Hiring a consultant can be a game-changer—or a total waste of time, trust, and budget. If you want to avoid the classic bait-and-switch (sold by the A-team, stuck with the C-team), this guide will help you vet the right partner, scope smartly, and get what you actually paid for.
Bonus: We cover knowledge transfer, post-engagement support, and why you should never skip the reference checks.
It’s easy for executives to view short-term, fractional solutions as a great way to plug gaps and reduce your to-do list. It’s rarely that simple. In order for a project to go well, you need to take the time to scope the project, assign internal stakeholders and determine how much they’ll need to participate, and source the right agency.
Yes, we know you cringed when we mentioned scoping and documentation. But budgets will be adhered to if you take the time to develop the right expectations, understand the scope of work, and communicate with executives who think bringing in a consultant means waving a magic wand and seeing the results in the first 24 hours.
And executives aren’t the only ones guilty of magical thinking.
If you’re looking for someone to ride in on a white horse and fix infighting or produce something the sales team will love without ever speaking with a seller, it’s time to realign your expectations. This is RevOps, not sorcery.
Bringing in outside help makes sense when:
Don’t rush to hire if:
Consultants can help execute. They can’t fix chaos without direction.
A good consultant can only work with what you give them. Before you even start Googling agencies, get your internal house in order.
✅ Appoint an executive stakeholder: An executive stakeholder should be someone who benefits from the project and is willing to take ownership over the success of the project. They are part of the team because you will need someone to break a tie between misaligned leaders and lean on people who aren’t contributing to the project in a timely manner.
✅ Identify internal stakeholders and get their initial input: Think of this as requirements gathering lite. You’ll need to meet with leadership to get them to agree there is a problem worth solving and have them volunteer a few people to take part in the project when appropriate. For example, if you’re building an account management tool, you’ll need account managers to give requirements and participate in user testing once a solution is developed.
✅ Document the problem and your success criteria: Your job is to sketch out what “good” could look like—even if it’s just a napkin drawing. For example, people may be complaining about the contracting process because they’re still relying on spreadsheets and a cheap online signature tool. Your job will be to decide whether a CPQ tool makes sense given your business requirements and choose the right tool before selecting an agency to help you implement it. Once you understand what your company needs from a CPQ tool, which CPQ tool you’ll purchase, and your executive stakeholder helps choose a timeline, you can document your success criteria.
✅ List your core requirements and desired outcomes: Consultants think in milestones, dependencies, and deliverables—so meet them halfway. For example, if you implement a CPQ tool, you’ll need to:
If your consulting agency is only responsible for a portion of the milestones and outcomes – for example, pricing and packaging are usually developed in-house – give them a clear RACI-style breakdown of who owns what and when.
✅ Define the skill sets required: Does the work require a Salesforce admin with flow experience or do you need a solutions architect with Apex knowledge? Do you use HubSpot or a combination of HubSpot and Salesforce? Will you need to port data to an external warehouse using ETLs or need custom SQL development to update key reports? Once you know the products involved and the project’s complexity, you can find the right agency or consultant to do the job.
✅ Set Yourself (and the Consultant) Up for Success: Share internal docs, KPIs, and known blockers upfront. Be transparent about your budget and decision-making process. Define communication expectations: Slack, email, weekly syncs. Get alignment on what “done” actually means—and how it’ll be measured.
The better your prep, the faster a consultant can ramp—and the less budget you’ll waste on “discovery.”
Before you narrow down your list of potential consultancies, hit up your network. Post on RevOps Co-op Slack, ask your peers on LinkedIn, and contact people you know who have worked on similar projects. You’ll quickly find out who delivers—and who disappoints – after the SOW is signed.
Most consultancies use one—or a blend—of these three pricing models:
A lot of companies balk at project-based work. It’s tempting to think that every company is unique and follows a completely different workflow than others, but it’s actually pretty rare for a company to break the project mold.
For example, if an agency specializes in CPQ implementation for B2B SaaS companies with usage-based tiers, they’ll know where projects can fall off the rails and which elements take the longest to finalize. They’ll be able to estimate a price and tell you what needs to be done to keep the budget on track.
Clients often feel bamboozled when they don’t understand what’s out of scope or what triggers a change request. It’s also vital to ask for the right skills on your contracted team and ask the agency or consultant to spell out what’s included and what’s not (discovery, documentation, post-engagement support?).
Budget for success, not survival. In other words, if you insist on a lean budget and aren’t realistic about what can be accomplished in a given timeframe, the agency isn’t to blame when those cut corners catch up with you.
Hold consultancies to the same bar you’d hold a RevOps hire. In order to have a project launch successfully, you’ll need:
Run away if they give you:
🚩 Vague timelines or “we’ll figure that out in discovery”
🚩 No documentation plan or handoff process
🚩 No clarity on who’s doing the work
🚩 Promising the moon with no mention of trade-offs
If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Especially in RevOps.
The biggest mistake when selecting a consultancy is assuming the team selling you is the team doing the work.
Here’s how to avoid the swap-out:
If they dodge this part? Run. (Fast.) 🏃♂️
Your consultant isn’t supposed to be a permanent fixture. Make sure they’re documenting as they go and your team is trained to maintain and extend what’s built. There should also be a plan built into your statement of work to offer a bit of support should something go sideways.
Great consultants leave you with a working system, a trained team, and zero dependence. You should be dazzled—and self-sufficient. No one likes being tied to a resource forever because their custom coded plugin breaks any time you need to make a minor update.
Great consultants exist. But hiring the wrong one will cost you time, trust, and traction. With a little prep, a lot of vetting, and a strong BS detector, you can find a partner who actually helps you scale—without having to clean up a mess after.
And hey, if you’ve worked with someone amazing (or awful), tell the community. We remember names 😈
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