Author
Published date
1/16/2026
Reading time
5 min
SaaS growth leaders spend a large chunk of their strategic time coordinating specialists instead of optimizing campaigns. Prospects receive disconnected messages from paid media, outbound, and creative teams working in silos. Sales reps spend the majority of their day on administrative tasks, with context switching between applications consuming hours that should go toward closing deals.
At Understory, we built our 2026 growth system around one principle: coordinated execution without vendor management overhead. While typical B2B SaaS teams manage 50+ tool portfolios, we run a lean stack of specialized tools connected through a central hub.
Here's the exact system we use for clients with $20K-$100K+ ACVs and what it means for your own tech stack decisions.
Most SaaS growth teams assemble stacks tool by tool, creating integration nightmares that consume operations bandwidth. We built ours with Clay as the central coordination hub and Make.com as the workflow automation engine. Every other tool feeds data in or receives automated actions out.
We've embedded Clay expertise across our team through the Clay Bootcamp curriculum. This is a strategic capability building that enables hyper-personalized outbound at scale. Clay operates in two modes that power different parts of our workflow.
List Building Mode compiles, deduplicates, and filters leads while integrating with 100+ data sources. Enrichment Mode fills in partial records with missing details: firmographics, verified emails, social URLs, and AI-generated research.
Once we enrich contacts, they sync directly to client CRMs and outreach tools. Clay also handles data compliance by pushing data through their SOC 2 compliant infrastructure before it reaches downstream systems.
Make.com handles multi-step workflow automation across paid media platforms, outbound sequences, and CRM systems. When a prospect downloads a pricing guide, Make.com triggers personalized sequences in Instantly, updates targeting in LinkedIn Campaign Manager, and creates tasks for the sales team. All without manual intervention.
For simpler automations, we use Zapier's 7,000+ integrations. For privacy-sensitive workflows, n8n provides self-hostable open-source automation.
Our stack breaks into four categories: data foundation, email infrastructure, revenue intelligence, and paid media management. Each layer connects through Clay and Make.com to eliminate manual handoffs.
Accurate data powers everything downstream. These tools source, enrich, and validate contact information before it enters outbound sequences.
1. Boomerang
It scrapes company followers and existing data for enrichment. We selected it because it pulls prospect lists from company pages and integrates directly with Clay, letting us build targeted account lists based on who's already engaging with competitors or complementary tools.
2. LeadMagic
It handles email finding with accuracy and a deliverability focus. LeadMagic prioritizes verified emails that actually reach inboxes, which protects domain reputation and improves sequence performance.
3. IcyPeas
It provides high-volume email validation with less than 2.5% bounce rate. We run every email through IcyPeas before it enters a sequence because even a few bounces can tank sender reputation. The low bounce rate keeps our clients' domains healthy over thousands of sends.
4. Wiza
It delivers LinkedIn-powered contact enrichment with bulk export and real-time verification. When we need to pull contacts directly from LinkedIn Sales Navigator searches, Wiza exports verified emails at scale. The real-time verification catches stale data before it enters workflows.
5. Prospeo
It fills gaps when other enrichment tools come up empty. Prospeo serves as our supplemental layer that catches the 10-15% of leads that slip through primary sources.
6. DiscoLike
It discovers lookalike companies to expand target account lists based on ICP. Once we've identified high-performing accounts, DiscoLike finds similar companies we haven't targeted yet, expanding the pipeline without diluting ICP fit.
7. Claygent
This is Clay's AI-powered research agent for scraping and research outside standard databases. When we need custom data points that don't exist in traditional enrichment sources, Claygent scrapes websites, parses content, and extracts specific information at scale.
Domain health determines deliverability. We manage domains through Namecheap and Porkbun for DNS setup (SPF, DKIM, DMARC records) that keeps emails landing in primary inboxes.
It serves as primary email infrastructure for high-value, personalized outreach. Google's deliverability remains the gold standard for B2B email; premium inboxes on custom domains give us the sender reputation needed for enterprise prospects who filter aggressively.
This provides secondary sending capacity for volume without risking main domain reputation. We use ScaledMail through Outlook for high-volume campaigns, keeping the primary Google infrastructure clean for strategic, personalized sequences. This separation protects deliverability across both channels.
10. Instantly
It runs as our primary sequencing platform with inbox warm-up, reply tracking, and A/B testing. We chose Instantly because it handles the full outbound lifecycle: warming new inboxes, managing multi-step sequences, tracking engagement, and testing variations. The native warm-up feature alone saves hours of manual inbox preparation.
11. HeyReach
It automates LinkedIn outreach with multi-account management, connection requests, and coordinated follow-ups. LinkedIn remains essential for B2B SaaS outreach, and HeyReach lets us run coordinated campaigns across multiple profiles while keeping account health and safety at the forefront. The platform integrates with our email sequences so prospects receive consistent messaging across channels.
Connecting marketing activity to revenue requires unified data across CRM, attribution, and reporting tools.
12. HubSpot Sales Hub (or Salesforce)
These tools provide the CRM foundation with AI-driven pipeline forecasting, depending on client infrastructure. We're certified HubSpot partners, but we work with both platforms. The CRM serves as the single source of truth where all enrichment, outbound activity, and attribution data converges. Without this foundation, coordinated campaigns fragment into disconnected touchpoints.
