Erin Balsa

Content Marketing Consultant and Writer 

I build and execute content marketing strategies for sales-led B2B SaaS startups that sell complex, enterprise-ready solutions.

Erin enjoys B2B content marketing, keeping the Halloween spirit alive year-round, and talking about herself in the third person. 

No but really ... 

I've been working in content since 2011 when I landed my first job as an editor. Since then, I've worn a bunch of hats like:

- Content marketing agency leader
- Inc. 5000 B2B SaaS marketing director
- Freelance content strategist, writer, and editor

Over the years, I've written for a bunch of brands you probably know including:

- HubSpot
- Drift
- G2
- Intuit
- And a Fortune 100 that shall not be named

These days, I help marketing teams at B2B SaaS companies (Series A-C) survey a representative sample of their ICP and write a 𝒃𝒆𝒍𝒊𝒆𝒗𝒂𝒃𝒍𝒆 original research report that positions their brand as a credible authority — to secure press mentions and close enterprise deals.

If you're ready to publish research that builds trust instead of skepticism, let's chat. And if you just want to connect with a fellow marketing nerd who decorates for Halloween in July, I'm here for that too.

Hausofbold.com

Content Marketing Consultant

I build and execute content marketing strategies for sales-led B2B SaaS startups that sell complex, enterprise-ready solutions. 

Unlike some strategists and agencies, I don't hand you a content strategy and say, "Best of luck!" I ensure your success by helping across four buckets:

▶ People 
▶ Process 
▶ Strategy
▶ Execution 

Learn more and read client testimonials at: hausofbold.com

It's been 3 years since I joined Navattic as a marketing advisor.

In celebration,  I'm pressing buttons on my keyboard! 

(Look at me go.) 

I remember reaching out to Devin Reed and asking him how he got into advising. A simple question — but putting my intention out into the world changed things for me. 

Next day, Natalie Marcotullio reached out ... and the rest is history!

I'm grateful to have found such a wonderful long-term partner. Amazing people, amazing product, and super customer-obsessed. What's not to love?

👉  If your B2B needs regular guidance from a content/brand leader with deep experience in content strategy, original research, and thought leadership, drop me a note.

B2B Content Marketing Leader & Advisor | Creating Data-Backed Narratives That Make Selling Easier

I opened my LinkedIn notifications to see that someone left me a mean comment. 

My blood instantly started to boil. 

"Your research report reads like a sales brochure — you just don't know it yet."

𝘞𝘰𝘸. 𝘙𝘶𝘥𝘦! 𝘞𝘩𝘰 𝘩𝘢𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘶𝘥𝘢𝘤𝘪𝘵𝘺 𝘵𝘰 𝘴𝘢𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘢𝘣𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘮𝘦?!

Oh. 

It was me.
I posted that.
A few days ago. 

This is what happens when you take the advice to "lead with a spicy hook." It comes back to haunt you every time you open your notifications. 😂

It’s 9:07am and we have already:

- eaten breakfast, twice
- built a haunted house out of Picasso tiles 
- made cookies with Play-Doh 
- put ghost stickers on a sheet of paper 
- colored (but not on the wall this time)
- played in 3 feet of snow 

Ah, what other joys will the day bring? 

I know one thing it won’t bring: the ability to work in silence. 

Those days are long gone. 🙃

No alternative text description for this image

If your buyers are skeptical — and they are — would your research pass the sniff test or raise red flags? 🚩 

Most B2B research falls into one of four categories based on:

Rigor of methodology (competence)
Transparency of reporting (integrity)

Here’s a quick gut-check:

Is your methodology rigorous or sloppy?

Q: Was your sample size large enough to support the claims you made?
Q: Was your sample actually representative of your target market?
Q: Was the person who designed the survey and handled the data properly trained?
Q: Did you do data quality checks to weed out bots and people speeding through for rewards?
Q: Did your screener questions weed out respondents who lacked relevant, recent experience?
Q: Were your survey questions clearly worded, non-leading, and free from bias?
Q: Did you run cross-tabulations to analyze relationships within the data?
Q: Did you clearly disclose your confidence levels, margin of error, and study limitations?

