Garrett Wolfe
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My favorite GTM tools and ones that i want to try in 2026

January 7, 2026 · By Garrett Wolfe · Originally published on Substack

I wanted to use our first week back from the holidays to share some of my favorite tools and the folks building them. It’s easy to use tools without getting to know the people cranking away creating them, and for several of these I’ve been lucky enough to get to know the builders as well!

Notably, I have explicitly mentioned whether I’ve used the tool or not, so I’m not just shilling recommendations at you not having used it (like many other people do), and this is not sponsored in any way whatsoever, just doing my part to share the love and give thanks!

Inbound Scheduling & Workflows - Default

Default - Default is an incredible team building in the inbound space led up by Nico, Victor, Stan, George, Caitlin, and a handful of other exceptional individuals. For teams that are scaling and need scheduling, routing, and workflow tools associated with inbound demos - Default is a modern inbound workflows solution!

Funny, when I first started my journey into the startup world, I got to know Nico and the team and immediately fell in love. They weren’t ready to hire someone with my background at the time but I am so grateful to have stayed close to the team, become a power user of their product, and have implemented it for Unify and a handful of other clients! I’ve never known any different but I have used Hubspot’s calendar, Calendly, and am grateful for what they’re building.

Linkedin Signals - PhantomBuster & Captain Data

I feel like Phantombuster and CaptainData are some of the unsung heroes of GTM that I’ve had a ton of personal experience with over the last 24 months. These platforms can be used to scrape all types of engagement data on Linkedin like likes, comments, follows, viewers, as well as just general Linkedin scrapes, helping build lead lists on Linkedin among others. Before Unify built an integration with these tools, I personally used Phantombuster and CaptainData to scrape 50+ Linkedin engagement categories across thousands of people at Unify which generated milions of dollars of pipeline for us. The Phantombuster team (John Mears, Jackie Newnam, Brian Moran, Diane Bogui) and Captain Data team (Marc Francis, Chloe Damon, Olivier Darcq) are extremely kind, patient, and friendly - even with the admittedly steepish learning curve to work their systems overtime! God knows where i’d be without learning about these guys!

Favorite: My favorite is Phantombuster here for the friendlier UI, but CaptainData has a bit more power / configuration for folks who want to go really deep.

Website Deanonymization - RB2B / Vector

Although I’ve never spoken to anyone on the RB2B team, you gotta hand it to Adam on the Retention.com train for building a great media engine in founder led content by building in public and admitting both wins and losses.

Vector is competitor to RB2B that offers a very similar suite of tools with a team that has responded to support inquiries near instantly and their founding AE has gotten on the phone with me at a moments notice.

For deanonymizing website visitors (which could be considered both shady but also highly useful), RB2B, Vector, and a few other providers are great platforms.

Favorite: I’m a paying RB2B user, for whatever reason i’ve gotten better results from them but have heard of many friends who far prefer Vector.

Lead Gen Workflows - Clay and Unify

It’s unfair to give either of these too much airtime but both of these tools are category defining and revolutionary within the space. Unify’s team is comprised of some of the best specialists Hyewon Kim, Solomon Astley, Sam Waterbury, Skyler Mickunas (and quite a few folks who have gone out to start their own companies as well - Devin Plumb, etc.). Clay is no different, having met folks like Everett, Brett Fischler, Nick Goel, Daniel Johnson, Josh Hanson, Alex Lindahl, and many more - they are building something truly special

Clay is the power tool for GTMEs, and Unify seems to be going down the BDR automation (replacing Apollo route).

Favorite: Biased here and like both for different reasons :)

Email Tools - Instantly, Smartlead, Lemlist

Instantly, Smartlead, Lemlist, EmailBison - there’s a bunch here.

Instantly has the cleanest UI / UX but Smartlead has a better API endpoint. EmailBison people love for deliverability since its on different (I believe private) email infra but is newer to the game. Haven’t used Lemlist but have heard good things.

Basic Linkedin Messaging - Heyreach, LaGrowthMachine, Dripify

HeyReach has been my tool of choice for Linkedin messaging ever since a few of my clients introed me to it. They are all functionally the same and I don’t have a strong preference here but HeyReach has seemed to have the best external opinions on it. We used LaGrowthMachine at Unify and the team was very kind to help us with success, improve messaging, and generally just shoot the shit. Have heard good things about Dripify but haven’t had the chance to use.

Favorite: HeyReach

Advanced Linkedin Prospecting & Messaging - Valley

In the early days of Unify we viewed them more as a competitor, but they’ve come to be more of a complement in my mind as they have sticked to just Linkedin (as opposed to the full gambit for outbound). CEO Zayd Syed Ali is super kind, he has let me try out the tool and its extremely intriguing and has a stunning UI. Their head of growth (Shubh Agrawal) also is a legend and is friendly, and funny (important!).

AI Search - Exa, Parallel

Super fascinating category that I plan to write about but these tools (Exa, Parallel, Extruct) basically use AI to scrape the web for your search parameters. They can be used for super vanilla B2B SaaS use cases (folks that match X criteria, companies that match Y filters) across sales, recruiting, and more. However, i’ve found these platforms particularly useful for far more useful things like highly niche signal monitoring. I have a ton of fun with Exa because it complements my RSS feed work in Clay in a super neat way. The team at Exa is incredible, and while i’ve heard people rave about Parallel just as much if not more, I prefer to interface with a list like UI rather than a proper API at least for right now.

