Scoring your TAM with apollo.io
Scoring your market allows you to reach the most important companies, instead of pray and spraying
3/10/20264 min read
Building a prospect list is relatively easy nowadays. But building a high-quality prospect list, with highly qualified prospects ranked by priority, is much more challenging.
With tools like Apollo.io, LinkedIn or Sales Navigator, you can easily generate a list of several hundred prospects.
But there's one problem: not all companies are created equal.
If you prospect your entire TAM in the same way, you risk wasting time on companies that don't fit your target audience and missing opportunities to approach your best prospects with a more personalized strategy.
If you're targeting a relatively broad B2B market, with tens or even hundreds of thousands of potential companies, scoring your addressable market becomes extremely important.
The solution: score your TAM to prioritize the companies you should target first.
In this article, you'll learn:
Why lead scoring is essential.
How to use Apollo to do it.
A practical method for prioritizing your prospects.
How to turn your TAM into a meeting-generating machine.
How to Use Apollo.io
Apollo.io allows you to filter companies based on:
Company size (with more precise and reliable filters than Sales Navigator).
Revenue (although data isn't available for every company).
Number of employees by department.
Technologies used.
Business model (B2B / B2C).
A Key Advantage: Built-in Lead Scoring
Apollo allows you to create a scoring system directly within the platform.
You can:
Define your criteria.
Assign points to each criterion.
Automatically rank your entire TAM.
The result? Your TAM becomes structured and prioritized right from the start.
Of course, this requires some preliminary thinking.
Among all the companies that could potentially become my customers:
Which ones are most likely to need my product or service?
Which ones are most likely to actually be able to afford it?
Once you've answered these questions, your cold-calling campaigns will become even more effective!
The Most Effective Criteria for Scoring Your TAM
1. Company Size
This is such an important criterion that entire categories of companies are often excluded based on their size alone.
However, company size can also be used as a scoring criterion when you want to prioritize a specific sweet spot.
Here's why:
Companies that are too small may not have sufficient budget. You might therefore want to prioritize businesses with between 7 and 12 employees.
Companies that are too large often have lengthy and complex internal processes. You might therefore want to prioritize companies with between 200 and 2,000 employees.
Your ideal company size will depend entirely on your specific offering.
2. Revenue
Revenue can often be a highly relevant criterion. However, this information is rarely publicly available.
Apollo does have revenue data, although it isn't available for every company.
Still, when you're scoring a TAM containing tens or hundreds of thousands of potential prospects, it can help you identify companies within your desired revenue range.
This is particularly useful for ensuring that companies theoretically have sufficient budget, especially when targeting small businesses.
By making sure they generate a certain level of revenue, you'll reduce the risk of unpleasant surprises during the closing process, such as discovering that a prospect simply doesn't have the budget.
3. Department Structure
Depending on your product or service, this can be an extremely powerful criterion.
Very few tools allow you to accurately identify the size of different departments within a company.
For example, if you believe your product is particularly relevant to companies with between 200 and 2,000 employees and no more than 3 people in their Procurement Department, you can use this as a scoring signal.
Or perhaps your solution is most relevant to companies with no more than 2 employees in their Marketing Department.
These are exactly the kinds of signals you can use to improve your targeting.
4. Tech Stack
A company's tech stack can provide a weak signal of its level of maturity in a particular area.
For example, if a company uses advanced paid search software, it probably invests in SEA. The same principle applies to companies using specialized outbound sales software.
Apollo has a considerable amount of technographic data, although I'm not entirely sure how reliable it is.
Personally, I'd assign this signal a relatively low weighting within the overall scoring system, unless you have strong reasons to believe the data is highly reliable.
I can't make that claim myself.
5. Other Useful Criteria
Apollo offers several advanced filters that many competing tools either don't provide or only offer in a limited or incomplete way:
Industry.
Company business model: B2B or B2C.
Company growth.
Funding rounds.
Recruitment activity.
Location.
All these signals can be extremely useful, either for scoring your TAM or identifying short-term prospecting opportunities.
A Practical Scoring Example
The goal isn't to make things unnecessarily complicated.
The objective is simply to prioritize your prospecting efforts effectively.
This allows you to segment your entire addressable market into different priority levels.
For example:
🔴 Excellent: Fewer than 1,000 companies.
🟡 Good: Around 10,000 companies.
⚪ Fair: Several tens of thousands of companies.
❌ Not a fit: Everything else.
Here's what this looks like in the Apollo interface.
Why This Approach Changes Everything
Scoring your TAM with Apollo allows you to go from:
"I have a list of prospects"
to:
"I have a prioritized, actionable prospect list."
Real-World Benefits
Higher reply rates.
Better meetings: more meetings, and higher-quality ones.
Higher closing rates.
You concentrate your efforts where they'll have the greatest impact, giving yourself a much better chance of being among the few people who actually succeed with their prospecting campaigns.
Because yes, most prospecting campaigns fail.
Conclusion
The problem with prospecting isn't a lack of leads. It's a lack of clarity about your market and a lack of prioritization.
With Apollo.io, you can:
Get a clear overview of your entire addressable market.
Score it intelligently.
Focus your efforts on the most promising opportunities.
Now, I'll be honest: Apollo is a fairly complex tool to use!
So, rather than spending months figuring out how everything works, and driving yourself crazy trying to understand all these tools, you can outsource your prospecting and start generating results much faster.
For more information, feel free to book a meeting with me! Send an email at louis@outbound-machine.com