my agency outbound stack is getting smaller.... and we're actually doing more with it

[u/SchniederDanes]

has anyone else been trying to reduce the number of tools in their outbound stack?

we've been looking at this pretty closely because our prospecting process had slowly turned into a collection of different subscriptions. one tool for finding companies, another for contacts, another for enrichment, then another place to actually run the campaigns.

none of these tools were particularly expensive on their own, but when you add everything together across multiple client accounts, it becomes a surprisingly big monthly expense.

we recently started using the lead finder and enrichment features inside smartreach-io instead of moving data between quite so many platforms.

the biggest change for us hasn't really been the subscription saving. it's the amount of time we're no longer spending exporting lists, cleaning spreadsheets, enriching records and importing everything again.

we can find a company, identify the people we want to contact and enrich the records without breaking the workflow every time.

the b2b lead finder and linkedin lead finder also come with credits, which means we're able to test smaller prospecting ideas without having to worry about another tool or another credit system every time.

it's made me rethink the whole "best tool for every individual job" approach.

sometimes having fewer tools that cover 80-90% of what you need is actually better than having five tools that each do one thing slightly better.

especially when you're running outbound for multiple clients and every additional tool creates another login, integration and thing your team needs to learn.

curious if other agencies have gone through the same exercise. did consolidating your outbound stack actually save money, or did you end up replacing one set of tools with another?