Most agencies won't show you their tech stack.

They'll talk about "AI-powered outreach" and "multichannel sequences" all day — but the moment you ask exactly what tools they're using, you get a vague answer and a sales pitch.

We're not doing that here.

At Six Figure Consulting, we've booked over 2,000 appointments for 100+ clients across the US and globally. We've tried a lot of tools. Some blew us away. Some cost us weeks of wasted time. A few became non-negotiable staples we'd never remove.

This post breaks it all down: what we actively use today, and what we've used and still recommend depending on your situation.

If you're building or rebuilding your outbound stack, this is the only shortcut you need.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: most outbound fails not because of bad messaging — it fails because of bad data, wrong targeting, and manual processes that can't scale.

The right stack fixes all three. It helps you:

The wrong stack? It burns your domains, wastes your team's time, and gives you zero visibility into why you're not getting replies.

Let's get into it.

These are the tools running in our system today. Every client campaign we run touches at least one of these.

If you're only going to read about one tool in this post, make it Clay.

Clay is where we build, enrich, and qualify every lead list we work with. It pulls data from 50+ enrichment providers simultaneously, runs AI research using Claygent (their built-in AI agent), and lets you build workflows that would otherwise require 3 different tools and a developer.

Here's what we use Clay for at SFC:

The honest version: Clay has a learning curve. It took our GTM team a few weeks to get fully comfortable. But once you do, it's irreplaceable.

Best for: Anyone doing more than 500 contacts per month who wants serious personalization without manual research.

Before a lead hits Clay, it usually comes from Apollo.

Apollo is our primary source for scraping LinkedIn Sales Navigator lists, standard LinkedIn searches, and LinkedIn event attendees. The data quality is solid, it integrates directly with Clay, and you can pull hundreds of leads in minutes.

We don't use Apollo for email outreach (Instantly does that job better). We use it purely as a data source — think of it as the front door to our lead pipeline.

Best for: Scraping targeted B2B contact lists fast, especially from LinkedIn.

Boomerang is the tool you don't hear about enough. It's excellent for extracting company details from open job postings — a powerful buying signal that tells you a company is actively investing in a specific function.

We use it when we want to find businesses hiring in a role adjacent to what our client sells. It's also great for exporting bulk leads from Apollo searches at a lower cost than Apollo's native export.

Best for: Teams that want to use job postings as intent data without breaking the budget.

Instantly is the industry standard for cold email outreach, and it's the only tool we use for this.

It handles our sending infrastructure, email warm-up, campaign management, A/B testing, and analytics. The Clay + Instantly integration is particularly powerful — we can push AI-enriched, personalized emails directly into sequences without any manual work.

What we love about it:

If you're doing cold email and not on Instantly, you're likely leaving deliverability and results on the table.

Best for: Any B2B business running cold email outreach. Full stop.

For LinkedIn outreach, Getsales is our first choice. We have a lifetime plan, which means it's embedded deeply in our workflow. It handles LinkedIn-only campaigns well — connection requests, follow-up messages, and managing multiple accounts.

It's not the flashiest tool, but it's reliable, which matters more when you're running campaigns for 10+ clients simultaneously.

Best for: Basic LinkedIn outreach campaigns across multiple accounts.

Heyreach rounds out our LinkedIn stack. We use it primarily for audience building and outreach campaigns when Getsales isn't the right fit for a specific campaign structure.

It's particularly strong at managing larger audiences and has better analytics for LinkedIn campaigns. We run it as a secondary tool but for some use cases, it becomes the primary.

Best for: LinkedIn outreach with more advanced campaign structures and audience management.

We use the Claude/OpenAI APIs directly inside Clay to qualify and enrich leads at scale using AI.

We use this for specific high-value campaigns where we want to stand out from the flood of generic cold emails. The engagement rate on personalized video messages is significantly higher than text-only outreach.

Best for: High-ticket outreach where standing out matters more than volume.