Score it like this:
1 point for every “yes”
Higher score = higher rigor

Is your reporting transparent or selective?

Q: Did you set out to test a hypothesis rather than go digging for interesting stats after the fact?
Q: Did you report on the findings that challenged your assumptions — and not just the ones that supported them?
Q: Did you publish your survey questions verbatim instead of paraphrasing them?
Q: Did you distinguish between correlation and causation?
Q: Did you invite external experts to interpret your findings?
Q: Did you acknowledge limitations and uncertainties in your data?
Q: Did you keep your analysis neutral without turning it into a sales brochure?
Q: Did you show the full distribution of responses instead of only highlighting favorable results?

Score it like this:
1 point for every “yes”
Higher score = higher transparency 

Tally up your answers and see where you're at: 

High rigor + high transparency = Believable Research 
High rigor + low transparency = “Trust us” research
Low rigor + high transparency = Amateur research
Low rigor + low transparency = Hogwash research

Was this helpful?

WHAT I DO NOW

I'm a Partner at Aragon Holdings, where I lead M&A — sourcing, evaluating, and acquiring profitable, founder-led agencies in the $500K–$3M revenue range.

We're not financial sponsors chasing quick exits. We acquire agencies to own and operate them over the long term, partnering with founders who want liquidity, reduced risk, or a path to succession without dismantling what they've built.

Every deal is structured around founder goals — full exit, partial liquidity, equity rollover, or operating partnership. I work directly with founders from first conversation through close.

WHAT I'VE BUILT

I'm also Co-Founder of Marketers in Demand, the operating platform behind Aragon's portfolio of B2B marketing agencies. That portfolio now includes a collection of agencies focused on helping small marketing teams at technology companies do more with less.

Before that, I co-founded 522 Productions and scaled it to the Inc. 500 before exiting. My early career was in consulting at Oracle, IBM, and PwC. I hold an MBA from the University of Georgia.

I'm a 3x Inc. 5000 agency owner and operator. 

IF YOU'RE AN AGENCY FOUNDER

If you're running a profitable agency and thinking about what's next — whether that's growth, partnership, or an eventual exit — I'm always open to a confidential conversation. No pressure, no pitch. Just a real discussion about whether there's a fit.

Hit me up here on LinkedIn or send a note to tristan.pelligrino@aragon-holdings.com

Tristan Pelligrino

The hardest part of running an agency right now isn't finding talent. It's building a team that keeps up with how fast everything moves.

In the last two weeks alone:

→ Perplexity launched its "computer" product
→ OpenAI acquired OpenClaw
→ Claude rolled out cross-platform CoWork (both Mac and Windows)
→ Google dropped new Gemini capabilities and a bunch of other products (they do a bad job marketing their stuff)

That's one cycle. There will be another next week. And another after that.

Most agency owners I talk to feel this pressure but haven't changed how they hire or how they build culture around it.

They're still screening for skills that existed 18 months ago. They're still assuming training programs alone will close the gap.

Here's what I've learned: You can teach tools, but you can't train curiosity.

The people who thrive in this environment aren't waiting for a lunch-and-learn. They're testing new tools in the evening or on a weekend because they can't help themselves. 

They're reading release notes for fun. They're building workflows just to see what's possible.

This isn't about expecting unpaid work. And it's not a knock on anyone doing solid work today. It's about recognizing that the gap between "keeping up" and "falling behind" is now measured in weeks, not years. And that's an environment thing as much as it's a people thing.

As a leader, that means two things:

First, create an environment where curiosity is rewarded, not just productivity. Give people time and space to experiment. Make it safe to test things that don't work.

Second, hire for it intentionally. Here's what I look for now:

→ Do they have a personal project where they're experimenting with new tools & technology?
→ Can they tell me about something they tested recently that didn't work?
→ Are they naturally pulled toward learning about this space?

The agencies that win the next few years will be the ones that built teams of learners, not just executors.

I've said it before, the best marketers I know are the ones who are the most curious.

Partner @ Aragon Holdings | Acquiring Founder-Led Agencies | 3x Inc. 5000 Entrepreneur | Co-Founder @ Marketers in Demand

The line between software company and agency is blurring. And most agency owners aren't really paying attention.

