How to add Apollo prospects to Salesforce

The standard way to get Apollo prospects into Salesforce is Apollo's own Salesforce integration, which sends the people you save in Apollo to Salesforce as leads or contacts and can bring their companies along as accounts. You connect Salesforce from Apollo's integration settings, which requires a Salesforce edition with API access. Then you choose whether new people arrive in Salesforce as leads or as contacts, map Apollo's fields to your Salesforce fields, and decide whether to push records by hand, in bulk from a list, or automatically when they meet conditions you set. The integration can also log the emails and calls from your Apollo sequences in Salesforce as activity.

If you'd rather not connect the two tools, you can export your saved contacts from Apollo as a CSV file. Salesforce's Data Import Wizard then takes the file, lets you map each column to a field, and can match existing records by name or email so it updates them instead of adding copies.

Both routes move records reliably, but Salesforce asks a question that they answer the same way for everyone. In Salesforce, a lead is a person you haven't qualified yet. It holds the person and their company together on one record and isn't attached to any account. A contact belongs to an account, which is the company record your team already tracks, usually with an owner and often with open opportunities. When you tell Apollo to push everyone as leads, a new person at one of your existing customers arrives as a stray lead that the account owner never sees. When you push everyone as contacts, every prospect at a company you've never spoken to gets an account of its own, and your account list fills up with companies nobody is working.

A good result treats each person according to where they stand. Prospects at new companies become leads with the right owner and a reason to call. Prospects at companies you already have land on that account, where the person who owns the relationship can see them. Everyone in either group fits your ideal customer profile, still holds the role, and passes your org's validation rules on the first try.

Kite does that work for you. It qualifies the prospects before they reach Salesforce, reads your org to see who and what is already there, and writes each person as the right kind of record with the research attached.

Start by telling Kite which prospects you want in Salesforce. You can point it at people you've already saved in Apollo:

"Add the Apollo contacts labeled Q4 Fintech to Salesforce and run our assignment rules."

Or you can ask Kite to find them:

"Find 50 heads of revenue operations at US software companies with 100 to 1,000 employees and add the best ones to Salesforce."

Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. Because it has already studied your company, it knows your ideal customer profile, your current customers, and your competitors, so it can propose the titles, seniority, company size, and locations to target without a long brief. You can work with Kite in your browser in the Kite web app or in Slack.

You'll need to connect your Salesforce account through OAuth so Kite can read and write your records. To find new prospects, you don't need an Apollo account, because Kite has its own Apollo connection built in. To work from people you've already saved in Apollo, connect your own Apollo account, or export the contacts as a CSV file and upload it to the conversation.

Before it writes anything, Kite reads your org and tells you its plan: who it will add as leads, who it will add as contacts on existing accounts, which owner or assignment rule it will use, and which Lead Source it will set. Confirm the plan or change it, and Kite writes the records and then tells you what it did.

Kite works from the prospects you've already saved in Apollo, or it finds new ones in Apollo's database, depending on what you ask for. With your Apollo account connected, it searches your saved contacts by keyword, stage, or label, and it reads your contact stages, labels, and team members so it can match the group you described. If you uploaded a CSV export instead, it reads the file from the conversation.

When you ask Kite to find prospects, it uses its built-in Apollo connection. It searches for companies by headcount, location, revenue, funding, keywords, and the technology they use, then searches for people at those companies by job title, seniority, and location. It builds as much of your profile into the search itself as Apollo can filter on. It can also read a company's open job postings and recent news in Apollo, which often gives a rep a timely reason to reach out, such as a new revenue leader or a funding round.

Kite checks each prospect against your ideal customer profile before anything reaches Salesforce, because an Apollo search or an old saved list includes people who no longer fit. It confirms that each person still holds the role at that company, using their public professional profile or the company's own pages, and it drops anyone who has moved on. It removes your competitors and anyone who has asked not to hear from you.

Every prospect who passes gets a fit score from one to five, with a one-line reason a rep can read at a glance, such as "VP of revenue operations at a 300-person billing software company that just opened two sales operations roles." When the list runs past about fifteen people, Kite splits it into primary and secondary groups so sales knows where to start. If fewer people qualify than you asked for, Kite tells you how many passed and why the rest fell short.

Kite enriches each qualified prospect with the professional details a rep needs to reach them. Apollo's person enrichment supplies the work email, LinkedIn profile, current title, and seniority. Apollo's company enrichment supplies the company's domain, industry, employee count, revenue, funding, and technology. When Apollo has no work email for someone, Kite tries its other email sources before giving up.

Kite records the verification status of each email exactly as the source returns it, whether that's verified, catch-all, or unverified. A missing email stays marked as not found rather than guessed. Kite includes business details only, so it leaves out personal email addresses and personal phone numbers.

