17 Tools To Make You More Productive In GTM

How I currently use, and see others, using the tons of tools out there in 2025

Chris Balestras
February 06, 2025

I’ve always been super interested in the tools that people use in their day-to-day work.

Below, I’ll outline the 17 tools I use to help be more productive in startups GTM.

Absolute game-changer - truly don’t know what I’d do without it in my day-to-day in sales, this blog, or Slope. You’d have to rip this from my cold, dead hands - the truest sense of PMF
I am a stickler for good branding, and Superhuman is up there with the likes of Apple, Equinox, etc. - the UI feels magical
Speeds up your day because every task you need to do can be done on the keyboard (shoutout to my consulting tenure and banking friends - the mouse-shaming has paid off a little)
The scheduled send feature is great, along with the “remind me” feature to have emails pop up
I like this a lot better than Fyxer because I don’t like the UI of Outlook or Gmail
Check out this video channel on how to use, and this link here for 1 month free

Another game changer - taking notes manually just isn’t happening anymore
Why is this different? It takes notes for you without the note-taker bot being present (which freaks people out)
- For customer meetings, you’ll need to know the consent laws here
However, my famous use case is for when I am working internally - specifically with people who are super smart but they’re hard to understand (for talking too fast, for example)
- I also like that it gives me air cover for things I may have missed
Take the notes from Granola —> Claude to speed up productivity - it helps get notes to emails, from like 0% —> 98% insanely fast

Honestly, I don’t totally understand the huge productivity saver here
The UI is a lot cleaner than Chrome, though; it feels like the Superhuman but for the Browser (aesthetically)
Hoping that there are dividends here as an early adopter, especially if a company deliberately decided to call them “The Browser Company.”

I have been a huge fan of Cron since 2022, and it hasn’t changed much since the Notion acquisition
I'm a huge fan of the UI in Notion, so think of their calendar the same way
Similar to Superhuman, it can use email shortcuts and combine multiple calendars into one view
Anything to get me out of Outlook or Gmail UI is a godsend

A lot of meetings don’t need to happen, and async communication is so much more productive, like 96% of the time
We speak faster than we write, and if I’m sharing a few screens in Arc, then I’ll want to show this in a video and send over the Loom
Can add this as a keyboard shortcut to fire up a Loom
A little hack here is that the free tier only allows 25 videos, so if you don’t need these to stay active for long, you can keep deleting them and get this for free
Tool under consideration: SendSpark -it’s like Loom for sales and has a Clay integration, so this might be something I move off of shortly

Little unknown fact - I was the sports editor of my high school newspaper. To say my grammar is a little rusty is an understatement
I have Grammarly sit on everything on my laptop (browser, desktop apps, email, etc.) to help make sure I’m not using the wrong you’re/your
I’ve been using this for a while now, and I’m sure other tools might start offering this for free with these AI tools, but for now, I am happy with it

This is for more of the business use cases
In GTM/startups, most are still using Gong, which is commonly known as the meeting recorder for sales (however, it’s super expensive, and I figure they must be facing a ton of churn risk with these cheaper tools out there)
Fathom is free and is great for situations where the person I am chatting with is OK with a bot being in the meeting (as mentioned, some people I’ve worked with don’t love it, albeit they’re usually not in tech, so it’s rare)
All of these tools are becoming commoditized and do the same thing, tbh

Well worth the price - this sits next to me all day. I probably should have had this higher up the list
Claude, by far, is the best: “Take my raw transcript from Gong and write me a concise follow-up email.” It truly gets you from 0 —> 98% in the way a normal human would write it (ChatGPT isn’t as great here, IMO)
When I was taking CS50x, Claude was amazing as a coding co-pilot (although Cursor and Windsurf are taking the market for a tool in the IDE, and agents like Replit are doing all of this for you)

I have PTSD from PowerPoint as a consultant (see #5 - and generally despise the UI from any Microsoft product, Yikes)
Pitch is cleaner and more modern. However, I have used these AI tools like Gamma (put in text, and it makes the deck for you), and they’re great too

Like many others, I have replaced Google searches with just using Perplexity. It’s incredible, both their app and APIs
It now integrates with Crunchbase and DeepSeek

I love Clay; I wrote about it all in an earlier GTMBA article here
I owe the GTMBA community a few upcoming videos of how I’ve used it; that’s coming soon. It is just a game-changer tool for GTM
I mostly use the PhantomBuster and LGM integrations on the left and right hand side of the Clay equation (data in and data out)

Tool under consideration: currently playing around with Octave as well for messaging; more to come there

I’d recommend using an intent/signal-based platform like CommonRoom or Koala to help shake the warm lead tree or better understand your PLG metrics
Helps to identify website visitors, activity in GitHub repos, LinkedIn mentions, etc. - an awesome tool to have next to Clay

Outreach/Salesloft is so mid-2010s
LGM is great for multi-channel campaigns (LI & email), where HeyReach is great for LinkedIn - both are modern and sync well into Clay

LinkedIn notoriously does not place nice with other tools in scraping their data
Clay does not have a great “people” pull (“find me engineers at X Company” - they’d return only partially, and it wouldn’t be super accurate)
- LI is the best source of truth, so PhantonBuster does a good job of scraping leads from an LI search and piping it into Clay - it’s magical

Shoutout to the bloggers at Clay for showing me this
The photo at the beginning of the article is courtesy of Napkin - it takes text and creates engaging photos for you, which is great for blogs (I am not super creative to be able to create on my own

The default dictation on the MacBook is meh
I speak like 3x faster than I type, so this is great for a lot of my use cases (speaking into Claude —> it writing something for me)

This feels meta
I have seen the big debate about Substack vs. Beehiiv and would like to know if/when it makes sense to migrate GTMBA to either (or use both).

Would be curious which tools I am missing/if there are better ones out there!

or to participate.