Meet The Company
Ingage is a sales presentation software company helping home improvement businesses close more deals.
Headquartered in Yardley, Pennsylvania, Ingage provides cloud-based presentation tools that enable sales teams with dynamic, interactive content that engages customers and drives results. Their platform provides admin controls to seamlessly share content with the team and robust analytics for sales leaders to have the insights they need for coaching and accountability.
Ingage serves the home improvement industry — roofing, remodeling, windows, exteriors, kitchens, baths, … — where in-home sales presentations can make or break a deal. Their customers regularly report significant improvements in close rates (some seeing increases of 10%+) after adopting the platform.
With a 34-person distributed team across the US, Ingage needed their internal operations to be as streamlined as the sales experiences they help their customers create.
The Problem
“It’s like my teenage son’s room,” Dean Curtis told us during our first call. “It’s just a disaster.”
Dean wasn’t talking about his actual son’s room.
He was describing his company’s Notion workspace.
So how did his company’s Notion workspace become, in his words, “a big black hole”?
It started with the best of intentions.
Dean discovered Notion through his daughter in college. After running a successful 3-month personal experiment, he did what many enthusiastic founders do: migrated his entire 34-person company over in a single weekend.
Training sessions were held. Templates were implemented. Everyone was excited.
And then… the wild west began.
When Good Intentions Create Chaos
The problem wasn’t that people didn’t use Notion. They used it a lot.
But without guardrails, everyone built their own little kingdoms. Private team spaces multiplied. Every team cooked their own sauce. And the promise of a “single source of truth” became… well… a dumping ground.
“Notion is a big black hole. There’s loads of stuff in there, but we can’t find anything.”
That’s what we heard – almost word for word – from nearly every stakeholder we interviewed.
- The sales VP couldn’t find manufacturer discount information despite knowing it existed somewhere
- The design team had zero formal project tracking (they literally managed workloads through Slack messages and hope)
- Customer success didn’t know case studies existed, even though marketing had created dozens
- Playbooks went stale because nobody knew who owned them
Dean captured the core issue perfectly:
“Everyone’s stuck in old Microsoft thinking – everything’s a new document, living in isolation. They don’t see how content connects.”
The lottery problem was real: if any team member won the lottery tomorrow and left without notice, critical information would leave with them – because it was hidden in private spaces only they could access.
What We Actually Built Together
Over 8 weeks, we worked with Dean, Drew (who became the company’s internal Notion architect), and a network of department champions to transform how Ingage thinks about information.
Here’s the philosophy shift that made everything click:
Before: “I need to do something → let me create a page”
After: “I need to do something → is this a document, a project, or a task? Let me add it to the right database.”
Sounds simple. But this mental model change required more than just moving databases around.
Three Pillars, One Architecture
We built the transformation around three interconnected systems:
1. Knowledge Management
A centralized documents database where every piece of content has:
- A single owner (“DRI” — Direct Responsible Individual)
- A verification expiry date (90 days for playbooks)
- Clear document types (playbook, standard, reference)
No more orphan pages. No more “I think Sarah wrote something about this once.”
2. Project Management
A unified system replacing the patchwork of HubSpot tasks, Google Sheets, and “whatever people had access to.” Cross-functional visibility means everyone can see what everyone else is working on — without having to ask.
3. OKR Dashboards
Dean had already built the skeleton. We added the dashboards and reporting layer that made it actually usable for the team.
The Architecture Pattern
The secret sauce was a simple principle we call “shared resources, private dashboards.”
The databases live in a centralized backend – one source of truth that’s easy for humans and AI to understand.
But each team gets their own dashboard – a personalized launchpad that filters these shared resources to show exactly what they need.
Think of it like this: the databases are the library. The dashboards are your personalized reading list.
The Part Most Consultants Skip
Building the system is maybe 40% of the work.
The other 60%?
Getting people to actually use it.
We call this “tool gravity” – creating enough gravitational pull that Notion becomes the natural place people go, rather than something they have to be reminded to check.
With Ingage, we focused on:
- Training the trainers: Drew and the department champions learned not just how to use the system, but why it’s structured this way. They can now evolve it without us.
- Layered activation: We didn’t do a big-bang rollout. Champions beta-tested each module before the wider team saw it.
- Migration by osmosis: We didn’t force a wholesale migration of old content (most of it was outdated anyway). Instead, we encouraged the “campsite principle” – whenever you touch something old, migrate it to the new system. Leave it better than you found it.
- AI as the carrot: The better organized your Notion, the smarter the AI becomes. We installed a custom system prompt that actually knows where to look. Suddenly, asking Notion AI a question actually works.
What Dean Said That Stuck With Us
At our wrap-up call, Dean shared something that we’ll carry into every future project:
“I’ve actually learned a lot from you in terms of accountability. When you hire consultants, sometimes they can just go forever. You guys were really clear about expectations and holding us accountable. And I think – if you’re a good consultant, you’re working yourself out of a job.”
That’s exactly the philosophy we build around.
With Notion, there’s no reason for consultant lock-in.
This isn’t Salesforce where you need specialized expertise forever.
Drew can now handle 80% of what comes up. And when something bigger emerges?
That’s where Ingage can always rely on us as their long-term strategic partner.