These companies are still very early, but it reminds me a ton of Unify when I joined in April 2024 as they iron out a few key things like

Product Walkthrough / Demo Software - Navattic, Supademo

Making folks get on the phone with an AE in order to buy can be intimidating and annoying, thus a handful of platforms have popped up that allow folks to build guided walkthroughs or demos. When I was building Galaxy, I setup Supademo for us as I saw it on Twitter and it was super easy to get up and running. Created a great “intent signal” for us and converted to a bunch of design partners that I sold for us. Highly highly recommend using, and I met Joseph Lee (CEO) at a founder dinner purely coincidentally and Fredo Tan (Growth Lead) via product dogfooding and the team is great.

Navattic is a bit more mature and has deeper product suite (today). Randy Frank is a Duke Alum and had Ethan Dursht on his early team (before he joined Unify!). Alisa Feng has also been extremely kind to me as I diligence new product ideas as well.

Favorite: Supademo for bootstrapped companies / quick builds and early stage Companies; Navattic for more thorough demo automation with integrations, sandboxes, etc.

Email / Linkedin Activity Syncing - Outbound Sync

A difficult part of building these outbound systems is syncing everything back to your CRM so your team knows whats going on at a glance. For god knows what reason, none of the email tools / linkedin tools sync activities back to CRM. I’m very curious as to why they left out such a logical thing so if someone could give me an answer I would be plenty interested to hear. OutboundSync finally syncs back all of this interaction data directly to your CRM along with great dashboarding to manage what is going on. In this regard, they do compete with Unify somewhat which is fascinating. Harris Kenney is super friendly and a great guy to watch as he built this product mostly himself out of pure struggle and frustration.

ScaledMail, ZapMail, etc. - Email Infra Management

Managing email infrastructure is not only annoying, but complicated. Everyone has their own preference but I took the jump and chose ScaledMail to use which I have now rolled out over 4+ clients. They are super great for spinning up and down mailboxes, checking email health, and for just asking questions to. Because they deal with so many mailboxes, they can buy them at a cheaper cost then you and me buying our own via Outlook and Gmail. DNS settings and such can be irritating for folks, this eliminates that entire process and puts them in charge. Their team is also incredibly responsive, helpful, and always down to chat about things regardless of what they may be! Dean Fiacco is a great team lead here

Favorite: ScaledMail

CRM - HubSpot, Salesforce, Attio

I am not the most qualified person to speak on this subject but have used Hubspot, Salesforce, and a handful of others in the last few years. As Vic Schwenoa once put it to me:

Hubspot is what I use personally and typically recommend to folks. It’s a lot faster, snappier, and cleaner than Salesforce. This makes a big difference for deep revops work, for list building, and for actual utilization by reps and other teams which matters a ton.

Dharmesh Shah is also a masterclass in founder-led marketing, he posts on Linkedin and Twitter nonstop with very genuine and sincere content and Hubspot in particular is far more well rounded in other areas of operating other than sales engagement (marketing, CS, signals, etc.)

I’ve heard great things about the Octolanes, Clarify’s, Lightfields, and other AI CRM’s of the world, but have not used them yet simply out of lack of integrations with GTM tools. Excited to see how this newish space evolves

Favorite: Hubspot for ease of use and scalability

Contact Data - Wiza

Wiza has somehow appeared on the market as a new player that has somehow made it big, entirely bootstrapped. A really impressive feat. I’ve procured them for a client and have been impressed by the match rate of contact data versus other vendors. While they dont have a sequencing tool (yet), it’s nice to see someone crushing in the data space. Great folks here like George Uhlrich, Michael Kilcullen, and KJ Chow)

BDR Dialing - Nooks, Orum

I am going thru a buying cycle with Nooks and Orum right now. Anthony Firenzi recently started at Nooks and he tends to have a good nose for GTM tools so excited to see what comes here. Orum is another solid tool folks recommend, though I haven’t tried it just yet.

Free Contact Data + Email Sequences - Apollo

This is just such a no brainer but everyone should have the Apollo chrome extension and get their 100 free emails per month + 1 free email sequence. Just so awesome to have on hand and one of the best things to have while you bootstrap your ideas :)

AEO / GEO (&SEO) Optimization - Gauge

Transparently, I ran into the Gauge team by first trying to sell Galaxy to them and get them using it. I was already building AEO / GEO / SEO infrastructure myself in-house, and wasn’t interested in buying Gauge. What was initially me trying to sneakily sell, turned into a beautiful relationship with Caelean Barnes and Ethan Finkel showing me their platform, letting me use it, and seeing the trajectory of Galaxy go hockeystick as I invested more in building AEO / GEO. Track mentions, visibility, where to go get citations and more. Doesn’t hurt that they’re friendly (and I have a fairly active text chain w them).

AirOps (also love but haven’t used!) and Profound in this space too.

Notable Mentions

Tools I want to checkout in 2026

Spongebob I Need It GIFs | Tenor

If you work at these companies and wanna give me a spin of your tool (or are a new entrant to the crowded space of GTM, hit me up)

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