For 20 years, the model was clear:

→ Software companies sold tools
→ Agencies sold services to use those tools
→ Clients paid both and hoped the outcomes followed

What's emerging is something different. 

It's something discussed more heavily on X and in some communities I'm in → Software Enabled Agencies.

Old model: "Here's a seat license. Here's a retainer. Good luck."

New model: "Here's the outcome. We own the delivery. Pay for results."

I've seen the shift firsthand:

An agency used to charge $8K/month for paid media management. Separate from that, the client paid $2K/month for reporting tools, $500/month for project management software, and $1K/month for creative collaboration platforms.

Four invoices. Zero accountability alignment.

Now? Agencies are bundling the software into the service. They're not reselling tools—they're building proprietary systems that make their delivery faster, more transparent, and harder to replicate.

In some cases, this requires custom internal software/tools. In others, it requires building on top of existing platforms.

The client pays for one thing: the outcome.

Here's what I think actually matters:

The agencies that win in the next 4-5 years won't be the ones with the best talent OR the best tech stack.

They'll be the ones who take the most accountability for results.

When you own the outcome end-to-end—strategy, execution, reporting, optimization—you capture value that used to leak out to five different vendors.

Across our agencies, we're building toward this. Custom dashboards clients can't get elsewhere. Automated workflows that eliminate handoff delays. AI-assisted delivery that lets us do in hours what used to take days.

Not to cut costs. To own more of the value chain.

Here's the rule I use: If a software tool is critical to your delivery, you should either build it, white-label it, or integrate it so deeply that clients see it as YOUR capability—not a third-party dependency.

Software and services are converging. That's just where things are headed.

Agencies that figure this out will command premium pricing and sticky client relationships.

Agencies that don't will keep competing on hourly rates while software eats their margins from both sides.

Running a video production agency for over a decade was the hardest thing I've done as an operator. I wouldn't recommend it. But I'd do it again.

Here's the thing about video production: nothing is repeatable.

Every project is a custom build. Different crews. Different locations. Different timelines. Different client stakeholders with different schedules.

Then add the variables you can't control:

→ Weather pushes your shoot by three days
→ The CEO's calendar shifts and now your entire production schedule is blown
→ The location you scouted falls through 48 hours before call time
→ Equipment fails on set with 30 people standing around billing hourly

You're not running an agency. You're running a logistics company that also happens to make creative work.

I've seen agency owners in other verticals stress about a delayed client approval or a missed deadline. And I get it, those things matter.

But when you've had to reschedule/reroute a 15-person crew because of a blizzard, your definition of "problem" gets recalibrated.

Here's what a decade of video production actually taught me:

→ Contingency planning isn't optional—it's the job
→ Systems thinking matters more than talent
→ You can't scale chaos, so you build processes that absorb it
→ Client communication under pressure is a skill you develop or you fail

Would I recommend running a 100% project-based video production company? No.

The margins are brutal. The stress is constant. The unpredictability never stops.

But if you want a masterclass in agency operations, project management, and staying calm when everything breaks? There's no better training ground.

I don't run a company that shoots large television commercials anymore. Our teams don't travel like they used to.

But every system I've built, every contingency I plan for, every client fire drill I handle...it all traces back to those years of solving impossible problems on set.

We just shipped something I'm really excited about.

We built an AI-powered chat layer into our content operations platform that lets you have a conversation with your entire content library.

Not a keyword search. Not a filter. An actual conversation.

Ask it "What topics do we write about most?" and it queries your structured content data (categories, publish dates, custom attributes) and gives you a real breakdown. 

Ask it "What's our perspective on ABM?" and it searches semantically across every blog post, article, and document you've ever published to synthesize an answer grounded in your actual words.

You might be thinking "Google Drive has AI search now" or "Notion can do this." 

Here's why this is different:

Before you can ask smart questions, you need smart data. Our platform actually ingests your content. 

