The productivity stack
My Stack for Running DemandLoops & Delivering Client Results
đ Hi, itâs Kaylee Edmondson and welcome to Looped In, my newsletter exploring demand gen and growth frameworks in B2B SaaS. If youâre one of the 23 people that have subscribed since last Sunday, hello! So glad youâre hereâyouâve just joined 2k+ marketers who read Looped In every Sunday.
I got called out last week. Hard.
A CMO I was working with looked at my screen during a strategy session and said, "Wait, that's it? That's your whole tech stack?" She seemed genuinely confused. "I thought consultants used like 50 different tools."
Well, I used to. My Notion workspace has a graveyard page titled "Tools I've Tried" with 73 entries. Seventy-three. Each one promised to be a game-changer. Most lasted about 3 weeks before I realized they were solving problems I, or my clients, didn't actually have. Or were just too early-stage for me to actually see gains from using them.
I now run a 6-figure demand gen consultancy using a pretty simple stack:
Stack 1: The 11 tools that power DemandLoops (my business operations)
Stack 2: The 4 tools I implement most often inside client environments
This isn't about being minimalist for the sake of it. It's about the fact that most marketing tool proliferation actually makes you slower, not faster. There, I said it.
The Real Cost of Shiny Object Syndrome
Let me paint you a picture from 18 months ago. I had:
3 different AI writing assistants (because surely one was better for emails, another for blog posts, another for social)
2 separate scheduling tools (one for external meetings, one for internal planning)
4 different research platforms (company data, contact enrichment, intent signals, competitive intel)
6 automation tools because each one handled a "unique" use case
Truth be told, I spent more time context-switching between tools than I did actually thinking strategically about client problems. Every new tool added cognitive overheadâanother login, another interface to remember, another integration to maintain.
The breaking point came when I realized I was spending 40 minutes every morning just checking different dashboards to figure out what needed my attention. I was over it.
Stack 1: The DemandLoops Operating System (11 Tools)
These are the tools that keep my business running efficiently while managing 6+ client engagements simultaneously.
Core Business Operations (3 tools)
Notion: My second brain for everything. Client notes, frameworks, content planning, knowledge base, and strategic thinking. Every piece of intellectual property lives here, organized in a way that lets me quickly context-switch between clients without losing momentum. Notion AI has been helpful to create shortcuts for what used to be manual and repetitive tasks, and Notion Agents are early (just launched) but already proving to be quite sticky.
Monday.com: Project timelines, resource planning, deliverable tracking, and capacity management across all client engagements. The visual table views keep me sane when juggling multiple project phases simultaneously. And the automations ensure Iâm not rebuilding the same project over again when I start with new clients.
Mercury: Invoicing automation, expense tracking, and payment processing. The automated recurring billing means I spend zero mental energy on finance admin.
Intelligence & Research (1 tool)
Clay: My secret weapon for so many things, honestly. I keep my DemandLoops database in tact and up to date this way. I can use Clay to research future clients and gain market intelligence in their respective industries. The list goes onâŠ
Communication & Content (7 tools)
Loom: Async video for client updates, strategy walkthroughs, and content creation. I record 20+ Looms per week because they're faster than email or Slack and create better alignment than text.
Willow Voice: Voice-to-text transcription that handles technical marketing jargon correctly. I use this for rapid content creation, prompting, and nearly anything else that saves me from typing.
Readwise: Research organization and knowledge capture. Everything I save while working on client projects gets automatically organized and surfaces relevant insights across engagements. I use the CODE method for digital filing. Saved my life.
Fathom: Joins every client call and automatically generates action items and summaries. This saves me 2+ hours per week of post-meeting admin and ensures nothing falls through the cracks.
Claude & ChatGPT: My strategic thinking partners. Claude for long-form framework development and client deliverables, ChatGPT for research synthesis and competitive analysis. I treat them as thought partners, not replacement for strategic thinking. E.g. I really like to have them argue my thoughts. Give me a contrarian argument so I can think through my objection handling and clarify my perspective.
Chili Piper: Meeting scheduling that handles complex routing logic. Even as a solopreneur, the ability to automatically route different types of meetings (discovery calls vs. existing clients vs. follow-ups) makes my life so much easier.
Why This Stack Works for Consulting
The key insight: every tool serves multiple functions and integrates seamlessly with the others. Notion connects to Clay for research â Fathom recordings get summarized into Notion â Action items flow into Monday.com â Follow-ups get scheduled through Chili Piper.
There's no data duplication or context switching. Everything flows together.
Stack 2: The Client Implementation Toolkit (4 Tools)
These are the tools I implement and optimize inside client organizations. The selection depends on existing infrastructure, but these are my go-to recommendations that consistently deliver results.
HubSpot: The marketing automation backbone for 80% of my client work. I can set up scoring, lifecycle marketing, and account-based workflows quickly because I know every feature intimately. The integration ecosystem is unmatched.
Clay (again): Account enrichment, intent signals, competitive monitoring, and workflow orchestration for clients. Clay often replaces 4-6 existing tools in a client's stack while delivering better results through connected workflows.
AirOps: Content research and creation workflows, especially valuable when helping clients break into new markets or develop thought leadership in complex technical areas.
Vector: Contact-level visitor identification and intent tracking that moves clients beyond traditional ABM to target actual individuals, not just accounts. I use it to de-anonymize website visitors and build dynamic contact audiences for precision ad targetingâfinally solving the âghost problemâ where prospects research but never convert.
Why These Tools Win in Client Environments
The selection criteria for client tools is different from my personal stack:
Adoption Speed: Teams need to be productive quickly, not learn complex new interfaces
Integration Capability: Must work with existing client infrastructure
Scalability: Needs to grow with the team without breaking
Training Simplicity: I can't spend weeks teaching teams new platforms
Each of these tools can be implemented and showing value within 2-3 weeks, which is crucial for consulting engagements.
What I Deliberately Don't Use (And Why)
Separate social media scheduling platforms: Clay handles social monitoring, and authentic engagement beats automation volume. IMO.
Specialized ABM platforms: HubSpot + Clay orchestration consistently outperforms $200K ABM suites in my experience.
Multiple AI writing tools: Claude + ChatGPT cover 95% of use cases. More options just create decision paralysis.
Enterprise video editing suites: Loom + basic editing covers all practical needs without the complexity overhead. And my use case is only for internal comms.
The best marketing technology approach is one that serves both your operational efficiency and your strategic delivery, not the one with the most impressive feature lists you'll never fully utilize.
Here's to growth (with fewer tools),
Kaylee â