Apollo Phone Numbers Wrong? How to Validate an Apollo Export Before You Dial

Why Apollo numbers go wrong

Most "Apollo's numbers are wrong" complaints come down to four things, and only one of them is about Apollo's data quality:

1. You're dialing the switchboard. Apollo's help centre describes separate fields for a contact's direct work phone, a mobile number, a corporate (company-level) phone and an additional number (export guide). If your dialer takes the first non-empty column and that is the corporate line, you'll reach reception, not the person.
2. The data aged. People change jobs, carriers and phones. Business data decays every month, phone numbers included.
3. The format broke on the way. Opening the CSV in Excel strips leading zeros and can turn long numbers into 4.15555E+09. A number that was right in Apollo is wrong in your dialer.
4. The number never existed. Typos, missing digits and wrong country codes in the source data.

Validation fixes 3 and 4 completely and flags 1. Nothing but a call fixes 2.

What Apollo itself says

Apollo's pricing page, read on 6 November 2026, says credits are shared across a team, granted at the start of each billing cycle, and that unused credits expire at the end of each cycle. Access to phone numbers depends on your plan. The page makes no statement about phone number accuracy and doesn't mention credit refunds for wrong numbers. Its help centre also notes that mobile numbers in CSV enrichment need Direct Dials access.

In practice: assume you pay for every number you reveal, right or wrong, and clean the export before you spend calling time on it.

Step by step

1. Export without breaking the numbers

Export the people you want from Apollo to CSV. Don't open it in Excel first. Upload it as downloaded, or open it with Excel's import wizard and set the phone columns to Text. See validate phone numbers in Excel if you have to.

2. Pick the column you'll dial

Look at the phone columns and decide:

Column type	Use it for	Notes
Mobile	Calls and SMS to the person	Most valuable, often the emptiest
Direct work phone	Calls during work hours	Reaches the person's desk or softphone
Corporate / company phone	Account-level calls	A switchboard, shared by everyone at the company
Additional / other	Fallback	Check what it is before using it

A common rule: mobile first, then direct work phone, never the corporate line for person-level outreach. Build a single dial_phone column with that order before you validate. The phone list segmenter can split rows by which column is filled.

3. Run a numbering-plan check on every row

Upload the CSV to the bulk phone number validator or to the verify page. Each number gets:

• Status: valid (can exist in its country), invalid (too short, too long, unallocated range) or empty.
• E.164 form: a +, the country code and the national number, nothing else.
• Country and numbering-plan type: mobile, fixed line, toll-free, VoIP and so on, where the country's plan says so.

Numbers written without a + and country code are read as US numbers, so add country codes to international rows first. The add or remove country code tool does that in bulk.

4. Add a live carrier lookup where line type matters

In the US and Canada, mobile and landline numbers share area codes, so the numbering plan returns "mobile or landline" for most of them. If you plan to text, or your compliance process treats mobiles differently, you need the carrier-reported line type. A live lookup returns the current carrier and whether the line is mobile, landline or VoIP, which also catches numbers that were ported.

Spot-check one number with the landline or mobile checker before you commit a whole list. Background: mobile vs landline lookup and TCPA: mobile vs landline.

5. Dedupe and load

Remove duplicate numbers after formatting. (415) 555-2671 and +1 415 555 2671 only match once both are in E.164. The remove duplicate phone numbers tool handles it. Then import only the valid rows into your dialer or sequencer.

Clean the emails in the same pass

An Apollo export carries emails too, and Apollo's own email status is the status recorded when Apollo last checked, not today. If the file has an email column, SimpleVerifier runs a live SMTP mailbox check on every address in the same upload, and reports catch-all addresses as risky, never valid, graded higher, medium or lower likelihood (how grading works). See should you re-verify an Apollo export. Or use the free Apollo email verifier for a quick look.

What it costs on SimpleVerifier

• Pro, $39 a month: phone format checks on every row (status, E.164, country, numbering-plan type), plus Unlimited email verification*, the email finder and an API.
• Pro + Phone, $49.99 a month: adds 5,000 live carrier lookups a month with carrier and carrier-reported line type, US numbers included. Failed lookups don't count.
• Starter, $9 a month: 2,500 emails a month, for small email-only lists.
• Free: 100 checks with a Google sign-in.

*Fair use: the first 100,000 checks a month at full speed, then slower, never cut off. Phone lookups and API calls are not part of Unlimited.

Files can be up to 100,000 rows. See pricing.

What validation won't tell you

• Whether the person still uses the number.
• Whether you have consent to call or text it.
• Whether it rings through or goes to a gatekeeper.

It does make sure every number your reps dial can connect, is written the way your dialer expects, and is the type of line you think it is.

More reading: phone number validation for cold calling, phone carrier lookup, Apollo alternatives, clean CRM phone numbers.