Most agencies are out here buying tools like they are collecting Pokémon cards. Gotta catch 'em all. They've got six outreach platforms, three landing page builders, a recording tool they never review, and they are still losing deals they should be winning by a mile.

The problem isn't the tools.

It's that they have no idea what they're trying to accomplish with them.

Here's what I actually believe: the right GTM stack doesn't make you faster at doing the wrong things. It makes the RIGHT things easier, smarter, and harder to screw up.

So, here's what I use, why I use it & why the sequence matters more than the software.

Step 1: Find Them Before They Know They Need You

You can't win a deal you never get into. So the first job is building a pipeline of people worth talking to.

For that, I use Apollo.

And before you roll your eyes (I know). Everyone's on Apollo. But here's what's changed: they just dropped end-to-end AI agents, waterfall enrichment (which is a game-changer for data quality), and they are in beta with a Claude integration. Which means the tool is getting smarter about how to use itself. That's not marketing copy. That's actually useful.

Pair Apollo with Instantly or Lemlist for the outreach sequencing. Instantly is great for volume and deliverability. Lemlist is better if you want more personalization and video embedding in your sequences.

Pick one. Don't use both. As an agency owner, your job is to close deals, not to test email SaaS platforms.

Step 2: Know Who You Are Talking To Before You Open Your Mouth

This is where most agencies absolutely fall apart.

They show up to calls knowing nothing. They ask the same five surface-level questions. The prospect gives guarded answers because they don't trust someone who clearly did zero homework. And then the agency owner jumps in (the second the prospect takes a breath) with their full capabilities deck and their beautiful case studies and their "we're really a strategic partner" pitch.

The prospect smiles & says it was great. And THEN hires someone else.

Why? Because you were performing, not listening. And they could tell.

Pre-call intelligence is not optional. It's the thing that separates agencies that win from agencies that wonder why they are losing to people who are clearly worse than them.

I built Discovery Lab and Discovery Lab Pro specifically because I got tired of watching smart agency owners walk into calls half-blind. You plug in a prospect's information, and it gives you actual insight (what they likely care about, what their business challenges might be, how to frame your questions).

Go in knowing something. Full stop.

Copy.ai's Prospect Intelligence is also worth a look for additional contact-level research. Different angle, different data, useful as a complement.

Step 3: Don't Blow the Call You Just Did All That Work to Get

The prospect has been found. The homework is done. Now comes the actual call.

And then you wing it.

I see this constantly. Agency owners who spend hours on research and then show up to the actual call with no structure, no real listening framework, and a tendency to pitch before they understand. Sitting there half-thinking about what to say next instead of actually hearing what the prospect is telling them.

That's not a sales problem. That's a preparation problem disguised as a talent problem.

Call Lab and Call Lab Pro give you real-time intelligence during the call, so you can stay present and still catch what matters. If you want to see what this actually produces before you commit, grab a quick sample here. Takes two minutes. You'll get it immediately.

Fireflies handles recording and transcription so you can actually review calls afterward and figure out where you lost the thread. Because you will lose the thread sometimes. The question is whether you learn from it or just keep doing the same thing and blaming the prospect.

Step 4: Give Them a Place to Land (That Isn't a Generic Website)

You've got their attention. They click something. They land somewhere.

Where they land either confirms that this is the right choice, or makes them immediately doubt the last 20 minutes they just spent with you.

For landing pages at scale, I use Landingi. It's built for agencies doing real volume. Multiple clients, multiple campaigns, all of it manageable.

For personalized pages where the experience really matters, Instapage is cleaner and easier to edit. And Landing Rabbit is underrated, it builds off what you already have rather than making you start from scratch. Which, for most agencies, is exactly what the situation calls for.

For presentations, stop building decks in Google Slides and pretending that's fine. Gamma produces decks that actually look like you give a shit, and Canva has 12 bazillion tools to produce gorgeous slides.

Step 5: Make It Personal Without Making It a Production

Personalized outreach video is one of those things that sounds like a lot of work until you realize it's not anymore.

Descript lets you create AI avatar versions of yourself so you can scale personalized video without recording yourself 200 times a week. Embed those in your landing pages, your outreach sequences, your follow-ups.

ElevenLabs is where you go for voice cloning and AI audio. For anyone building video content, voiceovers, or audio-enhanced outreach, this is the tool.

Step 6: Build A Network (or just get paid for your recommendations)

If you have a productized service or software offering, building a growth network via Partnerstack or Dub is worth setting up. Partner program platforms make growth easier & tracking a snap. And, if you are recommending products to your clients, jump into their respective networks.

Here's the Thing About All of This

The tools are not the strategy.

I've seen agencies with exactly zero of these tools close better deals than agencies with all of them, because they actually showed up prepared, listened hard, and spoke directly to what the prospect told them they needed.

But I've also seen smart agencies leave an embarrassing amount of money on the table because they were manually doing things these tools handle automatically, and they were spending brain calories on data entry instead of on the actual relationships.

The stack above is what I use. It's what I recommend. Every link is an affiliate link, and I'll tell you that plainly because I'm not in the business of pretending I don't have skin in the game.

But I also would not put them here if I did not think they were the right tools for the job.

These are the rules (and yeah, I know that these are not exactly a revelation, but consider this a good reminder):

  1. Use the right tool for the right job. For example, don't use Copper CRM for cold outreach because it is not the right tool. Copper is great at what it does. Cold outreach is not what it does.
  2. Know who the prospect is before reaching out.
  3. Know what matters to them before getting on the call.
  4. Show up with something worth their time.
  5. Give them a landing place that earns the next step.

That's way more than a tech stack. That's kind of a whole GTM playbook in 5 bullet points, IMHO.