How to Target Net New Contacts at Current Customers in Apollo.io - Land and Expand Using Apollo.io

Why Land and Expand?

Landing a new customer is just the starting point. The real growth opportunity lies in expanding within that account - reaching additional stakeholders, opening new discussions, and growing the relationship. Apollo.io has the tools to automate this entire process.

Step 1: Start with a Customer Account List

The foundation is building an account list of your current customers in Apollo.io. You can do this by:

• Manually creating a company list within Apollo.io
• Syncing accounts from your CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce, etc.)
• Uploading customer accounts via CSV file

This list tells Apollo.io which accounts are already customers so the system knows where to look.

Step 2: Identify New Contacts at Current Customers

Configure an Apollo.io Play with these criteria:

• Account filter: Must be on the current customer list
• Contact filter: Must be new to the company (less than one month in their role)
• Persona filter: Must match your defined target profiles - operations directors, finance leaders, IT managers, or whoever your ideal contacts are

This combination surfaces people who recently joined your customer accounts and match your target buyer profile.

Step 3: Add New Contacts to a Sequence

Once Apollo.io identifies these contacts, the Play can automatically:

• Add the contact to a “Net New Customer Contacts” list
• Create tasks for the account owner to reach out
• Enroll them in a dedicated outreach sequence

The messaging for these sequences should differ from cold outreach. Reference the existing customer relationship and offer to extend conversations to their team rather than pitching from scratch.

Step 4: Assign Outreach to the Right Owner

Account owners should handle outreach to current customers. This maintains relationship alignment and avoids confusion with cold-style communication from someone the customer has never heard of.

Step 5: Adjust Apollo.io’s Sequence Rules

This is a critical step that is easy to miss. Apollo.io sequences are designed for cold outreach and will not email current customers by default. You need to create a custom rule set that allows sequences to run for accounts marked as current customers.

Without this adjustment, your expansion sequences will be blocked by the default safety rules.

Step 6: Automate with Plays

With everything configured, an Apollo.io Play automatically:

1. Finds new contacts at customer accounts
2. Checks them against persona filters
3. Adds matching contacts to the appropriate list
4. Assigns tasks to the right representatives
5. Enrolls them in expansion sequences

This runs continuously in the background without manual effort.

Benefits of This Approach

A land-and-expand workflow helps your organization:

• Monitor organizational changes at customer accounts in real time
• Proactively engage new stakeholders before competitors do
• Develop multi-department relationships within existing deals
• Transform single contracts into long-term account expansion opportunities

The Bottom Line

Using Apollo.io Plays and sequence rule sets, you can automate the entire land-and-expand process. Your reps spend their time building deeper, more profitable relationships instead of manually tracking who joined which account this week.