SayIntel vs Apollo

Apollo is a 275M-contact static database. You filter by industry, title, headcount, and tech stack to build a target list, then reveal emails and run sequences.

SayIntel starts from a real-time signal, a conference speaker page, and produces a qualified, message-ready list of the people who just spoke about your space. Same end goal (booked meetings), opposite starting point (signal vs database).

A title in a database tells you what someone does. A talk title at a conference tells you what they're working on right now. The second is a buying signal; the first is a guess.

Cold replies on database lists run 1-3%. Cold replies that reference a specific recent talk run 8-15% in our customers' data. The lift comes from relevance, not volume.

Apollo strengths: massive contact volume, mature sequencer, phone numbers on higher tiers, CRM sync, intent data partnerships.

SayIntel strengths: turns a public conference URL into an enriched, ICP-qualified list in minutes; drafts messages that quote the speaker's actual talk; cuts enrichment spend with pre-qualification before any email reveal runs; works across any conference, summit, or industry event.

Where they overlap: SayIntel uses Apollo as one of its enrichment providers. So you're not paying twice for data, you're paying SayIntel for the speaker-extraction, ICP scoring, message drafting, and pre-qualification on top.

Pick Apollo by itself when your motion is broad-firmographic outbound, "all VPs of Engineering at 100-500 person SaaS companies in the US", and you don't have a specific event signal to anchor on. Apollo + a sequencer + good copy is still the fastest way to start a cold pipeline from zero.

Pick SayIntel when your buyer cluster shows up at conferences, RevOps, DevTools, fintech, healthtech, cybersecurity, climate. Speaker rosters give you 50-800 high-signal prospects per event with a built-in opener (the talk itself). You'll get more meetings from one conference than from a month of cold-list dialing.

Run Apollo for the always-on broad outbound. Run SayIntel on every relevant industry conference as it announces speakers. The SayIntel leads will out-convert the Apollo leads 3-5×, but the Apollo leads keep the pipeline full between events.

Both feeds drop into the same sequencer (or your CRM), see the workflow in our scraping & personalization guide.

Apollo prices per seat with metered email/phone credits (~$59, $149/user/mo). SayIntel prices per qualified lead so you only pay for speakers that pass ICP scoring, see pricing. On a typical 800-speaker conference, pre-qualification cuts the billable lead count by 60-70% before any enrichment runs.