with an error or making things up, it said, first of all, you told me to find this and add it to their record, and I don't have a record for them, so you may have meant somebody who already has one. And secondly, I need to add email and title properties. Then it said the email came back verified on the work domain, and the title is there. Both are now written to a new page in Targets, along with two new columns that database didn't have before: email and title. It set the status to Waiting and left Priority, Next Step, and Why blank for me to fill in. So if I jump over into my Notion Targets, I'll see that new record, and there's the email. Verified, at example.com. That's a verified email address, and I didn't want to put the real one here. It cost a credit, it went and looked them up, it added it to the database, and everything came back just the way we wanted. What we just got here is different from earlier. Instead of going out on the web and trying to find what's publicly out there, we went down the same trail, but we paid for a lookup into a database of over a billion business contacts. It gets checked and rechecked. Verified means you can count on it as send-ready. If it came back unverified, I'd treat it like a maybe, and you don't build this on a maybe. I could pull direct phone lines too. That costs another credit. Some numbers come back marked do-not-call, which Claude will warn you about, and you really have to pay attention to those. But we're going to stay on email in this track. This is the first place in this track where the tool we're talking about actually costs money. In Notion, I'm using the free version. Here, you can use the free plan and get 75 credits a month. A credit is a person. If you're only enriching 75 people or fewer per month, that's fine. Everything fits inside the free plan with room to spare. Paid starts around $69 a month and goes down if you pay annually, and it mostly buys you volume and a couple of filters that we're not really using. We'll hit some of the fancier filters maybe in video three or four or five in this track. Either way, who shouldn't pay is most of you. If you run out of credits consistently and you need more, then go do that. If you need to get better at searching the public web, that's fine too. But if your target queue keeps running dry and your appetite outgrows the public web, then the data really pays for itself. It's $70 a month, my queue stays full, and it keeps me going. And I'll go one further: the queue stays full of deals you can close. This isn't just lead lists. Skip this whole thing if you're doing fine. But if you're running dry, this is the way forward. So do the setup. Enrich one or two people. Not two random people, but two people you really want to contact this week. If you're going to spend a credit, spend it with intention. Then take one of them through the machine you already have. Brief yourself. Get a draft. Get their profile looked up. Get that dossier built. You just used one sentence and one credit to bring back one verified human email. And we can do this over and over in the same day. In the next video, we're going to talk about your whole targets queue and every hole in it: the missing names, the missing emails, the "name unknown" rows. Remember that spreadsheet that wasn't filled out all the way? We're going to watch all those blanks become people. Names, emails. And it's only going to cost about, I don't know, ten cents a head. Most of you are going to be using free credits. We're about to make that list enriched. I'll see you there.