Most companies I work with would say they prefer full-time hires over consultants or contractors. There’s no question full-time hires are tremendous assets. Having an embedded team member who can focus 100% of their energy on your business is hugely valuable.
Hiring is also one of the most expensive investments you’ll ever make. And you want to make sure you’re bringing in the right people to impact your company’s growth.
In some cases, hiring someone full-time isn’t necessary or (gasp!) prudent. Consultants can have an impact at a fraction of an FTE’s expense. They even can help with your full-time hiring plan.
Here are a few examples of where I’ve seen consultants be especially helpful:
When you haven’t experimented enough to know what’s working vs. not
The digital marketing landscape shifts by the minute. And teams can’t move fast enough to keep up with the pace of change. It takes time to build a thoughtful strategy, and there’s value in investing in the long-term. But companies can’t risk missing out on opportunities to get in front of their audience in new, emerging channels.
Client case study: testing and learning for B2B lead gen
Recently, I worked with a client who was spending a large portion of their demand generation budget on LinkedIn. Despite the dollars pouring into that channel they weren’t sure they were getting a good return on investment. The team hadn’t run enough experiments on comparable channels to know how LinkedIn stacked up.
Their gut told them LinkedIn was where they should be because they’re a B2B business and LinkedIn is the B2B channel. Their team was strapped and didn’t have the bandwidth to run new experiments, so they brought me in to explore new strategies.
I studied their customer base and worked with the team to develop hypotheses about where we thought prospects spent their time. Their initial hypothesis was that because LinkedIn is a platform for B2B marketers, that was the best way to reach their C-suite audience.
I worked with them on building a new hypothesis that focused on identifying channels where the C-suite spends time. We assumed their busy C-suite customer commutes and/or catches up on their newsfeeds at the start and end of their busy day. I led the implementation of a test to see if retargeting display ads on LinkedIn or Facebook+Instagram were more likely to reach them during those bookends of their days.
The test I ran found that conversions on Facebook significantly outperformed LinkedIn. It had 4x more conversions than LinkedIn, at a fraction of the cost.
This helped the team reorient their strategy and budget to include Facebook and Instagram, and staff up around it.
Without the outside perspective and additional bandwidth from a consultant, they never would have uncovered this higher-converting strategy and much smarter use of their marketing dollars.
When you don’t have the budget for a senior hire, and can’t afford someone too junior
Companies in growth mode, especially startups, often find themselves hiring talent that is good at executing. These are critical team members and their hustle makes up the spirit and energy I love about startups.
But when you stack your team with junior hires, you miss out on the strategic experience necessary to build a solid growth plan. And that usually comes in the form of an experienced strategy hire (Director/VP level or above, in most cases).
For companies short on cash, strategy hires are expensive. But they are worth their weight in gold. You need someone who has taken a lot of shots throughout their career…someone who can bring that perspective to your strategy.
But you may not be ready to make the investment in a full-time strategic hire. To help you bridge the gap, a consultant is a great option, giving you strategic insight at a fraction of a full-time hire’s cost.
Consultants can be more impactful because the nature of their role gives them exposure to varying problem sets in different business settings. Their experience and perspective has a breadth you can’t find in someone with extensive, full-time operating experience.
When you need help de-risking your hiring plan
Consultants work with many different companies, which means they see a lot of team structures. With an understanding of where your growth strategy is heading, they can help you figure out how to prioritize your full-time hires.
From sourcing and interviewing to onboarding, hiring is an expensive undertaking. Hiring the wrong people is even more costly.
I’ve seen many companies pour resources into writing job descriptions, sifting through LinkedIn profiles, and interviewing candidates before taking a step back to evaluate how their growth strategy lines up with their staffing plan. A lot of that work needs to happen before you even start writing that job description.
Especially in high-growth settings, teams are too resource-constrained and execution-obsessed to pause for strategy. That’s where a consultant can prove very helpful.
A consultant can assess your current channel strategy and analyze how your team stacks up against the skills you need to achieve your growth plan. From there, they can advise you on the candidate profile and eventual JDs you need to make sure you’re sourcing the right talent.
When the market shifts and you need a strategy reset
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, B2B marketers with deep investments in event marketing found themselves retooling their entire strategy. With in-person marketing indefinitely on hold, event marketers had to refocus entirely on digital. Some had a digital presence to double down on, and others needed to build their digital strategy from the ground up. And all of these changes needed to happen overnight.
For companies who focused entirely on event marketing (which is common in B2B), it was as if their entire marketing playbook went out the window. One company I met with had one “keeper” of their event strategy, the sole channel the company relied on for customer acquisition. With little to no experience in digital, their head of marketing needed outside expertise to help her reorient their strategy. This is an example of where a consultant proved to be hugely valuable.
This company needed to lean on someone to help them run experiments on new channels, identify what new strategies could help them reach the customers they normally would have engaged with at events, and develop a new playbook to help them navigate a digital-first world.
Hiring a consultant is an effective tool to accelerate your company’s growth. Whether you need help
running experiments,
getting senior-level guidance at a fraction of the cost,
evaluating your org design,
reorienting your strategic plan,
consultants can be just as valuable to your team (if not more!) as a full-time hire.