13. Fibbler
It closes the attribution gap between paid media and CRM data, powering outbound-to-paid workflows and measuring influenced pipeline alongside direct conversions. We selected Fibbler because it solves the multi-touch attribution problem that plagues most B2B SaaS companies: proving which activities actually generate pipeline. Combined with Clay and HubSpot, Fibbler becomes a cornerstone of how we run multichannel campaigns and deliver GTM insights.
14. OutboundSync
It syncs outbound activity into CRMs with multi-channel tracking and revenue attribution. Most outbound tools create data silos, but OutboundSync pushes every email open, reply, and LinkedIn interaction back to the CRM so sales teams see the full picture without logging into multiple platforms.
15. Looker Studio
This tool provides centralized performance visualization pulling data from all ad platforms. We use Looker Studio to monitor spend, performance, and trends in one place, giving clients a clear view of ad performance without logging into each platform separately.
16. Porter Metrics
It feeds LinkedIn, Meta, Google Ads, and CTV data directly into Looker Studio without custom integrations. Building and maintaining data pipelines from ad platforms to dashboards consumes engineering time; Porter Metrics handles this automatically so we can focus on optimization rather than data plumbing.
We manage unified campaign orchestration across Google Ads, LinkedIn Campaign Manager, Meta Ads, Reddit Ads, and other platforms. This provides coordinated cross-platform execution, intelligent spend optimization, and pipeline-to-close attribution tracking through Fibbler.
When prospects receive LinkedIn ads, cold emails, and demo follow-ups with consistent messaging and identical account intelligence, they experience unified execution rather than fragmented touchpoints. The difference shows in conversion rates: coordinated campaigns treat outbound as targeted advertising with personalized messaging that hits the exact person, not just job titles or demographics.
Pipeline forecasting breaks down when data lives across disconnected tools. SaaS growth leaders typically spend several hours weekly manually compiling reports from HubSpot, LinkedIn Campaign Manager, and email sequencers.
Our stack automatically consolidates attribution data through Fibbler and visualizes it in Looker Studio, enabling accurate MRR predictions without the manual work. Combined with Clay and HubSpot, Fibbler becomes a cornerstone of how we run multichannel campaigns and deliver GTM insights.
When a $50K prospect downloads your pricing guide, our stack executes in under 60 seconds:
No manual intervention required. Fibbler attribution updates automatically throughout.
Growth leaders struggle to prove which activities generate pipeline, making it difficult to optimize spend allocation. The challenge intensifies when teams think about outbound in a silo, focused on cost-per-email instead of as a super-targeted ad campaign. Fibbler provides multi-touch attribution connecting every paid media click to closed opportunities, measuring influenced pipeline alongside direct conversions. This enables data-driven budget decisions rather than guesswork.
For B2B SaaS with $20K+ ACVs: every tool must integrate with your CRM and enable bidirectional data flow. Trigger-based workflow automation becomes essential for coordinating paid media, outbound, content, and partnerships across complex sales cycles with multiple stakeholders. These three principles guide our tool selection.
Evaluate tools using three criteria:
Tools failing any criterion create coordination bottlenecks that waste your team's time and fragment the prospect experience.
Rather than purchasing enterprise-tier monolithic platforms, we achieve sophisticated capabilities through flexible tool combinations. Clay + Make.com + specialized tools costs significantly less than enterprise ABM platforms while providing superior flexibility and avoiding vendor lock-in.
Evaluate total cost of ownership including integration maintenance, training time, and opportunity cost of inflexible systems. License fees represent a fraction of the true cost.
Maintain backup options for functions that can't fail:
This redundancy prevents revenue disruption while enabling continuous testing across providers to optimize performance.
Transitioning from fragmented tools to coordinated architecture requires phased implementation.
We recommend appointing a dedicated project owner (typically RevOps or Growth Operations), conducting regular progress reviews with cross-functional stakeholders, and maintaining parallel systems during testing to prevent revenue disruption.
Team training requirements: Clay Bootcamp curriculum provides comprehensive training. Make.com workflow configuration requires additional training for marketing and sales operations staff. Stagger training schedules to prevent operational disruption while building internal expertise.
Adaptation periods: Teams transitioning from familiar tools like Outreach or Salesloft to new sequencing platforms experience learning curves. Focus on demonstrating clear efficiency improvements to maintain team buy-in throughout the transition.
SaaS growth leaders cite vendor coordination as consuming a large chunk of their strategic time. This coordination overhead causes disconnected customer experiences and wastes budget on redundant tools.
At Understory, we've developed this exact stack for B2B SaaS companies needing coordinated multi-channel campaigns with lean teams. Instead of managing dozens of vendor relationships and struggling with fragmented data, you get a coordinated growth system that eliminates context switching and delivers consistent buyer experiences.
We coordinate your complete growth system using these specialized tools connected through Clay as the central hub, supported by expert execution across paid media management, GTM engineering, and creative services.
Book a strategy call to discuss how our GTM tech stack can reduce vendor management overhead for your SaaS growth team.
Catch up on our Understory Unfiltered episode where Harris Kenny reveals how OutboundSync recovered a $400,000 Porsche deal and why agency partnerships beat direct sales for GTM.
Catch up on our Understory Unfiltered episode where Robert Yuen shares how he went from sleeping on an office air mattress to building a 100-person SaaS company serving architects.