We pull in YouTube videos and transcribe them automatically. We read PDFs, parse web content, and break it all down into structured, searchable data. Then we automatically categorize and tag every piece based on your organization's custom content taxonomy. Not generic labels. Your categories, your attributes, your content structure.

That ingestion layer is what makes everything else possible. You're not searching filenames or skimming document headers. You're querying thousands of content chunks that have been broken down, embedded, and organized before you ever ask your first question.

The part I'm most proud of is the routing layer. Every question gets classified in real-time and the system decides the best way to answer it:

• Aggregate questions (counts, trends, timelines) hit your structured database directly
• Content questions (themes, strategies, perspectives) use vector similarity search across your embedded content library
• Complex questions use both

This matters because not every question should be answered the same way. "How many posts did we publish last quarter?" is a database query. 

"What unique angle do we bring to demand gen content?" requires reading everything you've ever written.

This wasn't a weekend project. It was weeks of building the ingestion pipeline, embedding infrastructure, chunking strategy, and retrieval tuning to get answers that actually reflect what's in the library. Not hallucinated summaries.

The vision: every piece of content your team creates becomes searchable institutional knowledge. Not buried in a Google Drive folder. Not lost in a CMS. Available in a conversation.

We have so much more on the product roadmap, excited to keep rolling things out to clients.

Most marketing teams organize content by format. Blog posts in one folder. Videos in another. Social in a spreadsheet somewhere.

Then six months in, someone asks: "What content do we have for enterprise buyers in the consideration stage?" And nobody can answer without digging through 200 files.

We hit this wall with our clients enough times that we rebuilt how we think about content organization from scratch. 

And the way we think about it doesn't start with technology or AI. It starts with structure.

Here's the framework we landed on:

Three layers. Each one answers a different question.

👉Content Types answer "what format is this?"

Blog post, case study, newsletter, video script. Straightforward. But this is where most teams stop — and it's the least useful layer for strategic decisions.

👉Categories answer "what do we want to be known for?"

These are your content pillars — the topics and themes that define your brand's authority. They're the strategic bets you're making about how your market should perceive you. Every piece of content should reinforce one of these pillars.

👉Custom Attributes answer "who is this for and where does it fit?"

Target ICP. Buying stage. Industry vertical. Product line. These are the fields unique to each client's business — the metadata that turns a content library into a searchable, filterable strategic asset.

Without all of these layers, you can't answer the questions that actually matter:

- "What do we have for mid-market buyers evaluating competitors?"
- "Where are the gaps in our consideration-stage content?"
- "Which ICP segments are we underserving?"

The other thing we did: we made AI categorize everything automatically on ingest. Every blog post, transcript, or uploaded document gets analyzed and tagged across all three layers without anyone manually filling out fields.

When you have no data integrity, then it doesn't really matter how many tools you build or workflows you roll out. You'll be working from bad data.

Content ops isn't about making more content. It's about knowing exactly what you have, what's working, and where the gaps are.

Sometimes agency founders wait too long to bring in outside help. Then they overcorrect and hire consultants for everything.

Both approaches cost you.

I talk to 5-10 agency owners a week, and this question comes up a lot: "Should I hire an advisor for this?"

There's no universal answer. But here's the framework I use after years of hiring (and sometimes wasting money on) external help:

Ask two questions:

1. Is this obstacle big enough to block a meaningful goal?
2. Can my team solve it fast enough to matter?

If the answer is yes to #1 and no to #2, bring in outside expertise.

That's it. That's the filter.

I've used external consultants for financing, messaging and positioning, software development, HR issues, and legal matters. Every single one accelerated something I couldn't have figured out quickly enough on my own.

The value isn't just expertise. It's perspective.

Your team is too close to the problem. They have context, but they also have blind spots. A good advisor sees patterns across dozens of similar situations. They know where the landmines are because they've watched other people step on them.

Here's what actually matters when evaluating whether to hire help:

→ Speed: Will this person get you to a solution 3-6 months faster than figuring it out internally?
→ Stakes: If you get this wrong, what's the cost? High stakes = outside perspective is worth it.
→ Repetition: Is this a one-time problem or something you'll face again? If it's recurring, build the capability internally. If it's a one-time obstacle, rent the expertise.

