AI-Augmented Marketing Analyst, Material Handling

Material Handling | Construction | Agriculture

• Prepared for: Internal Executive Review
• Presenter: Jared Steier, VP Sales & Marketing, Material Handling
• Date: 2026
• Source proposal: NunnCurtis Labs, $497 implementation package

• We're hiring the analyst either way
• The decision is whether they spend year one on Excel cleanup or on distributor strategy
• Tooling cost: ~$400-$650/month
• Net new annual value: ~$32,500 conservative, likely $50,000+

• Monthly distributor scorecards ship 2 weeks late
• Trade show pipeline attribution takes 6 weeks (we just shipped MHEDA last week)
• Content-performance and win-loss analysis don't get done at all
• 70-80% of analyst time goes to "pull this data for me" requests
• Strategic work — the reason we're hiring this role — gets crowded out

• The role is open and we're interviewing now
• MHEDA 2026 just wrapped; we need the post-show ROI report in weeks, not months
• The AI tooling that handles this work is finally cheap, accurate, and connectable to our stack (HubSpot, ERP, Excel)
• Vendor saturation hasn't hit mid-market manufacturing yet; moving now costs less than moving once every competitor is moving

• Monthly distributor scorecards, per business unit
• Trade-show pipeline attribution
• Lead-source ROI by channel
• Technical-content performance
• Competitive pricing intelligence
• QBR data slides
• Ad-hoc reporting (Slack bot self-service)
• Channel-partner enablement tracking
• Distributor onboarding metrics
• Win-loss analysis on key product lines

• Workflow automation (Zapier or Make): $50-$300/mo
• BI / dashboarding (Power BI or Looker Studio): $0-$70/mo
• AI generation (Claude API + OpenRouter): ~$50-$150/mo
• Contact enrichment (Apollo or via our existing Instantly subscription): $0-$99/mo
• Existing line items reused: HubSpot, CRM, iCapture (no change)

• Analyst fully-loaded cost: ~$48/hour
• Hours recovered annually (conservative): ~470 hours
• 470 × $48 = $22,500 direct savings
• Plus: trade-show ROI shipped on time, content gap analysis happening at all, board deck takes hours not days = ~$10K
• Tooling spend: ~$5K-$8K/year
• Payback: 3-4 months from go-live

• Day 30: Material Handling scorecard automated; post-MHEDA report shipped
• Day 60: All three business-unit scorecards live; Q2 lead-source ROI report shipped; content-performance gap analysis circulated
• Day 90: All twelve workflows live or in pilot; Slack bot live; analyst spending 30-40% of time on strategic work (vs. <10% today)
• Built by the analyst with IT support
• Optional: $5K-$15K implementation co-build with NunnCurtis Labs

• Data quality from ERP is worse than we think. Mitigation: scope week-1 with IT, exposes the issue before we build on top of it
• Analyst doesn't ramp on the AI tooling. Mitigation: week-2 walkthrough; analyst owns the workflows from day 30
• Distributors push back on tier transparency. Mitigation: scorecards stay internal in months 1-3, share externally only once we trust the numbers
• Tooling vendor changes pricing. Mitigation: dual-vendor capability on workflow (Zapier + Make) and AI (Claude + GPT via OpenRouter)

• Not a replacement for the analyst — this is a bridge that makes the analyst more effective on day one
• Not a rip-and-replace of HubSpot, the CRM, or the ERP
• Not a six-figure systems integration project
• Not a multi-year transformation initiative
• A pragmatic, buildable, in-90-days plan for the role we're already hiring for

1. Approve the $497 proposal investment (this document)
2. Approve the monthly tooling spend (~$400-$650/month, ~$5K-$8K/year)
3. Approve 2-3 hours of IT time in week 1 to expose ERP data and validate access
4. Optional: approve the $5K-$15K implementation co-build if we want NunnCurtis Labs to pair on the rollout

Recommended next step: confirm the new analyst starts with the prompt playbook on day one.