# Build an account's buying committee without wasting Apollo credits

> Search is free, so browse every buyer at a target company, tick only the people worth pursuing, and see the credit cost before you spend a thing.

- Workflow type: app
- Services: Apollo, Slack Bot
- Categories: Sales
- Published: 2026-08-14

## What it does

- Type a company domain and see two panels side by side: the people you already have on that account, and everyone else at the company worth knowing about.
- Browsing costs nothing. Contact details are pulled only for the people you tick, and a running counter shows the credit cost before you confirm.
- A persona matrix shows whether you have an economic buyer, a champion and a technical evaluator at the account, with a clear marker wherever you have nobody.
- Saved people land in your CRM with duplicates handled, can drop straight into a sequence, and the finished committee posts to your deal channel in Slack.

## What you'll need

- An Apollo account and its API key. A master key is needed if you want the sequence features.
- A Slack workspace where the app can post into your deal channels.
- A rough idea of the personas you sell to, such as economic buyer, champion and technical evaluator. You define these inside the app.

## Prompt

Build me an app where sales reps assemble the full buying committee at a target account without accidentally spending Apollo credits. It runs on Apollo, with Slack Bot for sharing. The organising idea is that searching is free and enriching costs money, so the app should make that split obvious in the interface instead of hiding it.

The main screen starts with a single input where a rep pastes or types a company domain. Resolve that domain to an account using Apollo Search Accounts and show an account header with the company name, domain and account stage. Everything below the header is scoped to that one account.

Left panel, titled something like Who we already have. Use Apollo Search Contacts scoped to the resolved account. Group the rows by persona, derived from the saved title filters described below, and by contact stage. Load the stage list with Apollo List Contact Stages so stages render as human labels rather than raw IDs.

Right panel, titled something like Net new at this company. Use Apollo People Search filtered to the company domain and the saved target titles. This is the important one: People Search does not consume credits and deliberately returns no email addresses and no phone numbers. Label the panel so a rep understands that immediately, and render the contact detail columns as not yet pulled rather than leaving them blank as though something broke. Any person in this panel who already matches somebody in the left panel should be visibly marked or filtered out, so a rep never pays to enrich a contact the team already owns.

Selection and the credit meter. Every net new row gets a checkbox. A persistent counter, always visible while scrolling, shows how many people are selected and how many credits confirming is about to spend, updating live as boxes are ticked. Nothing is enriched while browsing or selecting. Enrichment happens only on an explicit confirm, and the confirm dialog restates the credit count one more time before proceeding. Include a configurable cap on how many people a single confirmation may enrich, so a mis-click cannot fire off a huge batch.

On confirm, run Apollo People Enrichment against only the ticked rows. Bulk People Enrichment accepts up to 10 people per request, so chunk the selection and show progress as the chunks complete. Then file the results with Apollo Bulk Create Contacts, which has built in deduplication and accepts up to 100 contacts per request. Bulk Create Contacts returns newly created and existing contacts separately, so use that response to move rows into the left panel and to tell the rep how many were genuinely new versus already in the CRM. Report what enrichment actually returned, including anyone who came back with no usable contact detail, so every credit spent is accounted for.

Optional sequence step. After a successful save, let the rep choose a sequence from Apollo Search Sequences and push the newly saved contacts into it with Apollo Add Contacts to Sequence. Both of those operations require an Apollo master API key, so detect that condition and disable the sequence step with a short explanation rather than letting it fail when a scoped key is in use.

Persona coverage matrix. Above the two panels, per account, show a matrix with one row per persona: economic buyer, champion, technical evaluator, plus any personas the team defines. For each persona show how many people we already have and how many net new candidates are available, with a clear gap marker wherever we have nobody at all. Coverage is the real point of this app, so the matrix should be the first thing a rep's eye lands on.

Saved persona definitions. Let the team define each persona as a set of target job titles and seniorities and save them, so the whole team prospects the same way. The saved definitions drive both the People Search filters on the right and the grouping on the left. Persist them at the workspace level rather than per user, and let any rep edit them.

Sharing. A share button posts the finished committee for the account into a deal channel using Slack Bot Send a Message, with the channel picker populated from Slack Bot List Channels. The message should list the committee grouped by persona, call out the gaps explicitly, and note how many credits were spent building it.

General notes. Reps work through account after account, so keep the layout dense but calm and remember the last few accounts each rep opened so they can jump back quickly. Apollo's own interface is widely criticised for getting cluttered at scale, so resist cramming everything on screen and let the two panel layout plus the coverage matrix carry the work.

## How to customize

- Change the personas and the job titles that map to each one, then save them so the whole team prospects against the same definitions.
- Set how many contact lookups a single confirmation is allowed to spend, so a mis-click cannot run a large batch.
- Pick which Slack channel each account's committee gets shared to, or turn sharing off entirely.

## FAQ

### Does searching for new people cost credits?

No. Browsing the people at a company is free and uses none of your Apollo credits. Credits are spent only when you tick specific people and confirm, because that is the step that pulls their email address and phone number.

### Why are there no email addresses in the net new panel?

That is deliberate, and it is how Apollo works. The free search holds back contact details on purpose. The app shows you name, title and company so you can decide who is worth pursuing, then fetches contact details only for the people you pick.

### Will this create duplicate contacts in Apollo?

No. When you save a selection, the app files those people in a way that handles duplicates automatically, and it tells you plainly which ones were brand new and which were already in your CRM.

### Do I need a paid Apollo plan?

You need a plan with credits available to pull contact details, since that is what credits are for. Browsing, the persona matrix and the coverage gaps work regardless. The sequence features need a master API key.

### Can the whole team use the same persona definitions?

Yes. The target titles for each persona are saved in the app and shared across the team, so every rep prospects the same way instead of inventing their own title filters.

Use this prompt in General Input: https://www.generalinput.com/prompts/build-an-accounts-buying-committee-without-wasting-apollo-credits