Works / MARA · Client Shortlisting

The Shortlist That Knows Your Best Work

Which client site can we feature next? Ask MARA in the team chat and a shortlist comes back out of Salesforce — every one live, unrestricted, not already featured, and ordered by how well it fits what you actually asked for.

Client: Marketing Team · Role: Automation Engineer · Year: · Stack: n8n · Salesforce · Slack

The story

The before: Refilling a showcase slot at a real-estate web agency meant four systems per candidate — the launches report, the sales channel, the site itself, then the client's account to see whether they were even allowed to appear. Nobody had written the rules down.

The turn: So I encoded the judgment instead of speeding up the search. Once "live, unrestricted, not already featured, right product, right brokerage" was something MARA could evaluate, the question could be asked across the whole database at once.

How it works

  1. Slack: You ask in plain words. Anything MARA doesn't recognize comes back as a question.
  2. Gallery Rules: Name a page and its own requirements join the ask, labelled with where they came from — and dropped first if the search has to widen.
  3. Salesforce: Your client records are read, never written to — live sites only, out of roughly 32,000 records.
  4. Qualify + Rank: Sites you've already flagged as showcase-worthy fill the list first, then it tops up from the wider pool — ordered by recency, account tier, and how many of your stated preferences each one hits.

The reach changed, not just the speed — the bottleneck was never how fast anyone clicked, it was that the rules lived in one head. And nothing gets filtered away quietly: a restricted or flagged client still shows up, tagged, because a hidden miss costs more than a visible extra. You decide, not the filter.

What changed

which sites launched under that brokerage recently? is this client even allowed to be showcased? is this one already featured somewhere else?

The numbers: ~5,900 — candidates one question reaches, up from ~45.

A Slack thread asking MARA to suggest the best client sites, and MARA returning a ranked shortlist with counts, a follow-up filter, and flagged rows tagged for review
You ask in plain words. The shortlist comes back ranked.

Fair questions

can it filter by brokerage, status, site type and launch date?

Yes — those four are among thirteen dimensions, and they combine in one sentence. That was the original ask. (from the ticket)

does it judge the design?

Partly. Style asks get scored over candidates that already qualified — the final design call stays with the person curating. (from the guardrails)

will it suggest something we already have up?

No. Anything already featured on that page is excluded, and that index refreshes weekly.

The reel continues

Previous: EmployeeCare · Leave Request Automation · Next: Greenlight · Site QA Automation · open my notebook?

Got a call only one person on the team can make, judge, remember? Shortlist It — or discover my mastery.