As the new year starts it is a great time to examine your sales stack. Here at VA Partners we try new tools frequently looking for the best fit for ourselves and clients. This year was the same, as we moved off some tools and added others. There are a few solutions in our sales stack that we have used for years to go along with the new ones. As we head into 2026 here is the sales stack we are using.
CRM
We have used HubSpot for over a decade and continue to use it ourselves and recommend it to our clients. HubSpot has become a little less start-up friendly with fewer options in the free packages, but there is a lot of value even in the first paid level. We value its ease of use, robust feature set, and the quality training and support provided. The marketing tools are also great and we use the email marketing engine ourselves and with a number of our clients.
I use LinkedIn everyday and LinkedIn Sales Navigator almost every day. LinkedIn is our key social media platform. I make connections, share content, and use it as a great source of sales and industry knowledge. Even with AI we still use LinkedIn Sales Navigator for account based research. It is a great solution for researching and selling to larger accounts.
AI
We have really been embracing AI tools over the last two years, with our most used tool being ChatGPT. The use cases include account based research, helping with messaging, and research on competitors products. Some of our team members do use Perplexity for the same use cases as ChatGPT. One thing that Perplexity and ChatGPT are not great at is, identifying prospects and their contact details. We have been using Knockd for researching contacts at small and medium businesses. It goes out on a daily basis and finds new contacts with associated emails and telephone numbers. (Note that this is also a new client of VA Partners)
Other Research
We use a number of other sales research tools to support our outreach efforts. For most of these tools we have paid versions.
- Apollo.io: This is a great research tool for emails and phone numbers.
- Wiza : It is used to create lists with LinkedIn sales navigator. It pulls in data from LinkedIn and works out emails and creates a CSV file that can be loaded into your CRM.
- Hunter.io : This is a great tool to spot check emails when you are stuck.
If you have questions on our sales stack or need some help with yours please reach out and connect with me .
