Playbook: the Monday portfolio triage

The outcome

By the end of a single focused session, you will have looked at every brand you manage, know which ones need attention this week and why, and have a short, specific action for each one that actually matters. No opening twelve dashboards and eyeballing charts. No client asking about something you missed.

• Who it is for: account managers and strategists running a portfolio of client brands.
• Cadence: weekly, ideally Monday morning so the week's work is set before anyone asks.
• Time budget: aim for around ten to fifteen minutes per brand once you are in the rhythm, less for the quiet ones.

This playbook leans on three features working together: the agency rollup to triage the portfolio, per-brand AI Insights to read what changed, and Ask SendLens to go from insight to action without leaving the page.

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What you need in place first

Before this runs smoothly, make sure each client brand has:

• AI Insights generating. SendLens runs its signal detectors and synthesises a briefing per brand. You can trigger a fresh generation, but note the weekly regeneration cap per brand, so do not burn them casually. One fresh pull at the start of your triage is usually all you need.
• A recent weekly report. This is what you will lean on for client comms at the end.
• Ask SendLens to hand. The assistant can pull the underlying numbers and take actions for you, which is what makes the last mile fast.

Get those three right and the workflow below is quick every week.

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Step 1: start at the rollup and triage the portfolio

Open the agency rollup first. It lists every brand with this period's revenue against last period, split across campaigns, flows, and SMS. This is your triage screen. The job here is to sort quickly, not to study anything in depth.

Read it in one pass and split your roster into three piles:

• Movers. Brands where revenue has swung noticeably up or down versus last period. These get your full attention.
• Steady. Brands tracking roughly where they were. A quick glance at their insights is enough.
• Quiet. Brands with little activity this week. Note them and move on.

Do not spend equal time on every client. The rollup exists so you can put your hours where the movement is. A brand down sharply on flow revenue and a brand up sharply on campaign revenue both need a look, for opposite reasons.

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Step 2: for each mover, read its AI Insights briefing

Open the brand and go to its AI Insights. SendLens has already done the reading: it runs a set of detectors across the brand's data every week and synthesises them into a plain-English briefing with the important findings first. Treat it as the analyst who went through everything before you sat down.

Read the briefing the way you would read a good analyst's note, with a healthy respect and a little scepticism:

• Take the ordering seriously. The synthesiser leads with what it judges most material. Start at the top.
• Read each signal for what it is. Some are hard numbers (retention decayed this much), some are structural heuristics (these two flows look like they overlap). Know which you are looking at before you promise a client anything.
• Sanity-check against the rollup. If Insights flags a revenue concentration risk and the rollup shows one campaign carried the period, those two agree and you can trust it. If a signal seems to come from nowhere, verify before acting.

The point of this step is speed with judgement. The insight has been derived for you, so your only job is deciding which of the ones handed to you deserve action this week.

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Step 3: triage the signals into act, watch, or ignore

Not every signal is this week's problem. Sort each one into act now, watch, or ignore, and let the signal type guide the decision. Here is how I read the common ones:

By the end of this step you have, per brand, a short list of act-now items. That list is the week's work.

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Step 4: use Ask SendLens to go from insight to action

This is where the time saving compounds. Rather than clicking through to verify each signal and then building things by hand, ask the assistant. It can pull the specifics and take the action for you.

Use it to verify and quantify first. It can pull the latest insights, the RFM breakdown, cohort retention and the heatmap, flow performance week by week, audit findings, signup sources, the revenue timeseries, and more. So when Insights says retention is decaying, you can ask for the cohort retention numbers and see the shape immediately, without leaving the conversation.

Then use it to act. The assistant can create a segment, create a list, and draft a campaign for you. If your triage decided a brand needs to win back a slipping tier, you can have it build the segment and draft the campaign in the same breath, then hand the draft to whoever writes the copy.

A caution worth keeping: the write actions are real. A segment or draft it creates is a real object in the account. Read back what it built before you rely on it, exactly as you would check a junior's work. The speed is the point, but the account is the client's.

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Step 5: turn the triage into client comms

An agency lives or dies on the client feeling looked after, so close the loop. For each brand that needed action, you now have the raw material for a short, credible update:

• Lead with the weekly report for the numbers.
• Add two or three lines from your triage: what you spotted, what you are doing about it, what you expect from it. Pulled straight from the act-now list, this writes itself.
• Save the watch-list items for the monthly or quarterly review, so the client sees you are ahead of things that have not become problems yet.

The client does not need the signal names or the mechanics. They need to know you saw something, understood it, and acted. This step is what turns ten minutes of triage into a visible service.

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Step 6: make it a repeatable team habit

The first week is the slow one. After that, protect the rhythm:

• Divide the roster across the team by account owner, with one person keeping an eye on the portfolio-wide rollup so nothing falls between people.
• Time-box each brand. The movers earn more minutes, the quiet ones get a glance. The rollup is what lets you allocate honestly.
• Pull insights once, early. Given the weekly regeneration cap, generate fresh insights at the start of triage and work from that pull, rather than regenerating repeatedly through the day.
• Keep a running note per brand of what you actioned, so next week you can see whether it worked.

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What good looks like after a month of this

You will know the habit has taken when:

• Nothing on a client call surprises you, because you saw it in triage first.
• Your act-now lists get shorter over time, because you are fixing the recurring issues at the root.
• The resurrection and win-back actions you took start showing up as real revenue in the rollup.
• New client brands slot straight into the same Monday rhythm, so growing the roster does not mean drowning in dashboards.

Run this every week and the whole portfolio stays legible, however many brands you add. The tool does the reading, you do the judgement, and the client gets an agency that always seems to be one step ahead.

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Companion playbooks to come: the quarterly business review built from Audits and the Lifecycle Blueprint, and the new-client onboarding first-thirty-days.