What Does a Marketing Consultant Do? (Explained by Joshua Feinberg)

I was recently asked by a reporter to share my insight on what a marketing consultant does.  So in case, you have the same question -- "What Does a Marketing Consultant Do?" -- here's my take:

Typical tasks?

I help companies get found by the right people, in the right places, at the right time, and in the right context -- and uncover new revenue growth opportunities.

This typically includes five very specific and interrelated areas: 1) Differentiation. 2) Thought Leadership. 3) Competitive Positioning. 4) Sales Cycle Acceleration. 5) Scalable, Predictable Revenue Growth.

What makes an excellent marketing consultant?

Marketing consultants need to be able to diagnose and solve business problems that are often not able to be solved internally for various reasons.

Marketing consultants also need to be constantly learning and experimenting as the pace of change can be especially fast.

Finally, marketing consultants must be very strong at building consensus and driving alignment with many stakeholders.

Specializations and who I typically work for:

My primary area of specialization is digital transformation go-to-market content strategy for mid-market and enterprise IaaS, SaaS, and FinTech.

Because I typically work with CEOs of small companies (<50 employees) that sell to larger companies (500+ employees), my full-funnel client engagements require that I wear a lot of hats and help my clients dramatically improve their differentiation, thought leadership, competitive positioning, and ability to close sales faster without compromise.

Main reasons people hire marketing consultants:

The reasons that companies hire marketing consultants vary considerably depending on the context.

B2B vs. B2C often brings quite different priorities, as does the industry, and most of all, the company size (and whether there's a deep bench of internal marketing talent).

Larger companies, with bigger internal marketing teams, tend to hire marketing consultants in very specialized areas.

Smaller companies typically need extremely versatile marketing consultants (like a super-utility player in baseball that can comfortably handle five or more different positions on the field)