Founder-Led Sales & My Current Sales Tool Stack

In my current advisory work, be it for product or services companies (look, free advertising!), one pattern that I've noticed, no matter what the scale of the early stage company, is the need to transition from founder-led sales to something more scalable. I'll likely write more on that at some point, but in the meantime, how do you scale yourself as a founder & sales leader? Here's my tech stack and what I've been generally advising companies I work with to consider. It's particularly salient for the Lab2Market Validate cohort I'm teaching at Dalhousie University.

It's worth noting I'm a tool nerd, so take it all in accordingly. And yes, most are referral links so I can keep that nerd habit going.

  • For automated outbound (sequences, the ability to send to LinkedIn, etc.) and a large data set of prospects, this is the tool that all the cool kids are using: Apollo. Its pricing is a bit wacky, but it's pretty cool. I was also a heavy user of MixMax back in the day and still think it's quite powerful even without the dataset of Apollo. Note that you should be judicious in your use of these tools both to not be a jerk and also to not get marked as spam and be unable to use your email address anymore.
  • I’m not at all against Google Sheets / Excel but if you want a flexible, human comprehensible, user-focused CRM, I really dig Attio. Attio does to bulk email sends too, but not sequences. It syncs your data, enriches, and organizes it for free, without needing to bcc into it like other CRMs. It's kind of a love child of Notion & AirTable with CRM features layered on top.
  • To make finding time in your calendar easier with others try SavvyCal. It's arguably more civilized than Calendly as it allows the other person to overlay their calendar and has great rules, and it's more useful than Google's solution.
  • I'm a big fan of Superhuman for email (they have templates you can use to make sending easier plus it's an amazing email client).
  • To spin up quick, aesthetically pleasign websites with very little effort for an execeptionally low cost, I'd suggest using Carrd. My homepage and advisory sites are hosted there with their built-in templates, and they really are easy to spin up.
  • Recording calls with prospects, if they're cool with it, you can obviously use your videoconferencing software's built in recording tools, but I'm currently digging Fathom; free and does speaker attributions, summaries, etc.
  • Oh, and shameless plug because they are currently a client but I find it to be a crazy useful tool for focus: brain.fm. Gets me into flow super fast and keeps me there.

What am I missing? What do you use?