The mistake I see most often: owners treat advisor spend as a cost instead of a trade.

You're not paying $10K for advice. You're trading $10K for 4 months of time you would've spent stuck.

The agencies that scale aren't the ones who figure everything out themselves. They're the ones who know when their own expertise isn't enough—and move fast to fill the gap.

A lot of service businesses (agencies especially) run on duct tape.

Spreadsheets for tracking. Tribal knowledge for strategy. Manual reports that take hours. Deliverables built from scratch every quarter.

We decided to build something different.

Over the past year, we've been developing/refining/improving an internal operating system purpose-built for how a modern agency actually works. It has two core pillars:

Pulse — The Portfolio Command Center

Pulse gives leadership real-time visibility into every active contract across the portfolio. We have a collection of four agencies, so this helps aggregate data. It connects ClickUp, QuickBooks, and HubSpot into a single view and introduces a consistent "currency" that tracks what's been sold, delivered, and owed — down to the task level.

The key metric: points burden. Based on an internal points system, this metric tells us instantly whether a contract is on-track or off-track relative to billing.

No more guessing. No more stale spreadsheets. Management reports generate automatically with 90 days of delivery velocity, financial position, and AI-analyzed meeting sentiment per contract.

Compass — The AI Strategy Workspace

Compass is where strategy actually lives. Every contract gets a structured workspace that captures meetings, notes, competitive research, and deliverables — all connected through a knowledge base that compounds over time.

The real unlock: AI-powered context to drive key decisions. Compass assembles context from a client's entire history — past roadmaps, meeting transcripts, competitive intelligence, the agency's process library. This helps us craft deliverables at a much faster rate, with greater detail. Research reports. Strategic roadmaps. Channel-specific plans. Each one builds on the last quarter's work rather than starting from scratch.

When a strategist leaves, the knowledge stays. When a new quarter begins, the strategy evolves rather than resets.

Why does this matter?

Agencies sell expertise and execution. But most of the infrastructure for managing that work is generic tooling held together by manual processes. Pulse and Compass are our answer to what an agency operating system should actually look like — one that treats delivery tracking and strategic intelligence as the main driver.

We're not selling it. We built it because we needed it. And it's changed how we operate.

P.S. - screenshot below of one of the dashboards (taken from a presentation I gave last week to a group of agency owners)

Most agency M&A conversations go nowhere. And that's the problem.

The agency acquisition space is flooded with people who love talking about deals but never close them.

I've seen it from both sides—as a seller and now as someone who acquires agencies as my full-time focus.

Here's what actually happens:

A buyer reaches out. They're "very interested." You have three calls. You send financials. They ask follow-up questions. You answer them. Then silence. Or worse—they come back with an offer that reveals they never had the capital or means to get a deal done to begin with.

Meanwhile, you've spent 6-8 weeks on someone who was never going to close.

On the flip side, sellers do this too. They'll entertain conversations for months, get deep into diligence, sign an LOI—then get cold feet or reveal deal-breaking terms they knew about from day one.

Here's the rule I use: Qualify before you invest.

Before any serious negotiation—definitely before signing an LOI—verify three things:

→ Do they have the financial capability to close this deal?
→ Have they actually completed a transaction before?
→ Are they operating on a real timeline, or just "exploring"?

If you can't get clear answers to those questions, you're not in a deal. You're in a conversation that's burning your time.

Because once you sign an LOI, you're spending real money. Legal fees. Accounting. Diligence. Your own hours.

And if it falls apart? Those costs don't come back. You're restarting from zero—back to marketing the business, fielding new inquiries, rebuilding momentum.

I've seen founders lose 6+ months and $30K+ on deals that were never real.

The better approach:

Treat qualification like a gate, not a formality.

Ask direct questions early. Request proof of funds/financing before deep diligence. Check references on past deals.

The serious buyers and sellers won't be offended. They'll respect it.

The tire kickers will disappear. And that's exactly the point.

Most agency owners check their bank balance and call it financial management.

Then they're blindsided when cash gets tight or margins erode.

I've acquired and operated multiple agencies. The ones with real financial clarity aren't running complex dashboards or hiring fractional CFOs on day one.

