Hiring a Marketing Strategy Consultant: What 90 Days Should Deliver

Most companies that hire a marketing strategy consultant are not short of ideas. They are short of a plan the sales team believes, a budget the finance team can defend and a first quarter of work that actually starts. The consultant’s job is to produce those three things, in that order of usefulness, and to leave something your team can run.

This guide is for the CEO or owner about to sign a strategy engagement. It sets out what the first 90 days should deliver and in what sequence, how to test each deliverable, how to compare proposals line by line, and the signs that a strategy will stay in a slide deck. It does not repeat the question of whether to build an in-house team or outsource the function; that comparison is covered in In-House Team, Agency or Outsourced Marketing Department?

What you are actually buying

“Marketing consultant” covers three different things, and proposals often blur them. Be clear which one you need before you compare prices.

• A strategy engagement. A defined piece of work: research, positioning, a written plan, a budget and channel split, measures and a roadmap. It has a start, an end and a set of files you keep.
• A fractional or part-time CMO. Senior direction for a set number of days a month, usually ongoing. Useful when you have an execution team but nobody senior to direct it. The output is decisions and oversight more than documents.
• An agency that also plans. Strategy written by the same people who will execute it. The advantage is continuity; the risk is a plan that leans towards the services that agency sells.

None of these is wrong. The mistake is paying for one and expecting another: buying a strategy document and expecting someone to run the campaigns, or hiring a fractional CMO and expecting a finished annual plan in four weeks. Write down, before you issue a brief, who will execute the plan once it exists. That answer shapes everything below.

The 90-day sequence: what should arrive, in what order

In our view, a sound engagement moves from understanding to positioning to a working plan to the first weeks of execution. The order matters more than the dates: a channel plan written before the positioning is agreed tends to be rewritten, and a budget written before the KPI framework has nothing to be judged against.

The table below is an illustrative sequence for judging a proposal, not a standard timetable or a record of any real engagement. It lists the stages in order and what should exist at the end of each. Scope, the number of markets and how quickly your team supplies data all change how long each stage takes, so ask every consultant to put their own week numbers against these stages. A proposal that cannot, or that schedules the budget before the positioning is signed off, is telling you something.

Two checkpoints deserve a formal sign-off, in our experience: the positioning at the end of stage two, and the budget and channel split in stage three. Agreeing direction before detailed planning is cheaper than rebuilding a finished plan because the board disagrees with its starting point.

What each deliverable should contain

What Gulf market findings should cover

Use this as a checklist when the findings arrive. Anything missing is a question for the consultant. Professional recommendation.

If the findings could be pasted into a competitor’s file unchanged, they are not findings. If you are commissioning the research separately, our guide to market research companies in Saudi Arabia covers how to choose a supplier.

Positioning and messages

The positioning summary should name who you are for, what you do better than the alternatives and why buyers should believe it. Each audience should get its own key messages: the procurement manager, the consultant engineer and the owner do not care about the same things. A good test is whether the positioning rules something out. If every competitor could claim it, it is not positioning.

The plan and calendar

The plan should fit the year you actually work in. For most Gulf and Egyptian B2B companies that means allowing for Ramadan and Eid, national days, exhibition season and the budget cycles of public and private clients. A calendar copied from a Western template can put your biggest campaign in a month when many decision-makers are hard to reach. It should also say what you will stop doing, not only what you will start. Our annual marketing plan guide covers the calendar and the one-page plan format.

Budget and channel split

Expect a total, a split by channel and objective, and the reasoning behind both. Strategies routinely outgrow the money behind them, so a good consultant sizes the plan to your budget or shows clearly what more would buy; our guide to splitting a budget between brand and performance covers the theory behind the split.

KPI framework

Look for a short list of measures tied to sales outcomes: qualified enquiries, quotation requests, meetings, pipeline value and won business, alongside a few leading indicators such as reach in the target segment. Each measure needs a definition, a source and an owner. Followers and impressions on their own are not a KPI framework. The reporting template should be something your CEO would read in five minutes; our guide to the monthly marketing dashboard shows one format.

The 90-day roadmap

This is the bridge to execution. It should list the first campaigns and assets, who produces each, the approval steps, the launch dates and the first review date. If the roadmap has no names against tasks, it is a wish list.

What the consultant needs from you

Strategy engagements stall on the client side as often as on the consultant’s. Before the first meeting, line up:

• A decision-maker. One person who can approve positioning and budget without waiting for a quarterly board meeting.
• Sales access. Time with your sales director and two or three salespeople. They know why deals are won and lost; most plans that fail never asked them.
• Data. Sales by product, segment and country for the last two or three years, enquiry sources if you track them, past campaign results, and current ad and analytics account access.
• Existing material. Company profile, catalogues, proposals, website, social channels and any previous plans, including the ones that were never used.
• An honest view of capacity. Who will execute the plan: your own team, an agency or the consultant. If the plan depends on new hires, say so now; the team-constraints row in the findings checklist above is where that gets tested.

How to compare proposals

Proposals for strategy work are hard to compare because each one describes a different scope in different words. Put them into the same table before you look at price.

On the last point, ask every firm to state the tax basis and currency of its quote, because VAT rates differ across the region (see PwC’s tax summaries for Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Qatar). For a cross-border engagement in Egypt, PwC notes that VAT on services from a non-resident supplier is generally reverse-charged by the Egyptian business unless the supplier uses the simplified registration process.

Be cautious with two kinds of proposal. One promises specific results, such as a number of leads or a percentage growth, before the consultant has seen your data. The other offers a fixed template plan at a low price; it will look complete and fit nobody.

Warning signs that the strategy will not reach execution

In our experience, most strategy fails in the gap between the document and the first campaign. These signs usually show up early, and several of them are also why companies end up changing marketing suppliers again and again:

1. The sales team was not interviewed. The plan will describe buyers the salespeople do not recognise, and they will quietly ignore it.
2. The deliverable is a presentation, not a plan. Slides explain a direction; they do not assign tasks, dates or budget lines.
3. The budget does not add up to your number. Either the plan assumes money you have not approved, or nobody asked what the budget is.
4. Every channel is recommended. A plan that says yes to everything has not made the hard choices you are paying for.
5. No measures are linked to sales. If success is defined as engagement and reach, nobody will be able to say in six months whether it worked.
6. No owner for week one. If the roadmap does not say who briefs the first campaign and when, nothing will happen in week one.
7. The consultant disappears at handover. The first quarter of execution is where the plan meets reality and needs adjusting. A plan with no review point after launch is left to drift.

The common failure looks like this, in a hypothetical case: a distributor approves a plan for a new product line in a board meeting, then hands it to a two-person marketing team with no extra budget and no agency, and later finds that only the social media part has happened. The plan was not wrong; nobody planned the execution.

Hypothetical example: what each stage should leave behind for a Saudi distributor of a new pump range.

Why this differs from the failed version: the same two-person team can run this plan, because the Build stage cut the channels down to fit the team. If the roadmap had assumed a third hire, the Start stage would have exposed it before launch rather than months later.

Where to start

If you are close to hiring, write a one-page brief first and send the same brief to every firm you consider. The quality of their questions will tell you more than the quality of their slides.

At RX Designer, marketing strategy and research follows the same order of work, Understand, Position, Build and Support, and the team stays on to execute the plan, continuing into sales messaging and enablement where the gap is in the sales conversation. The Azeidk case study shows one direction across brand, content, campaigns, events and sales communication, and GCS shows a new fire-safety brand taken from identity to a company profile and WhatsApp message flows for its sales team. If you would rather test the thinking first, a business diagnosis session ends with clear next steps.