u/Just_Awareness2733

one of our clients asked me last week to put together a doc of what tools we use and how everything connects and i started writing it out and it turned into like 4 pages so i figured id just post a version here since people ask about this stuff constantly

we run a 16 person agency, about 20 active client campaigns at any given time, been doing this for 6 years now. revenue sits around $107k/mo give or take. we service B2B SaaS companies mostly but also have a handful of fintech and cybersecurity clients. the thing that makes our setup different from most solo operators is that we're constantly running 3 or more ICPs simultaneously for a single client which means the tooling has to support segmentation at every layer, not just at the list building stage

THE DATA LAYER

this is where most people overthink it honestly. for our primary prospecting we use Zoom͏Info and Link͏edIn Sa͏les Navi͏gator together. ZoomInfo handles the bulk firmographic and technographic filtering, Sales Nav is where we do the manual sniping for weird ICPs that dont fit neatly into ZoomInfo filters. like if a client sells to "series B fintechs that just hired their first VP of Engineering" thats a Sales Nav play not a ZoomInfo play.

ZoomInfo costs us around $24k/year on our current plan which sounds insane but when youre running 20 campaigns and need fresh data constantly the math works out. we tried GetPr͏ospect for maybe 3 months last year as a cheaper alternative and the coverage was fine for US based prospects but fell apart completely for UK and DACH regions which a few of our clients need. so we dropped it. not a bad tool just didnt fit our use case.

for enrichment we export from ZoomInfo, run through Pro͏speo to find any missing emails, then verify everything downstream. that chain handles probably 85% of our email sourcing. the other 15% comes from manual research which yeah, is slow, but for some verticals especially cybersecurity where decision makers are paranoid about their info being public its the only way.

we also have 2 Cl͏ay licenses at $149/mo each which our ops team uses for waterfall enrichment on specific campaigns where we need phone numbers or LinkedIn URLs that ZoomInfo doesnt have. Clay is powerful but i wont pretend its intuitive. we had to train people on it for about 3 weeks before they stopped breaking workflows and honestly one of our team members still avoids it. the interface is like if someone designed a spreadsheet inside a fever dream. but when it works it works.

VERIFICATION

this is the part i wish i had taken more seriously earlier. about 2 years ago we lost our biggest client at the time, $14k/mo account, because we had a stretch of bad deliverability that tanked their reply rates for 6 weeks. turned out we were skipping verification on a chunk of our lists because we trusted the source data too much. that cost us probably $180k in lifetime revenue from that client and it was entirely preventable.

now we run everything through Million͏Verifier as the primary pass. costs us about $60/mo at our volume which is nothing. after MillionVerifier we use Scr͏ubby for the catch-all addresses that MV cant definitively verify. Scrubby runs maybe $40/mo for us. the two together mean our bounce rate across all campaigns sits at 1.1 to 1.4% consistently. before we added Scrubby it was more like 2.8 to 3.1% which doesnt sound that different but when youre sending 15k+ emails a week that delta matters alot for domain reputation.

if youre running less volume honestly just MillionVerifier alone is probably fine. Bouncer is another option ive heard good things about but havent personally tested it so cant speak to it.

SENDING INFRASTRUCTURE

ok this section is gonna be long because this is where agencies live or die

we use Smar͏tlead as our primary sending platform for most campaigns. switched from Reply.io about 14 months ago and the difference in inbox rotation and warmup management at scale was night and day. Reply.io was fine when we had 8 clients but managing 20 campaigns with 60+ inboxes across them was painful. the UI just wasnt built for that volume of campaign management.

we also run some campaigns through Woodpecker for clients who want more granular A/B testing on sequences. Woodpecker is honestly underrated, the condition-based sequences are really good, but its not great when you need to manage a ton of inboxes per campaign.

for inboxes themselves we use Maildoso for the bulk of our sending domains. right now we have around 70 active inboxes across all campaigns which costs us roughly $350/mo through Maildoso. we tried Inframail for a few months and it was cheaper but we had DNS issues on like 4 domains that took forever to get resolved and when your client is paying you $5k/mo and their campaign is sitting dead because of a DKIM issue on the inbox providers end... yeah thats not a fun conversation. Maildoso hasnt been perfect either (their dashboard is slow as hell sometimes) but the actual deliverability has been solid.

we warm up every new inbox for minimum 21 days before sending any campaign traffic through it. i know people say 14 days is fine and maybe it is for some setups but weve found 21 gives us a noticeably better first-month deliverability window. we warm up through Smartleads built in warmup which is fine, nothing special, but it works and its one less tool to manage.

our sending limits are 35 emails per inbox per day. never higher. we used to push 50 and it worked for a while until it didnt and then 3 domains got flagged in the same week. 35 is the sweet spot for us with our current inbox count.

THE CRM QUESTION

most of our clients use their own CRM, usually Salesforce or HubSpot, and we push qualified replies into their system. for our internal tracking we use Close CRM which runs us about $99/mo per seat and we have 4 seats. its not cheap but Close is genuinely... actually its honestly the best CRM ive used for outbound-specific workflows. the calling features are solid too which matters because about 30% of our clients also want us doing cold calls as a follow up layer.

we tried running everything through Salesforce at one point and it was overkill for what we needed. great tool, wrong context.

LINKEDIN LAYER

we use Waalaxy for automated LinkedIn outreach on about 6 of our 20 campaigns. not every client needs it and not every ICP responds well to LinkedIn touches. the campaigns where it works best are selling to marketing leaders and RevOps people, they actually check LinkedIn. selling to CTOs or engineering leads through LinkedIn is mostly a waste in our experience, open rates on connection requests are abysmal.

Waalaxy is like $60/mo per seat and we run 3 seats. its fine. does what it says. the sequencing is basic compared to dedicated email tools but for LinkedIn its enough.

HOW IT ALL CONNECTS FOR MULTI-ICP

so when a client comes to us with 3 ICPs (which is most of them), heres roughly what happens. we build seperate lists for each ICP in ZoomInfo, enrich through Prospeo for email finding, verify through MillionVerifier then Scrubby, segment into separate campaigns in Smartlead with dedicated inbox pools per ICP, and run different messaging for each. the key thing people miss is that you need separate inbox pools. if youre sending 3 different value props from the same inboxes your warmup signals get muddled and spam filters pick up on the inconsistency faster than youd think.

each ICP gets its own set of 3-4 inboxes, its own domain (sometimes 2), and its own warmup timeline. this means for a 3 ICP client were managing 9-12 inboxes and 2-3 domains just for them. multiply that by 20 clients and you see why we need 16 people.

MONTHLY COST BREAKDOWN (roughly)

ZoomInfo: ~$2k/mo

Sales Navigator: 3 seats at $99/mo = $297

Clay: 2 seats at $149/mo = $298

Smartlead: ~$194/mo (their scale plan)

Woodpecker: $59/mo

Maildoso: ~$350/mo

MillionVerifier: ~$60/mo

Scrubby: ~$40/mo

Close CRM: 4 seats at $99/mo = $396

Waalaxy: 3 seats at $60/mo = $180

thats around $3,875/mo in tooling before payroll, office, and everything else. honestly its not bad for the revenue we generate but it took us years to get here. 3 years ago we were spending almost the same amount on way worse tools because we kept trying to find the one magic platform that did everything. spoiler: it doesnt exist.

anyway this got way longer than i planned. theres definitely stuff im forgetting, we also use a few internal scripts and Zapier automations that glue things together but those are boring. if anything here doesnt make sense just ask and ill try to clarify when i get a chance

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