Rethinking Outbound Sales Strategies for 2026

An event at a rage room feels fitting for the times, amiright? We thought we’d turn up the dial of our guests' rage by asking questions like "What will AI change most in sales?" Everyone’s favorite 😂 The vibe: Everyone's panicking about robots stealing their quota. The reality: AI is just handling the sh*t work nobody wanted to do anyway. If you want some practical examples and real guidance on how AI is ACTUALLY changing sales, check out a few of these helpful guides: 1/ AI use cases mapped 2/ How Pocus rebuilt cold outbound & 5x’d pipe gen 3/ placeholder for default guide  

Operationalizing your ICP shouldn’t be the hardest part of outbound. So we fixed it. Introducing Automated ICP Signal Creation in Pocus. 1/ Define your ICP in plain English: Pocus turns it into a signal everywhere 2/ Update once: It syncs instantly across Lists, SmartMap, scoring, and more The result? Better ICP → better targeting → better outbound. Your reps will know exactly who to talk to, every time.

Another 🔥 launch before the holidays just hit! The best reps already do social research before every outbound touch. It works. It just doesn't scale. ===> Enter Social Signals. Pocus automatically watches the LinkedIn activity your buyers are already creating: >> Comments on competitor posts >> Engagement with your content and team >> Discussions about problems you solve Just give us the LinkedIn pages you want to track. No manual entry of specific posts—it's all automatic. Then Pocus: ✅ Matches activity to accounts in your CRM ✅ Creates net-new contacts that don't exist yet ✅ Triggers plays, scores, and lists without manual work So every rep gets "top performer" context across their whole book, not just the top 10 accounts. Social Signals is now live for all Pocus customers

A few weeks ago we hosted 20 GTM leaders to smash their GTM frustrations at a rage room in NYC. In between smashing plates, we also asked them what GTM tactics they wanted to smash. The answers were spicy 🌶️ → Cold calls (don’t know about this one Matin Y.…cold calling still works if you’re using signals 😉) → Generic “bumping this up” emails…we all know this lazy slop → Hidden pricing → Overcomplicated inbound workflows The theme? Tactics we’ve continued to run with past their prime It used to be the way things were done, but not anymore! The old playbook is burning. 🔥

Data quality is the silent killer of pipeline. You build sophisticated scoring models and campaign workflows. But underneath? Your CRM is full of duplicate contacts because: > "50 Cent" and "F. Cent" and “Curtis Jackson” aren't recognized as the same person > Someone changed companies and the system created a new record > Middle initials vs full names break exact matching We’re eliminating the struggle with AI-powered identity matching! Here’s what’s new: ✨ Multi-layered matching - exact matching for clean data, LLM-powered probabilistic matching for messy records. ✨ Name variation intelligence - automatically handles nicknames, hyphenated names, middle initials, spelling variations. ✨Advanced agentic matching - For remaining unmatched records, a custom AI agent uses an intelligent multi-step process to find matches. Traditional exact-match enrichment was built for perfect data that doesn't exist. We built for messy reality.

Is your perfectly personalized and relevant email to an exec getting crickets?  🦗🦗🦗 You’re probably using your research wrong. Execs are the hardest group in an account to break into. Referencing a generic piece of research from their 10-K isn’t enough. Kyle Asay recommends instead using your AI-researched and personalized outbound with mid-level and below-the-line contacts first. Talk to people. Gather more intel. Now you have the details you need to make your POV unignorable to an exec. Catching up on season 4 of the pod? Watch Kyle Asay’s full episode here: https://lnkd.in/ezNswUr9

Apollo acquired Pocus - and I think this says a lot about where we're headed. We're not standing still. As we continue to invest in the future of GTM, moves like this show exactly what that commitment looks like in practice. Pocus is one of the most exciting companies in the space, and the fact that we're bringing them into the Apollo family is something worth paying attention to. Two cool companies. One shared vision for what GTM looks like next. Full story → https://bit.ly/4bFcbfH

Apollo.io hit $200M ARR. Now it wants to own the full sales stack. The company just acquired Pocus, a revenue intelligence startup. Apollo already handles data, outreach, and execution for sales teams. Pocus adds what was missing: who to call, and why now. Enterprise accounts at Apollo grew over 400% in the past year. Matt Curl was recently named CEO, and he's already making moves. Read more: https://lnkd.in/gQjYv-zm

Let a hot lead go cold?? In this economy?? Couldn't be our customers. We've seen a 50x increase in teams using Apollo Inbound (in just 6 months) because they were sick of missing opportunities to turn manual sorting and missed follow-ups into faster conversions. Oh, and btw customers using Inbound are 2x more likely to book a meeting 👀

The Apollo app in ChatGPT is now live. We’re plugging directly into how you and your team already work. Now you can easily: — Search for people and companies without leaving the chat — Enrich contacts and write them back to Apollo automatically — Add prospects to sequences on the spot We believe the future of GTM isn’t another platform to log into, so we’re giving you the intelligence and execution you need inside the tools you already use.