How to choose a go-to-market tool when you are the whole team

Almost every tool in this category is good at something. The reason founders still buy the wrong one is that they compare feature lists, and a feature list cannot tell you which problem you actually have. So start with the problem.

The first question is whether your bottleneck is the list or the timing. If you cannot name fifty companies you would happily sell to, your problem is the list, and you want an enrichment or database product. If you can name them and never get round to writing, your problem is timing, and a bigger database will not help. Almost nobody answers this honestly, because admitting the second one feels like admitting you are disorganised. It is not; it is the normal condition of running a company.

The second is whether you have an audience to read signal from. Community intelligence products are strong when there is a community, product usage or a following to mine, and close to inert when there is not. This is a factual question about your own company, and answering it wrong costs more than any other mistake on this list because the tools involved are expensive.

The third is what you will actually maintain. A tool that needs configuring every week gets configured for three weeks. If you are the whole team, the product that survives is the one that produces something useful when you have not touched it in a fortnight, and that is a different property from being powerful.

The fourth is the total bill, not the subscription. A cheaper product that needs a paid sending tool and a paid enrichment tool is not cheaper. Write down every subscription a working setup requires before comparing anything, and do it for each option rather than only the one you are sceptical about.

The question comparison tables never ask is what happens when you stop. Some of these tools leave you with a list, a set of drafts and a record of what worked. Others leave you with nothing, because the value lived in their platform. That matters more than any feature, and it is answerable in ten minutes by trying to export.

Finally: be suspicious of any comparison, including ours, where one column is all ticks. Every product here loses at something, and a table that does not say where is telling you about its author rather than about the tools.