The Scenario
You are an account executive with 30 target enterprise accounts in an Excel workbook on SharePoint. Apollo organization IDs are in column B of the Accounts tab. Before your outreach sprint this week, your manager wants you to walk into every call with a recent news hook — something that happened at the company in the last 30 days that gives you a real opening line.
Monday morning. Outreach starts Wednesday.
The slow version of Monday and Tuesday:
- You Google each company name, scan the news tab, read a few headlines, find something relevant
- By company seven you are reading a press release from 2023 and it took you twenty minutes to realize it
- You copy the relevant headline and URL into a side column of the workbook
- By Tuesday afternoon you have twenty companies covered, ten to go, and you are out of time.
The fast version is one prompt.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads the organization ID column, calls Apollo's news API for each account, and writes the latest relevant headlines and URLs back into the workbook.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
For each Apollo organization ID in column B of the Accounts tab, fetch the latest 3 news articles from Apollo and write the headline of the most recent article into column C, its publication date into column D, and its URL into column E. If Apollo has no news for an organization, write "No recent news" in column C and leave D and E blank.
SheetXAI reads all 30 organization IDs, pulls the news from Apollo, and fills in columns C through E. Monday afternoon. Done.
What You Get
A 30-row intelligence workbook with:
- Column C — headline of the most recent news article per account
- Column D — publication date
- Column E — article URL
Every row either has a news hook or is explicitly flagged "No recent news" so you know which accounts need a different angle.
What If the News Data Is Not Quite Ready
News pull results are not always clean or usable. SheetXAI handles filtering and prep in the same operation.
When you only want articles from the last 30 days
Apollo may return older articles. You do not want to reference a six-month-old press release.
For each organization ID in column B of the Accounts tab, fetch news from Apollo and return only articles published in the last 30 days. Write the most recent qualifying headline into column C, its date into column D, and its URL into column E. If no article was published in the last 30 days, write "No recent news" in column C.
When you want to flag accounts that had a funding announcement
For each organization ID in column B of the Accounts tab, fetch the latest news from Apollo. If any article in the last 60 days mentions "funding," "raised," "Series," or "investment," write "Funding event" into column F and include the headline and date in columns C and D. For all other accounts, write "No funding news" in column F and still populate columns C and D with the most recent headline.
When the workbook has company names but not Apollo organization IDs
Column A has company names, column B is blank.
For each company name in column A of the Accounts tab, look up the Apollo organization ID and write it into column B. Then fetch the latest 3 news articles for each organization and write the most recent headline, date, and URL into columns C, D, and E.
When you want news fetched, filtered, and a personalized opener written in one shot
For each organization ID in column B of the Accounts tab, fetch the latest news from Apollo. Filter to articles published in the last 45 days. Pick the most relevant article for outreach (prefer funding, product launches, and leadership changes over general industry news). Write the headline into column C, the date into column D, the URL into column E. Then write a one-sentence personalized outreach opener in column F referencing the specific news event, written in a direct professional tone.
The pattern: fetch, filter, and turn news into outreach copy — all in one prompt. You walk into every call with a real opening line.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Excel workbook of target accounts, then ask it to pull Apollo news articles for each one. The Apollo integration is included in every SheetXAI plan. For related workflows, see how to export your Apollo pipeline to an Excel workbook or the Apollo in Excel overview.