You have a marketing engineer starting, or already on the payroll. Sales says the leads are bad, nobody can say which of this month’s signups deserved a call, and at day 90 the CEO will ask what the hire built. Most plans for that quarter answer by counting what ships: agents, automations, a demo.
This plan lays the quarter out as three stages, each judged by what it leaves for the next, and says which stage is allowed to run long. Plan it in months if the board wants months, and move to the next stage only when the gate is met. Ours ran long on the record and fast on the agents, which is the order to expect.
| Stage | What it leaves behind | The gate to the next | Our own clock |
|---|---|---|---|
| Month one: the record | One record the agents read, outcomes defined and signed by sales, a list of what each source misses | Every source audited, its real misses fixed | Nine weeks, two passes |
| Month two: one agent, one job | A written job, every output to a buyer approved, a log of edits and questions | A number agreed before the build, real history replayed first | Live the day after the audit |
| Month three: the read | The number read on real output, the agent’s questions sorted | The questions name the next build, or it is back to the record | Second build a week later |
Empact Partners builds these systems for partners and for its own sales. We are a go-to-market consultancy, six years old, and our consultants sit inside the marketing teams of the B2B software companies we work with. Building the agents those teams run on, each directed by a named consultant, is what we call marketing engineering.
The first jobs are almost always revenue operations (RevOps) work, the plumbing that routes a lead to the right person, follows it up and reports what became of it. The evidence here is our own reply and follow-up system, built for our outbound between August and October 2026, and agents we run inside partners’ teams.
Month One Builds The Record Every Agent Will Read
An agent reads whatever record it is given. If marketing and sales disagree about which signups were worth a call, an agent built on that record does not settle the argument. It automates one side of it, faster than anyone can check.
So month one ships the record, and the first thing written into it is the definition of an outcome: what counts as a meeting held, an opportunity, a deal won. The person who owns sales signs it. Without that signature the record is marketing’s side of the argument, better formatted.
Then the record has to keep apart whatever changes the next action. Most records blur exactly the distinction a follow-up depends on, and a pricing request ends up filed beside a whitepaper download.
“Turns out a content download and someone asking for pricing are wildly different levels of intent, but our sequences treated them the same.” — r/startups, Mar 2026
When we rebuilt our own outbound record in August 2026, before restarting anything, it held 75 campaigns over 12.5 months, every reply classified and every closed deal traced back to the campaign that started it. It settled our version of the argument. Most replies were warm, and 264 companies had replied and never reached anyone’s pipeline.
In our case the record blamed the follow-up. In yours the record may say the leads really are bad. Either answer is worth more than the argument, and the record is the first of four things month one leaves behind.
One agent belongs in month one, as long as it only reads and routes. Ours went live the day after the record: it classified each new reply and sent it to its owner as a card in Slack, and it never wrote to a prospect or to the record. That is the same job as routing a new signup to the right person.
The sorting agent ran against a written measure from its first day. After any change to how it classifies, a person re-reads 25 random replies it sorted, the target is 85% agreement, and every result goes in a log with its date. The first re-read, of 54 replies, came back at 89%. The habit matters more than the number.
Let The Record Run Long, Then Audit Every Source
The August record settled the argument. It was still not a record an agent should write to, because it lived beside our old pipeline board, and a board has no opinion about evidence: a deal sits in whichever column somebody dragged it to.
On 29 September we replaced the board with a CRM that moves a stage only on evidence. A reply opens a lead, a held call makes it a meeting, and a won deal needs two separate pieces of proof.
Three weeks later we audited every source the CRM read for what it missed. Of 147 companies that had sent a human reply to our campaigns, 91 were in the CRM, and most of the rest belonged outside it by rule. The real misses were the kind no dashboard shows:
We could replace the board because it was ours. Inside a partner, the record usually sits beside the CRM sales owns, as a read-only view the agents query, and that is where a new marketing engineer should put theirs. Nobody in month one has the standing to rip out a CRM, and nothing in this plan needs it.
That audit is the gate out of month one, and it is the one teams skip, because a record looks done the day the import finishes. Ours took nine weeks and two passes. The drafting agent and the build it asked for took a week. If your month one runs long, let it: it is the cheapest overrun of the quarter.