Make connects everything. When a prospect replies positively, Make can automatically update our CRM, notify our appointment setter via Slack, and move the lead into the next stage — all without anyone touching it manually.

We've built dozens of automations using Make that save our team hours every week. If you're not using a tool like this to connect your outbound stack, you're creating manual bottlenecks that slow everything down.

Best for: Connecting tools and automating the handoffs between them.

Every discovery call, strategy session, and client meeting gets recorded and auto-summarized by Fathom. It pulls out action items, key quotes, and decisions without anyone taking notes.

This might seem like a small thing. It isn't. When you're managing multiple clients, having clean, searchable meeting notes is what keeps promises from falling through the cracks.

Best for: Any team running client calls or discovery sessions.

Pipedrive is our CRM of choice. It's visual, fast, and doesn't have the bloat of enterprise CRMs that make your team avoid updating it. We track every deal stage, appointment, and follow-up through Pipedrive.

Best for: B2B teams that want a clean, fast CRM without the Salesforce complexity.

These aren't tools we abandoned because they were bad. Most of them are excellent — just not the perfect fit for where SFC is today. Depending on your stage, budget, or use case, these might be exactly what you need.

Lemlist is excellent for teams that want LinkedIn + email outreach managed from a single platform. Its personalization features (dynamic images, custom landing pages) are genuinely impressive and drive higher response rates for the right audiences.

We've used it for clients who wanted a simpler, all-in-one setup before moving to our full stack. If you're a smaller team that doesn't want to manage multiple tools, Lemlist is worth serious consideration.

Recommended for: Solopreneurs or small teams wanting multichannel outreach without a complex tech stack.

Findymail is excellent at finding and verifying business email addresses. We've used it as part of our enrichment waterfall in Clay when other sources didn't return a match. High accuracy rate, simple pricing.

Recommended for: Any team building cold email lists that need a reliable email finder.

PhantomBuster is a powerful automation platform with hundreds of pre-built "phantoms" for LinkedIn, Twitter, and other platforms. We've used it for specific scraping and automation tasks that weren't covered by our primary stack.

Recommended for: Technical teams that want flexible automation across multiple platforms.

When we need to scrape data from sources that don't have native tools (review sites, directories, niche databases), Apify is our go-to. It has a massive library of pre-built scrapers and lets developers build custom ones.

Recommended for: Teams that need to pull leads from non-standard sources like G2, Clutch, or industry directories.

Before sending, every email list we use gets verified. Zerobounce is one of the most reliable verification tools — it removes invalid emails, spam traps, and catch-all domains that would kill your deliverability.

Recommended for: Every team doing cold email. Non-negotiable before launching any campaign.

Breakcold is a unique CRM built specifically for social selling — it aggregates LinkedIn activity, tweets, and other signals from your prospects so you can engage with their content before pitching. We've used it for founder-led sales motions.

Recommended for: Founders doing high-touch, relationship-first outreach.

Here's how we think about choosing tools for a client's campaign:

Volume matters. Are you reaching 500 people a month or 5,000? Low volume campaigns can use simpler tools. High volume requires a robust infrastructure with proper email warm-up, deliverability monitoring, and automation.

Channels matter. LinkedIn-only campaigns have a different stack than full multichannel (LinkedIn + email + voice AI). Don't over-engineer for channels you're not using.

Team size matters. A solo founder needs different tools than a 5-person GTM team. Choose tools your team will actually use.

ICP matters. Reaching US SaaS founders is different from reaching Dubai-based professional services firms. Data quality and outreach channels vary by market.

Here's the actual flow for context:

The stack exists to serve this process. Every tool has a specific job in this flow.

Your tech stack is not a status symbol. It's infrastructure.

The best stack is the one your team actually uses, that fits your volume, and that you can optimize over time. Start simple. Add tools when you have a specific gap you can't fill.

If you want to see what this looks like in practice — and what results it drives — check out our success stories.

And if you want us to build this system for you, view our packages or book a strategy call.

Until the next post

Ankit Modi
Founder at Six Figure Consulting
Connect with me on LinkedIn