Resident Engineer · Sales & Marketing
One senior engineer, on fixed days every week, inside the systems you already run. Leads stop falling between tools, reporting stops being assembled by hand, and the CRM becomes something your team trusts. Each fix goes live with the hours measured before and after.
The first month
Week one
The audit and a measured backlog
Weeks two to four
First fix live in your tenant
Every month
One-page report: hours saved against baseline
Throughout
Everything delivered is monitored
Your leads, your CRM and your reporting, fixed one process at a time.
Each fix goes live with the hours measured before and after.
Sound familiar?
From commercial directors and heads of marketing. If three apply, this page is for you.
You are not unusual
92%
say qualified leads are regularly dropped each month.
37%
say leads get stuck between marketing tools and the CRM.
68%
say their reps spend three to ten hours a week on CRM upkeep.
From a survey of 404 sales and marketing managers at companies with 50 or more staff. The top requests were better integration across tools (51%), automated follow-up tasks (47%) and leads routed to the right person without manual work (41%).1
What a Resident Engineer is
A Resident Engineer is a senior DataCactus engineer who works inside your organisation on fixed days each week, with the people who do the work, and puts fixes into production rather than into a slide deck.
Large technology vendors now call this a forward deployed engineer and reserve it for their biggest customers.2 We do the same work, on the Microsoft platform you already pay for, for organisations of 50 to 1,000 staff, at a price that makes sense for one department.
1
Your engineer sits with the team, maps the processes that cost the most hours, and measures each one: hours per week, volume, how long things take, how often they go wrong. You get a prioritised backlog with a baseline against every item.
2
The engineer builds the first item in your tenant, tests it with your team, puts it live and records a short handover. Then the next one. A small fix ships every few weeks; a bigger one every four to six.
3
One page. What went live, hours saved against the baseline, what is next, one recommendation. You decide the order of the backlog; we advise.
4
Monitoring and fixes for every item delivered are included while the engagement runs.
What you get
Not included, in writing
Microsoft, Azure and AI model consumption (you pay Microsoft directly; we estimate it per backlog item). Changes to your source systems. Same-day or out-of-hours response. Work outside the named department unless the backlog is re-agreed. Anything that needs access not granted by the end of week two.
What we build
Ordered by how often it is the first item on the backlog.
Every enquiry from the website form, event list, LinkedIn lead form or partner email lands in the CRM as a lead with its source, is assigned by territory or product, and creates the first-call task and the second- and third-attempt reminders automatically. Built on Power Automate or Logic Apps into Dynamics 365, HubSpot or Pipedrive. Usually a four-to-six week item.
Our Intake Agent asks the prospect the questions your best salesperson would ask, reads anything they attach, scores the enquiry against your criteria and writes a complete record into the CRM before anyone picks up the phone.
See the Intake Agent →Spend and leads from Google Ads, LinkedIn, Meta and email, matched to pipeline and won revenue in the CRM, refreshed daily in Power BI. The report sales and marketing both open, with the same numbers.
Consultants fill in a structured form; the system pulls the data, runs the calculations and produces a branded PDF proposal with engagement tracking. We built this for a legal and tax advisory firm and cut proposal creation from over an hour to minutes.3
Read the case study →Duplicate detection and merge, company enrichment from Companies House, stale-record flags, mandatory fields enforced at the stage where they matter rather than at entry. The boring item that makes every other item work.
Attendee lists in, personalised follow-up sequences out, replies routed back to the owner, no spreadsheet in between.
The won deal creates the project, the onboarding tasks and the welcome communications in Microsoft 365, so the customer’s first week is not a re-keying exercise.
If your first problem is not on this list, it goes on the backlog anyway. The list is what we have built before, not the limit of what we build.
What we measure
Lead response time (minutes from enquiry to first contact)
Speed to first contact is the strongest lever on conversion you control
Leads lost between systems (count per month)
The 37% problem, made visible and then driven to zero
Rep hours per week on CRM admin
The three-to-ten hours that should be selling time
Proposal turnaround (hours from request to sent)
Directly visible to the prospect
One number for pipeline, agreed by sales and marketing
Ends the argument about whose report is right
Proof
Personalised proposals took over an hour each, built by copying between Excel, a tax calculator and a PDF form. A Power Apps form, automated calculations and a branded PDF generator with open-and-click tracking took it to minutes.3
1 hour+ → minutes
Per proposal, delivered in five days.
The systems we work in
CRM and sales
The plumbing
Data sources
These are the ones we meet most, not the limit. We can work with any platform you already run. We do not ask you to buy a new platform, and we pick the most adequate tool for the job, whether that is Power Automate, an Azure Function or n8n.
Security and data
Inside your tenant
Everything is built in your Microsoft 365 and Azure environment, under your identity, permissions and policies. Your data does not leave it.
Data protection
A data processing agreement on every engagement. Where AI models are used, they run through Azure OpenAI in your subscription, in the UK region you choose.
Licences and consumption
Estimated per backlog item before it is built, paid by you directly to Microsoft. No reselling, no mark-up.
Access
We ask for the access each item needs, in writing, and we work through your existing change process for anything that touches production systems.
Price and terms
Resident Engineer · One
£3,500 a month
One day a week
Resident Engineer · Two
£6,500 a month
Two days a week
Prices exclude VAT and your Microsoft and Azure consumption.
Nothing to pay if week one disappoints
If the audit and backlog at the end of week one are not worth continuing with, say so and there is no charge.
You keep everything
Solutions, documentation and the runbook are yours on payment. We keep the right to reuse our general components and know-how.
Who it is for
A good fit
Commercial directors, heads of sales, heads of marketing and revenue operations leads in organisations of 50 to 1,000 staff that run Microsoft 365 and have more than one of the problems above. It suits teams with a CRM nobody fully trusts, reporting built by hand, and no engineer of their own.
A poor fit
If you have a single problem, our One-Problem Automation is cheaper and faster. If you want a marketing agency to run campaigns, we build the systems; we do not write your ads. Or if your CRM changes every quarter and nobody owns it.
FAQ
No. A contractor sells you days and you manage them. You buy a fixed monthly fee for named days, a measured backlog you own, monitoring of everything delivered, a monthly report and accelerators we bring. The engineer manages the work; you set the priorities.
The minimum is three months because the first month is mostly audit and the first build. After three, it is monthly.
It is yours, with the runbook, the solution inventory and a quote for ongoing cover of what was built.
We work in whatever you run. We will say if we think a change would pay for itself, in writing, with the number, and the decision is yours.
That is usually the third item on the backlog, and the one people remember.
In your Microsoft tenant and Azure subscription, in the region you choose. It does not come to us.
Bring your messiest lead process to a 30-minute call.
Tell us how an enquiry gets from your website to a salesperson’s diary today. We will tell you what the week-one audit would measure, what the first backlog item would probably be, and whether Resident Engineer or a one-off automation is the right fit.
Sources