Summary: Growth Operations Firm sat down live with HubSpot and Apollo for a session on the HubSpot Prospecting Agent — the new agentic capability inside Sales Hub, powered by Apollo's 240M+ contact database. We used the very tools and processes the webinar was about to help fill the room. This is the recap — what we showed, what we learned the hard way (RIP, 20,000 credits), and what's working now.
This was, in Chris Nault's words on LinkedIn after the session, "very meta. Very growth ops."
We used HubSpot's new Prospecting Agent — fueled by Apollo data — to drive registrations for a webinar about HubSpot's new Prospecting Agent, fueled by Apollo data. And shared our lessons learned and top use cases with the over 600 GTM leaders who registered for this event.
The session itself brought together Christopher Nault (CEO, Growth Operations Firm) as moderator, Amber Kemmis (Director of Revenue, Growth Operations Firm) leading the live demo, Lauren Ryan (Corporate Account Executive, HubSpot), and Cindy Chao (Product Marketing, Apollo). Here's what the room walked away with.
Setting the Stage: Outbound Is Broken in 2026. AI Hasn't Fixed It Yet.
Reply rates are at all-time lows. SDR ramp times are at all-time highs. Every prospecting tool now claims to be "AI-powered" — and somehow your team is spending more time in spreadsheets than ever before.
Lauren Ryan opened with the framing that landed hardest: "AI has made it easier to prospect at scale, which is great as a seller, but challenging as a buyer — because it's kind of democratized access to your inbox in a larger way. So whenever you actually send a prospecting message, it's more important now than ever to have really strong context backing it up."
The problem isn't more AI. It's that most AI tools sit beside the stack instead of inside it. Lists live in Apollo. Outreach lives in HubSpot. SDRs do the manual bridge between them — copy-paste, enrich, segment, sequence, repeat.
The 20,000-Credit Lesson (How We Got Here)
The most useful part of the session — and the part Amber put on LinkedIn before the live event — was the confessional.
In her pre-webinar LinkedIn post, Amber Kemmis wrote it plainly:
"We burned through 20,000 credits with the Prospecting Agent on HubSpot, so you don't have to 🫣 For months, we tried to master prospecting. Claude, Apollo.io, HubSpot Buyer Intent, super complex HubSpot workflows, unicorns — we tried it all. While it worked, it was overly complex, took months to build and perfect, and required a lot of maintenance. Then, HubSpot gave us all this in a neat little box with the revamped Prospecting Agent."
The 20K-credit pain wasn't because the tool didn't work. It was because we ran before we walked. The fix wasn't more spend. It was tighter planning:
- TAM precision over volume. HubSpot caps you at 20 research topics per play. Use them on niche signals your buyers actually care about, not 20 variants of "snow cones."
- Persona precision over breadth. "VP of Marketing" surfaces variants automatically. Newer titles like "GTM Engineer" need to be more explicit — there's less data on them.
- Plan type clarity. Known accounts get one motion; net-new companies surfaced from public signals get another. Don't run them through the same play.
What the New Prospecting Agent Actually Does
The Prospecting Agent isn't new — but the version that shipped two months ago is. The previous version required you to manually enroll people and ran the same outreach over and over. The new version is structured around what Amber called "plays" — a word she used roughly 20 times on the call.
Each play has three layers:
- A target segment — known accounts you're already chasing, or net-new companies the agent surfaces from signals
- A selling context — URL-driven content that grounds the AI's outreach in something specific and current (not "first name, last name, company")
- A delivery mode — adaptive outreach (Breeze writes everything, hands-off) or traditional sequences (multi-channel, more rep involvement)
The Apollo integration is where the enrichment story gets interesting. Apollo's database now sits behind the agent's contact-surfacing — so when HubSpot recommends a contact at a target company, it's pulling from 240M+ records, refreshed monthly, with waterfall fallback across 20+ vendors when Apollo doesn't have it.
On the live panel, Cindy Chao, Product Marketing at Apollo, walked through the flywheel behind that data:
"We have four million-plus users on Apollo, and our database is one that continues to grow and compound as more people get on it. We refresh it monthly — taking out stale information, updating contacts, updating companies. And our data team has built AI agents that scour the web for public resources to find new contacts in niche markets and geos, and then validate them. The database keeps growing, especially in the places that used to be hardest to reach."
That last point matters most for HubSpot Sales users. Niche industries, smaller geos, and newer titles like "GTM Engineer" are exactly where most contact databases get thin — and where Apollo's AI-driven discovery layer earns its keep.
Real Numbers, After 6–8 Weeks
The number that came up most in live Q&A was the response rate. Amber's team is averaging ~300 emails per rep per cycle, with a response rate above 5% — meaningfully higher than the 2–3% you'd expect from manually-written outreach. Multiple deals booked, attributed back to specific plays.
The asterisk matters: that's after six to eight weeks of daily pruning. Personas adjusted. Plays paused. Segments narrowed. Selling context refined. The team treats it like a garden, not a switch.
Why This Webinar Worked — The Bigger Lesson
Chris's LinkedIn post the day after the session captured the meta-lesson better than the recording did:
"Demand generation still works. ABM still works. Awareness still matters. We hit 604 RSVPs against a goal of 200. No paid ads. We used the tools and processes to get people to the event about the tools and processes. HubSpot (Prospecting Agent, CRM, Content + Marketing + Sales Hub). Apollo (Data + Segmentation + HubSpot Integration). Clean data. Targeted outreach. Email. LinkedIn (1+1 message, LinkedIn Events). A clear message. A real audience. A follow-up motion. Very meta. Very growth ops."
He closed with the line we keep coming back to internally:
"Keep driving awareness. Keep owning the customer journey. Keep refining the tools. Keep doing the work most people skip. That is what fuels growth."
Watch the Full Session + Get the Planning Kit
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The complete recording is on YouTube: The New HubSpot Prospecting Playbook Powered by Apollo
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And the Prospecting Agent Planning Kit (the fill-in-the-blanks template Amber walked through live), the deck, and the full session resources are all here: Get the take-home kit
Want Your Own Plan, Built Live?
If you're sitting on this and thinking "OK, but how does this work in MY stack?" — that's exactly what we built the free 1:1 Prospecting Agent Workshop for.
30 minutes with our team. Your specific stack — HubSpot only, HubSpot + Apollo, HubSpot + ZoomInfo, something else. By the end of the call, you'll have a Planning Kit filled in for your business and a clear next step.
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