The Complete B2B Sales Funnel: Apollo → Email Verification → Exarich → Cold Email

Most B2B sales teams do this wrong.

They find leads in Apollo, send them cold emails, and wonder why nobody responds.

Then they blame the email copy. The subject line. The sending time. The CRM.

They're missing the entire picture.

Cold email doesn't fail because of the email. It fails because of the leads.

And the leads fail because nobody's running them through a proper qualification and verification pipeline.

Here's the workflow that actually works.

The Four-Stage Pipeline

Think of outbound prospecting as having four distinct stages, each with a specific job:

Stage 1: Discovery → Apollo
Stage 2: Verification → Email Verifier
Stage 3: Qualification → Exarich
Stage 4: Engagement → Instantly/Smartlead

Skip any of these, and your pipeline degrades significantly. Do all four, and you'll be in the top 10% of sales teams for efficiency.

Let me walk you through exactly why each stage matters.

Stage 1: Discovery (Apollo)

Apollo's job is simple: Find people who look like they might be in your ICP.

Apollo excels at this. It has 275+ million contacts, advanced filtering, and verified email data.

You search for:

• Industry


• Company size


• Tech stack


• Location


• Job title

Example: You're selling marketing automation to B2B SaaS companies.

You filter Apollo for:

• Industry: SaaS


• Employees: 20-200


• Tech stack: Uses HubSpot


• Revenue: 2M-20M

Great! You have leads. But here's the problem: Apollo doesn't know if these leads are actually good.

It just knows they match your basic criteria.

Stage 2: Verification (Email Verifier)

Here's where most teams mess up: They skip this step.

They export from Apollo and immediately upload to Instantly or Smartlead.

But Apollo's email addresses aren't 100% accurate. Some are outdated. Some are wrong. Some are catch-all emails.

When you email a bad address:

• It bounces


• Gmail or Outlook marks you as a spammer


• Your sender reputation tanks


• Even good emails start going to spam

That's why email verification is critical.

Tools like ZeroBounce, EmailListVerify, or Bouncer:

• Verify each email is valid


• Check for catch-all addresses


• Flag risky emails


• Clean your list before you send

Benefit: You're not wasting sending credits on bad addresses. Your sender reputation stays clean.

From our example:

• 10,000 leads from Apollo


• Email verifier cleans and removes invalid addresses


• You're left with 8,500-9,200 verified emails

Stage 3: Qualification (Exarich)

This is where the magic happens.

Email verification cleaned your list. Exarich qualifies it.

These are different jobs:

• Email verification = "Is this email real?"


• Qualification = "Should we even email this person?"

You can have a list of 10,000 perfect email addresses for people who will never buy from you.

Exarich's job is to answer: "Are these people actually in our ICP?"

You upload your verified 8,500 leads to Exarich:
1. We scrape each company's website
2. Our AI analyzes their business model
3. We generate summaries of what they actually do
4. You set up intelligent filters based on real context

Filters might include:

• "B2B SaaS companies (not B2C)"


• "Companies targeting enterprises (not SMBs)"


• "Companies with marketing automation language on their site"


• "Companies showing hiring signals in their marketing section"

You just removed 6,300 leads that would have gotten no response.

Cost: ~$40-100 per 10,000 leads with Exarich

Benefit: You removed 74% of leads that wouldn't have converted. Your team's time is now worth 4-5x more.

Stage 4: Engagement (Instantly/Smartlead)

Now you have:

• Verified emails (Stage 2)


• Qualified leads (Stage 3)


• Exarich summaries (for personalization)

These tools handle:

• Sending at scale


• Tracking opens and clicks


• Managing sequences


• Detecting replies


• Protecting sender reputation

The Math: Why This Pipeline Works

Let's compare two scenarios:

Scenario A: Skip the pipeline

• 10,000 leads from Apollo


• Email verification: $100


• Upload directly to Instantly


• 0.5% response rate = 50 responses


• Cost per response: $200


• Team spends hundreds of hours on bad leads

• 10,000 leads from Apollo


• Email verification: $100


• Exarich qualification: $80


• 2,200 qualified leads uploaded to Instantly


• 3-5% response rate = 66-110 responses


• Cost per response: $2.70


• Team only talks to good leads

And that's not even counting:

• Saved SDR time (260+ hours)


• Better email deliverability


• Higher conversion rates


• Shorter sales cycles

Real Pipeline Example

Let's follow 10,000 leads through the entire pipeline:

Start: 10,000 leads from Apollo
After email verification: 8,700 valid emails
After Exarich qualification: 2,580 qualified leads
Upload to Instantly: 2,580 leads
Expected responses: 77-129 qualified conversations
Expected meetings: 20-40 (at 25-30% conversion rate)

Compare that to:

Start: 10,000 leads to Instantly (unverified, unqualified)
Expected responses: 50 (mostly unqualified)
Expected meetings: 2-5 (at 5% conversion rate)

The full pipeline gets you 4-8x more meetings with half the wasted time.

Why the Order Matters

You can't skip steps or change the order:

Step 1 (Discovery) must come first
Because you need leads before you can verify them.

Step 2 (Verification) must come before qualification
Because bad emails will tank your deliverability before you even get to the good leads.

Step 3 (Qualification) must come before sending
Because sending to unqualified leads wastes credits and damages your reputation.

Step 4 (Sending) comes last
Because you should only send to verified, qualified leads.

Skip verification and your first batch of bad emails damages your domain for all future sends.

Skip qualification and you're emailing people who don't need you.

Cost Comparison: Doing It Right vs. Doing It Wrong

Full pipeline (correct order):

• Discovery (Apollo): Already paying ~$100/month


• Verification: $100 per 10,000


• Qualification (Exarich): $80 per 10,000


• Sending (Instantly): ~$50-100/month


• Total: ~$330 per 10,000 leads


• Results: 4-8x more qualified conversations

• Discovery (Apollo): ~$100/month


• Sending (Instantly): ~$50-100/month


• Email credits wasted: $200-500 (bad addresses, unqualified leads)


• Total: ~$450-700 per 10,000 leads


• Results: Poor response rates, damaged reputation

The Real Cost of Skipping Steps

Here's what happens when teams skip verification:

1. Day 1-3: You send 10,000 emails (including bad addresses)
2. By day 3: You've already sent ~500 emails to bad addresses
3. Day 4+: Gmail and Outlook flag your domain as spam
4. All future emails go to spam, even good ones
5. Your entire sending capacity is ruined
6. You have to warm up a new domain (takes weeks)
7. You lost 2+ weeks of sales productivity

That's the hidden cost of skipping verification.

Here's what happens when teams skip qualification:

1. You send to 10,000 unqualified leads
2. Response rate is 0.5% (50 responses)
3. Your SDRs spend 20+ hours researching and following up on 9,950 bad leads
4. At $30-50/hour, that's $600-1,000 in wasted labor
5. Your team is demoralized by constant rejection
6. You get 2-5 meetings instead of 20-40

That's the hidden cost of skipping qualification.

Your Workflow Starting Today

1. Use Apollo to find leads (firmographic filtering)
2. Use an email verifier to clean the list (remove bad addresses)
3. Use Exarich to qualify the leads (filter based on real business context)
4. Use Instantly or Smartlead to send personalized campaigns (engagement)

Timeline: 1 week from discovery to first email
Quality: 90%+ of leads are actually worth talking to
Cost: ~$300-400 per 10,000 qualified leads
Results: 4-8x more qualified conversations

That's how you do B2B outbound right.

Ready to build a complete outbound workflow? Start with Exarich and see how qualification transforms your pipeline.