Disclosure. I co-founded Contaktly. None of the links below are affiliate links yet. When one becomes an affiliate link it will be marked as such; the price you pay is the same either way. Nothing on this page is here because of a commission; every tool is paid for and in daily use.
Cold email sending
Smartlead
Every cold email behind the benchmarks goes out through Smartlead: mailbox rotation across many domains, sequences with follow-ups threaded as replies, separate subsequences for out-of-office and referrals, reply categorisation and one master inbox across every client. It's the backbone and I'd pick it again. The annoying part is the analytics API, which times out on a full month of campaign stats; pulling the numbers for this site had to be done in ten-day chunks.
People and company data
Blitz
Where our lists come from: people search by title, company size and country, with a waterfall of email finders behind it so a named person comes back with a verified work address more often than with any single provider we tried. We also use it to look up the decision makers at a company a prospect names on a call. The annoying part: an API key expired on us without warning mid-month, so check the key before a big pull.
LinkedIn outreach
GetSales
Runs connection requests and messages across all our LinkedIn sender accounts, each inside its own sending window. It does the job and the team knows it well. The honest bit: sender accounts disconnect from LinkedIn often, and nothing shouts about it, so we built an hourly check that tags someone the moment a sender drops. Its company field on a profile can also be out of date; verify on LinkedIn before you write.
Calling
CloudTalk
Dialler, local numbers in each country we call, recordings and the call data the calling benchmark will come from. In October 2026 our bill was $188 a month for two seats, two parallel diallers and eight numbers. The lesson that cost us money: with automatic caller ID switched on it dialled Austria from a UK number and burned credit at international rates. Buy a local number for every country you call and set it per campaign.
Website visitor identification
Contaktly
Tells us which companies are on a website, which pages they looked at and who to contact there. I co-founded it, so read that with the appropriate scepticism. We use it on our own sites to feed call-now cards to the team within minutes of a hot visit, and to drop identified visitors into a book-a-meeting sequence in Smartlead. It is the source of the visitor identification benchmark, and that page will say exactly how its numbers are counted.
Also in the Mix
- MillionVerifier: Email verification before every upload and every automated send.
- MailReach: Inbox placement tests on new domains and after any deliverability wobble.
- HubSpot: CRM: every deal, stage and note; every tool above writes into it.
Reply handling (triage, drafting, diary checks, booking, invites) we built ourselves, because nothing off the shelf did it well enough. How it all fits together is in the stack playbook.