What's really going on

You're not chasing volume. You're chasing a small set of mid-market accounts through a long, prep-heavy cycle: warm+cold email, onsite, pilot, contract. That's a data-model problem, not a sequencer problem. The CRM's real job here is to be the live record of every touch, tied to your Notion context, so nobody walks into an onsite cold. Sequencing is a side dish.

What to do instead

1. Attio Plus (~$29–$35/seat/mo billed annually — check pricing) — modern CRM with a native Slack app so you can ask Attio anything, get pipeline updates, and trigger follow-up workflows from a DM or channel mention, and a native Notion app that keeps your pages and databases in sync with the CRM — spinning up a project page when a deal moves, logging call notes onto an existing page. Free up to 3 seats to test with zero commitment.
2. Attio Pro (~$69–$79/seat/mo — check pricing) — same product, adds Call Intelligence, advanced enrichment, and email sequencing. Skip until you know your real send volume.
3. Granola on Business (~$14/user/mo) — call notes tool with native integrations to Slack, Notion, HubSpot, Affinity, and Attio. Kills manual note-writing before every follow-up.

Today: open Attio Free, import your top 30 target accounts, connect Slack, and @attio in a channel to summarize one account. If the answer's useful, you have your CRM.

What you're being oversold

Salesforce + Outreach is the reflex pitch for "mid-market outbound," but the catalog is blunt: those tools are for 20+ person outbound sales orgs running cold sequences at scale and solve a prospecting problem you don't have. HubSpot Sales Hub Professional runs around $100 per month per Sales seat plus onboarding and buries you in features you won't touch. Every week without a shared account view is another onsite where two of you show up unaligned on what was already said.

When to revisit this

When one seller sends more than ~500 outbound touches a month, or you hire a second SDR.

The part worth getting right

The fork is your real email volume per seller. If each seller sends a few hundred touches a month, Attio Plus with manual sending covers you and you never buy a sequencer. If you're closer to a thousand a month per person — cold-heavy, template-driven — Attio's built-in sending will feel thin, and you're better off pairing Plus with a dedicated sender (Instantly, Smartlead) than jumping to Pro on faith. Pick wrong and you either overpay from month one or bolt on an outbound tool six months in with half your sequences already living in the wrong place.