They're following a simple cadence.

Here's the rule I use:

Daily: 5 minutes. Check cash balance, AR/AP, billings, collections, and sales activity (calls booked, proposals out, deals closed). No fancy graphics. Just context.

Weekly: Same metrics, plus a 13-week rolling cash forecast. This single report has saved more agencies from crisis than any P&L review. Cash problems don't surprise you when you're looking 13 weeks ahead.

Monthly: 1-2 hours of actual analysis. Compare actuals against budget, forecast, and prior periods. Ask three questions:

→ Are we hitting profitability goals?
→ Are we hitting growth targets?
→ Are we converting revenue to cash efficiently?

If the answer is no, the reporting tells you where to dig. Is it overhead creep? Production inefficiency? Customer acquisition cost? Working capital getting stuck in AR?

Quarterly: Zoom out. Are the fundamental choices—pricing, service mix, cost structure, growth investments—still right? This is strategic, not operational.

The agencies that struggle financially aren't usually bad at delivery. They're flying blind on the numbers until it's too late to course correct.

Simple and consistent beats complex and sporadic every time.

If you're running an agency without a 13-week cash forecast, start there. It takes 30 minutes to build and 5 minutes to update weekly.

That one habit separates agencies that scale from agencies that scramble.

Earlier this year I built a cash flow projection tool almost entirely with AI. I want to walk through exactly how it came together, because I think this is the future of how operators build internal tools.
 
The stack: Next.js (App Router) for the frontend. Supabase for auth, database, and row-level security. Recharts for data visualization. Vercel for deployment. Claude Code as the AI coding partner.
 
What it does: The app pulls in actual bank balances, then lets you map revenue and expense line items to specific weeks across a 26-week projection window. It calculates running balances, consolidates across multiple agencies, and renders everything in an interactive weekly grid and area chart.
 
The scenario engine is where it gets interesting.
 
Instead of cloning entire datasets for each scenario, I built a foundation + overlay model. Your base case is the foundation. The single source of truth. Overlay scenarios layer adjustments on top (new hires, lost clients, delayed payments) without duplicating data.
 
Changes to the foundation automatically ripple through every overlay. Negative line items serve as the override mechanism. Want to model losing a $10K/month client? Add a -$10K revenue entry in the overlay.
 
The weekly grid is a spreadsheet-style interface with inline editing, copy/paste support, drag-and-drop row ordering, and configurable row groups. Foundation rows appear as frozen (read-only) in overlay scenarios, with editable adjustment rows below a clear divider.
 
The dashboard shows all scenarios simultaneously on a single chart. The selected scenario highlighted in purple, others in gray. You can visually compare the cash impact of different decisions at a glance.
 
My takeaway: The moat for operators isn't going to be whether you can afford custom software. It's whether you know what to build. Domain expertise + AI tooling is a seriously powerful combination right now.
 
The app has been running across our agencies for months now. Happy to share more about the architecture or methodology if anyone is building something similar.

Most agencies can't answer a simple question: What is a contract?

I've audited dozens of agencies for acquisition. And one of the most common gaps I find isn't missing contracts—it's that nobody agrees on what a contract actually is.

Some teams count every email approval as a contract.
Others only count signed MSAs.
Most land somewhere in between, inconsistently.

This matters more than you think.

When you can't define what a contract is, you can't track revenue accurately. You can't forecast. You can't prove what was sold versus what was delivered. And when it's time to sell your agency, buyers will find the mess.

I spent years working federal government contracts before agency life. Say what you want about bureaucracy, but the feds know how to structure a contract.

Here's how I think about it. Every contract needs three things:

→ A unique ID that lives in one system of record
→ An original statement of work that defines scope, deliverables, and terms
→ A clear modification trail that links any changes back to the original

*Note - this follows along closely with how I built federal financial systems with purchase orders (POs) and modifications (MODs).

That's it. No unique ID? It's not a contract, it's a conversation. No original SOW? You're guessing at scope. No modification tracking? You have no idea what you actually owe the client.

The agencies that run clean on this aren't just easier to acquire. They deliver better, forecast tighter, and have fewer client disputes.