Kite searches your leads, your contacts, and your accounts before it creates anything, because in Salesforce the same person or company can already exist in more than one place. It searches leads and contacts by email address and confirms each match on the exact address. It searches accounts by company name and website, and for each account it finds, it reads the owner and any open opportunities.

What Kite finds decides what happens to each person:

• A person who is already a contact stays a contact. Kite doesn't create a lead for them. It updates their title or email if the research found something newer and lists them in its summary.
• A person who already has an open lead keeps that lead. Kite updates it with anything newer and adds the new research as a note.
• A person whose company is already a customer is left out unless you asked for expansion prospects, and Kite names them in its summary so the account owner can decide.
• Everyone else moves on to the next step, which decides what kind of record they get.

Kite also leaves your duplicate rules in charge. If Salesforce flags a new record as a match for an existing one, Kite doesn't override the warning. It reports the match instead.

Kite decides between a lead and a contact for each person based on whether their company is already an account in your org. When the company has no account, the person becomes a lead. That's where an unqualified prospect belongs in Salesforce, and it keeps your account list limited to companies your team is actually working.

When the company is already an account, Kite follows the convention you confirmed at the start. Many teams want the person added straight to the account as a contact, so the account owner sees the new name beside the people they already know and any open opportunity. Other teams want every new prospect to start as a lead no matter what. In that case, Kite creates the lead and names the existing account and its owner in the lead's note, so the rep and the account owner can coordinate.

Kite reads how your Lead, Contact, and Account objects are set up before it fills anything in, so each record passes your validation rules and uses the values your reports already count. It reads every field on each object, including the custom fields your admin added and any that are required. It reads the picklist values for Lead Source, Lead Status, Rating, and Industry, so it writes "Outbound" or "Apollo" only when that is a real option in your org.

This matters in Salesforce because a picklist value your org doesn't recognize, or a missing required custom field, makes Salesforce reject the record. Kite fills those fields correctly the first time. If your org has no fields for the fit score and its reason, Kite can create custom fields for them.

Kite assigns each record the way your team already routes work. For new leads, when your org uses lead assignment rules, Kite runs them on each lead, so it lands with the rep your rules choose. When you name an owner in your request, such as "assign them to Marcus," Kite assigns the records to that user instead. A new contact on an existing account goes to that account's owner, so one person handles the relationship.

Kite creates each record with the details a rep needs for the first conversation. A new lead gets the following:

• First and last name
• Company
• Job title
• Work email, and a business phone number when the source has one
• Company website, industry, number of employees, and annual revenue
• City, state, and country
• Lead Source, set to the value in your org that matches Apollo or outbound prospecting
• Lead Status, set to your first open status, such as "Open - Not Contacted"
• Rating, set from the fit score, so the strongest prospects are Hot and the rest are Warm or Cold
• Owner

A new contact gets the person's name, title, work email, phone when available, mailing address, Lead Source, and owner, and Kite links it to the existing account. Kite writes the fit score and its reason into custom fields on either kind of record. Salesforce's standard lead and contact have no field for a LinkedIn profile, so Kite puts the link in a custom field when your team has one, and in the note otherwise.

Kite attaches a note to each record that explains why the person is worth contacting. The note gives the fit score and its reason, the LinkedIn profile, the email's verification status, and the recent event that makes now a good time to reach out, and it cites the source for each fact. On a lead at a company that's already an account, the note also names that account and its owner.

When the prospects belong to a specific outbound push or event, Kite adds each lead or contact to the matching Salesforce campaign, so your campaign reports count them. It finds the campaign by name, and it can create one when you ask. For each primary prospect, Kite also creates a task for the record's owner with a subject that says what to do, a due date, and talking points in the comments, so the follow-up shows up on the rep's task list.

When the work is done, Kite posts a summary in the conversation where you asked. It says how many leads and contacts it created, how many existing records it updated, and how many tasks it scheduled. It lists who it left out and why, including existing customers, competitors, people who changed jobs, and matches your duplicate rules flagged. It also reports how many prospects it delivered against how many you asked for, and how many have a verified work email. The full list comes with it as a table, so you can scan the result without opening Salesforce.

From there, Kite can update each person's stage in Apollo so your team can see who has already gone to Salesforce. With your Apollo account connected, it can add the primary prospects to an Apollo sequence you choose, or it can write a personalized email to each one and send it with your approval. If you want new prospects added regularly, ask Kite to run the same job on a schedule, and it will post each batch's summary in the same place.

When Kite finishes, your Salesforce org holds a set of qualified prospects your reps can work right away, each filed as the right kind of record, and your conversation with Kite holds the record of what changed.