Apollo's index starts at LinkedIn. Ours starts at the map pin.

Apollo says its file holds 150 million contacts, with 5.3 million new ones each month. It says the rows come from a contributor network, from public crawling and from outside feeds. It claims a 98% email accuracy rate.

The shape of that file matters more than the size. Apollo hangs each contact on a job title at a company. The company needs a domain. The person needs a title.

That model works, and it works well. Sell software to a head of sales and Apollo is the right tool. It hands you the name, the title, the firm and a route in.

The half of Apollo that people pay for

Most Apollo users did not buy a database. They bought a place to build a list and press send.

Apollo bundles sequences, a dialer, call recording and mailbox warm-up. You pick a filter, save a list and start the emails in one tab. A weak row costs you less when the fix sits one click away.

We do not do that half. FindAndClose has no sequencer, no dialer and no sending. You export a file and run it in the tool you already use.

Where the model runs out

A contact graph needs a job title to hang a person on. It needs a company page to hang the title on. Most local trade firms have neither.

Think about a plumber in Bergen with two vans and one apprentice. There is no staff page. There is no company page on LinkedIn. There is often no website at all.

What he does have is a Google Maps listing. It carries a name, an address, a phone number and opening hours. It carries a rating and a review count too.

That listing is not a thin LinkedIn profile. It is a different kind of record. We grew our index out from the pin, so the listing itself is the row.

1. Pick one trade and one town you know well. A plumber, a dentist or a hair salon in your own city works best.
2. Run that search in Apollo. Filter to the country, then the industry, then firms under ten staff.
3. Count the rows with a real street address. Not a head office. The address a van drives back to at six.
4. Open the same trade on Google Maps. Count the pins. The gap between those two counts is this page.

We think you will find a handful of rows in Apollo and a few hundred pins on the map. We could be wrong in your town. Run it and see.

Then run the same test on us. The trial lasts 14 days and gives you 100 leads with no card. Pull one town and ring five numbers by hand.

This is why we lead with the test and not with a claim. A count you made yourself beats any table we could write.

Keep Apollo if you sell to firms with staff, a domain and a LinkedIn page. Nothing here changes that. The sequencer, the dialer and the CRM sync are real products.

Add us when the target list is a trade in a town. Roofers in Malmö. Dentists in Oslo. Cafés in Aarhus. Those rows live on the map, not in a contact graph.

• Selling software to a VP of sales — Apollo, every time
• Selling websites to salons with no website — us
• Selling to a franchise head office — Apollo
• Selling to the 40 franchisees who each run one shop — us
• Any list where the buyer is the person who answers the phone — us

The join between the two is a CSV. You export from us and load the file into whatever sends your mail. Apollo takes a CSV import, and so does every sending tool we have tried.

One warning, and we would rather say it here than in the small print. We do not send anything. No mail leaves our servers on your behalf, and we have no plan to change that this year.