Your team needs to be trained on this. Your strategists, your PMs, your account leads—everyone touching client work should know exactly what constitutes a contract and where to find it.

If you're a $1M+ agency without a contract management system, then this will probably come to bite you before too long.

Agencies stay on the wrong CRM or PM platform for years because they're afraid of switching costs.

I get it. You've got years of data in HubSpot or Pipedrive or some Frankenstein custom project management setup. The thought of migrating feels like open-heart surgery.

But here's what I've learned after acquiring multiple agencies and inheriting several different types of CRM/PM configurations: 

The switching costs you're worried about are mostly fictional.

The real problem isn't the technology. It's that you haven't defined your data independently of the platform. You haven't broken down your business into components which can be transferred to other systems (and explained logically to someone outside of the agency).

Instead, you've built business logic inside the tool instead of building a framework you could take anywhere.

Think about your CRM. It breaks down into a handful of core components:

→ Contacts (the people)
→ Accounts (the companies)
→ Activities (emails, calls, meetings)
→ Stages (where they are in your pipeline or journey or engagement level)

Your project management data is similarly simple:

→ Contracts (the agreement)
→ Service types (what you're delivering)
→ Plans (when you're delivering it)
→ Processes (how you deliver it)
→ Engagements (the active work, tasks and deliverables)

That's it. Everything else is implementation detail.

When you define these components abstractly, switching from HubSpot to Pipedrive becomes a mapping exercise, not a business disruption.

You can move freely from ClickUp to Asana or whatever.

We've done this several times. The agencies that had cleaner data models migrated in days. The ones that let their CRM become a junk drawer? Weeks of cleanup.

Here's the rule I use: If you can't explain your data structure on a whiteboard without mentioning a software name, you're locked in.

The agencies that will have the most flexibility in the next few years aren't the ones on the "best" platform. They're the ones who built platform-independent thinking into how they operate.

This gives you flexibility to change out LLM models, plugin different agents, and take advantage of new technology.

Your tools should serve your business. Not the other way around.

We built our own marketing intelligence API.

Across our agencies at Marketers in Demand, we kept running into the same problem: every client engagement required the same types of deep research, audits, and strategic planning. 

But the sequence and emphasis always varied based on the client's needs.

So we built Master Marketer.

It's an API that lets us send in a payload of information about a client and their competitors and get back structured, ready-to-use output. It assembles competitive research, compiles SEO audits, constructs draft 90-day roadmaps based on our own process library/task list, crafts draft content plans,   and more.

Here's what makes it powerful for us:

It's modular. Each function does one thing well. A research report pulls from LinkedIn, YouTube, Moz, SpyFu, DataForSEO, and other live data sources — then synthesizes everything through AI into a structured document. An SEO audit crawls the site, converts on-page content to markdown, analyzes keyword gaps, evaluates backlink profiles, and checks AI search engine visibility. Each output is its own building block.

It's composable. Outputs chain together. Research feeds into a roadmap. The roadmap and an SEO audit feed into a content plan. We decide the sequence based on what matters most for a given client. Same core functions, different configurations.

It's consistent. Whether we're serving a SaaS startup or an enterprise B2B company, the underlying intelligence gathering and analysis follows the same rigorous process. The inputs change. The quality doesn't.

It's ours. We're not locked into someone else's workflow or limited by a platform's assumptions about what matters. We built it around what we know drives results for our clients — and we can extend it whenever we identify a new need. We can also test different data providers and APIs, there's no vendor lock in with the types of data we assemble.

The simplest way to think about it: fill out a form or send a payload, get back marketing intelligence you can actually use. No black box. No generic templates. Just structured output built on real data, shaped by how we actually do the work.

When you own the system, you stop adapting to tools and start building tools that adapt to you.

taplio

The Battle

Erin Balsa

Tristan Pelligrino

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreErin Balsa's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreTristan Pelligrino's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Erin Balsa

Tristan Pelligrino

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Erin Balsa's LinkedIn Performance

Performance ScoreTristan Pelligrino's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreErin Balsa's LinkedIn Performance