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Month Two Puts One Agent On One Job, And Every Draft Waits For A Yes
Once the record exists, it shows where the work leaks, and that leak is the first job. Ours was replies and follow-ups nobody answered. The drafting agent went live on 23 October, the day after the audit, and nothing it wrote could leave the building: every draft waited in the company’s thread for my go.
Before the first live draft we replayed the previous ten days of real replies through it, with nothing posted and nothing sent. It produced eight drafts and two faults no gate had caught: an empty draft for a reply that needed no answer, and a draft promising an attachment that did not exist. Both were fixed the same day.
Two design choices carry the rest of the quarter. Approve every output that reaches a buyer and sample the ones that only sort or route, since nobody approves a thousand signups a month. Build the agent to ask when it does not know, and keep what it asked. Both go into the written job.
Empact Partners starts every marketing engineering build for a partner from that written job. We audit the work the team repeats each week, give one agent one job, name the consultant who answers for it, and fix its number before anything is built. When the job is routing, follow-up or reporting, that is our RevOps work.
What people running these agents say on Reddit
“Since I am still gaining trust with the tool, I do manual reviews once the agent is done. I can access all the drafted emails in a single view and approve them with one click.” — r/SaaS, Mar 2026
“When 45 agents are taking actions, the audit trail question becomes: which agent did what, under whose authority, and who is accountable if something goes wrong?” — r/SaaS, Mar 2026
Approval in one view is month two working as designed. Which agent did what, on whose authority, is the question that gets harder with every agent added, which is why the second one has to earn its place.
Month Three Reads The Result, Not The Run Log
Approval catches a bad draft. It cannot tell you whether the job is getting done, and neither can the agent’s own log. A B2B software partner’s prospecting agent ran on a schedule for months and logged every batch as a success. It had saved nothing new since spring.
A column it wrote to did not exist, so every find was thrown away and counted as nothing found. Nobody had written down what the agent was for, so nothing it logged could look wrong. When we reopened it in October, the first thing we wrote was the measure: new prospects arrive every week, and nothing found is ever lost.
Within three days the agent checked every find against the partner’s CRM by domain, and its finds landed on a tab of the reporting panel we built for the partner, where their own team reads them. Month three reads three things, and the run log is none of them.
| What to read | Where it comes from | What it decides |
|---|---|---|
| The number agreed before the build | A sample of real output, checked by a person against the record | Whether the job is getting done |
| The approval log | Every go, edit and refusal, by type of output | Where checks can get lighter |
| The agent’s questions | Everything it asked before it could finish | What the second agent does |
We count clean approvals, a go with no edit, for each type of reply, and when a type reaches ten I decide whether it may send on its own. Eleven days in, no type has reached ten. The agent still sends nothing without a person, which is where an agent in its second week belongs.
Our drafting agent is too young for a verdict on its number. Its questions are not. They were the most useful thing it produced in its first week.
The First Agent’s Questions Are The Second Agent’s Spec
On its first run the drafting agent asked 111 questions on 33 drafts, most of them decisions nobody had written down yet. Read again, 20 of the 33 drafts carried the same question in different words: should we build the report first and send it attached?
A week later, on 30 October, that build went live. An interested reply or a question about price now gets both of our reports built and attached before the answer is drafted. Nobody had to invent the second agent. The first one had asked for it twenty times on its first afternoon.
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The usual advice holds any second system until the first has run a full quarter. That is right when the second system is an idea from a meeting. It is wrong when the first agent’s log asks for it twenty times, because by then the people approving drafts are doing the second agent’s job by hand, every day.
If the questions ask about facts instead (which company this is, which price stands, who owns the thread), they name the record, and month three goes back to month one. That is the record telling you where it is still wrong, which is cheaper to hear in month three than in month nine.
Day 90 Should End With Three Answers The CEO Can Check
The CEO’s question at day 90 then has an answer in three parts:
Two parts of this plan cost nothing and can start today. Write down the number the first agent will answer to, with its value now, and have whoever owns sales sign the definitions behind it. Then list every source your pipeline reads and what each one misses. Most teams cannot finish that list in a day, which is the first finding.
A day cannot rebuild a record until it survives an audit, keep an agent on approval for as long as its log says, or read that log every week for a quarter. That part is the work Empact Partners runs inside partners’ teams, with a senior consultant in their own channels, every agent answering to a named person, and a horizon of quarters.
If your marketing engineer starts this quarter and nobody has written down what day 90 should show, pick a time on my calendar, and we will find out together whether we are the right people to build it with you.
