Apollo.io has the shortest setup of the ten CRMs Anexus supports: one API key, no subdomain, no account email, no OAuth redirect. But Apollo is a prospecting database and a sequencer rather than a system of record, and that changes what a synced contact actually looks like once it lands.
People, Contacts, Accounts, Sequences — Apollo’s four words
Apollo uses a vocabulary that trips up people coming from Pipedrive or Salesforce. Four terms are worth knowing before you connect:
- People — records in Apollo’s own shared B2B database. Hundreds of millions of them. Nobody on your team owns these; you search them.
- Contacts — people your team has saved into your own Apollo workspace. This is where Anexus writes. A Contact is yours; a Person is not.
- Accounts — the company-level equivalent: an organization your team has saved. Apollo attaches a Contact to an Account when it can work out where the person works.
- Sequences — the multi-step outbound cadences (emails, calls, tasks) that are the reason most teams pay for Apollo. Enrolling a Contact in a Sequence is the defining Apollo action.
The credential: one Apollo API key
Apollo authenticates every API call with a key sent in an X-Api-Key header. There is no OAuth app to approve, no admin consent screen, and nothing for your IT team to whitelist. Two things about the key do matter:
- Apollo scopes keys by endpoint, and gates the API by plan. The API settings page lists which endpoints a given key is allowed to call. A key that can search People but cannot create Contacts will connect and then quietly fail on every sync — check the endpoint permissions before you paste.
- A key belongs to one user in your Apollo team. Records created with it are attributed to that user. If the leads should sit under a particular rep, generate the key from that rep’s Apollo login rather than from an admin account.
Generate the key in Apollo
In Apollo, open Settings (gear icon, top right) → Integrations.
Find API in the integrations list and click Connect if it isn’t already enabled.
Create or reveal a key, then check the endpoint permissions shown alongside it. Contact-creation access is the one Anexus needs.
Copy the key. Apollo shows it in full here, so you can come back for it — but if you regenerate it, the old one dies immediately.
Paste it into Anexus
In Anexus, go to Settings → CRM Integrations → Apollo.io → Connect.
Paste the API key — it is the only field on the card — and click Save & connect.
Use the Test button on the connected card to confirm the key authenticates. Test checks the token itself, not what the token is allowed to do — endpoint permissions are confirmed on Apollo’s API settings page.
Field map: an Anexus contact as an Apollo Contact
Every contact captured on your profile is written as a new Apollo Contact. This is what goes where:
| Anexus captures | Apollo Contact field | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|
| Name | first_name / last_name | Apollo stores a contact’s name as two fields, first and last. |
email | Apollo’s identity key. It decides both deduplication and which Account the Contact joins. | |
| Company | organization_name | A name string, not an Account ID. Apollo resolves the Account itself, mostly from the email domain. |
| Job title | title | Apollo may show a different title later if its own database has a more recent one. |
| Phone | Direct phone | Apollo keeps several phone slots (direct, mobile, corporate). Captured numbers go to the direct one. |
Where the Account comes from
Anexus sends a company name. Apollo turns names into Accounts on its own, and it leans on the email domain to do it — a contact at dana@northwind.ca resolves cleanly to the Northwind Account, while the same person typing a Gmail or Outlook address usually will not attach to any Account at all, no matter what they wrote in the company box.
If your event leads mostly hand over personal addresses, expect a pile of Account-less Contacts in Apollo. They are still perfectly usable in a Sequence — they just won’t show up in Account-based filters or territory views.
Enrichment and duplicates — Apollo’s two surprises
Apollo enriches saved Contacts against its own B2B database. That is the whole point of the product, but it means the title or company on your Apollo Contact may not be the exact string your visitor typed on your profile — Apollo can fill blanks and layer its own data on top. If you need the words the person actually gave you, they are preserved in the Anexus Mini CRM regardless of what Apollo displays.
Deduplication runs on the email address, and it is literal. dana@northwind.ca and d.wong@northwind.ca are two Contacts to Apollo even though they are one human, and a plus-alias (dana+expo@…) is a third. If the same person taps your card at two events with two different addresses, you will have two Apollo Contacts and should merge them in Apollo rather than expecting the sync to spot it.
Turning new Contacts into a Sequence
This is the question every Apollo user asks, so to be explicit: Anexus creates the Contact and stops there. Nobody is enrolled in a Sequence automatically, and no email leaves Apollo because of a sync. Enrolment stays where it belongs — in Apollo, under your control, after you have looked at who actually turned up.
The practical workflow most teams settle on: after an event, open your Apollo Contacts, sort by newest, select the ones worth pursuing, and add that selection to a Sequence. Some teams instead build a saved search that catches the new arrivals and enrol from there.
When a sync doesn’t land
Apollo rejected the API key
Almost always one of three things: the key was regenerated after you copied it (regenerating kills the old key instantly), the key was created by a teammate whose Apollo seat has since been removed, or your plan does not include API access. Re-copy from Settings → Integrations → API and reconnect.
The key connects, but nothing ever appears in Contacts
This is the Apollo-specific one. Because Apollo scopes keys per endpoint, a key can pass authentication and still be forbidden from creating Contacts. Go back to the API settings page and confirm the key’s endpoint permissions cover contact creation, then click Sync past contacts on the Anexus card — anything that failed is still pending and gets retried.
Rate-limit errors during Sync past contacts
Apollo enforces per-minute, per-hour and per-day limits on each API key, and a backlog push is exactly the shape of request that hits them. If a batch stops partway, wait a few minutes and click Sync past contacts again — contacts that never went over are still pending and pick up where they left off. On a tight plan, a large backlog may take a few passes across a day.
I can find the person in search, but not in my Contacts
You are looking at a Person from Apollo’s public database, not your saved Contact. Switch the view from People to Contacts. If it truly isn’t in Contacts, check the Anexus card for a yellow warning — the reason Apollo gave is shown there verbatim.
The contact reached Apollo — and then reached Salesforce too
That is Apollo’s own CRM sync, not Anexus. If your Apollo workspace pushes Contacts onward to Salesforce or HubSpot, anything Anexus writes will ride along. Worth checking before a trade show, especially if you also connected that same CRM to Anexus directly — you would be creating the record twice by two different routes.
Disconnecting and revoking
Click Disconnect in Anexus and we stop writing to Apollo immediately. Contacts already created stay in Apollo — including anyone already enrolled in a Sequence, who will keep receiving that Sequence. Disconnecting a CRM does not pause an Apollo cadence; only Apollo can do that.
To kill the credential itself, regenerate the key in Apollo at Settings → Integrations → API. Remember that the key may be shared with other tools — regenerating breaks all of them at once, not just Anexus.
What’s next
- Back to all CRM integrations
- Managing contacts and leads — the Anexus Mini CRM keeps the untouched original of everything Apollo enriches