Last Updated on October 5, 2026 by Ewen Finser
Things are looking good for your marketing team (or so you thought). Traffic’s up, and your paid campaigns are getting clicks. The top of the funnel looks busy. But your demo requests haven’t budged, sales is complaining, and senior leadership wants to know where the marketing spend is going.
The obvious move is to quickly hire a demand gen consultant. But before you bring anyone in, you need to know whether demand gen is actually the problem. So start with the diagnosis.
Where things are breaking down
First, pull your funnel data. Look at click-to-lead, lead-to-qualified, and qualified-to-opportunity rates, broken down by channel and campaign. Wherever the biggest drop happens is where to start. Most of the time it lands in one of four places.
1. You’re getting clicks, but from the wrong people
Low conversion rates across most of your traffic usually mean people are clicking, but they aren’t buying. That’s usually a targeting problem. Before you hire for demand gen, have someone who specializes in paid search or paid social take a look at who your ads are reaching.
2. The right people show up, then leave
If targeting checks out but visitors bounce or abandon your forms, look at the page itself. Slow load times and forms with too many fields are common culprits. This is a landing page problem, not a demand gen problem. A CRO (conversion rate optimization) specialist can test what’s turning people away and fix it.
3. Leads come in, then go nowhere
Leads are coming in from your forms, but they aren’t turning into qualified opportunities. Is anyone nurturing those leads? Are sales and marketing on the same page about what counts as a qualified lead?
This one is usually about follow-up, not volume. More leads won’t help if the ones you already have aren’t going anywhere.
4. Conversion rates are fine; you just need more
This one is a classic demand gen problem. Each stage converts at a reasonable rate, but there isn’t enough volume going in to hit your revenue number.
If you landed on one of the first three, you may not need a demand gen consultant at all. If it’s number four, keep reading.
When a demand gen consultant is needed
If your numbers point to a volume or strategy gap, a demand gen consultant can get to the root of it. You’ll probably recognize a few of these too:
- Your pipeline targets are growing faster than your current channels can keep up with.
- Most of your pipeline comes from one channel, and costs there keep climbing.
- Nobody on your team owns the full picture connecting spend to pipeline to revenue.
- You want to test a new channel, segment, or market and don’t have that expertise in-house.
- You’re considering a full-time demand gen hire but aren’t sure what the role needs yet.
Consultant, full-time hire, or agency?
Once you know demand gen is the gap, you still have to decide what kind of help makes sense. Here’s a simple way to think about it:
- A consultant works well when you need specialized help or part-time support, or you want to test a role before committing to a full-time hire.
- An agency works well when you need a proven playbook and want to scale quickly.
- A full-time hire makes sense when demand gen is a core, long-term part of your marketing team and you need someone to own it permanently.
A lot of companies end up with a mix. If you’re not sure yet, starting with a consultant is the lower-risk option. You’ll learn what the role really takes, and sometimes the consultant turns out to be the person you hire full-time.
How to vet a demand gen consultant
Most candidates will look good on paper and bring a strong deck to the interview, but you need to know more: their experience, their ideas for fixing what’s broken, their references, and whether they’ll be a good fit for your company.
Decide what success looks like at 90 days
Before your first interview, write down what you need in black and white, with numbers: qualified opportunities per month, cost per opportunity, a new channel launched and tested.
Get things ready on your end
A good consultant can’t do much if they’re stuck waiting. Before they start, figure out who they’ll report to and how much budget they’ll be working with. Then make sure they’ll have access to your data and tools on day one: logins, CRM access, ad accounts, analytics. It sounds small, but waiting on access can eat up the first couple of weeks.
Look for experience at your stage and in your model
Demand gen at an early-stage startup has very little in common with demand gen at an enterprise company. At a startup, one person might be running every channel on a small budget and figuring things out as they go. At an enterprise company, they’re working with bigger budgets, longer sales cycles, and a lot more people involved in every deal. Someone who’s great in one setting may struggle in the other.
Ask where they did their best work. What stage was the company at? What was the average deal size? How long was the sales cycle? You want someone whose experience lines up with where you are right now.
Have them walk you through a program they built
Ask them to pick one program they’re proud of and take you through it start to finish. Then push on it:
- What did the funnel look like when you started?
- Which channels did you test, and which ones did you cut?
- How did you and sales agree on what counted as a qualified lead?
- What would you do differently?
Ask how they measure
Ask how they handle attribution, how they report pipeline to leadership, and which tools they’ve used that overlap with your stack. If they can’t explain how they’d know whether a program is working, keep looking.
Check how they work with other teams
Your consultant will be working with your marketing team, your sales team, and possibly an agency. Ask how they’ve worked with sales before and what they did the last time they disagreed about lead quality. How they answer tells you a lot.
Start with a defined project
Interviews only tell you so much. Start with a scoped project, clear goals, and a set timeline, ideally on terms that let you adjust hours or wrap up quickly if it’s not working. You’ll have real results to look at before you commit to anything bigger.
Red flags to watch for
A few things that should make you pause:
- They promise results before they’ve seen your data. Nobody can tell you what’s broken without looking at your numbers first.
- Every answer sounds the same. If they’re pitching the exact playbook they used at their last three companies, they may not be thinking about your business.
- They can’t name something that didn’t work. Everyone has campaigns that flopped. If they only talk about wins, you’re not getting the full picture.
- They’re vague about their availability. Make sure they can commit the hours you need for as long as you need them.
Hiring your consultant
Combing through resumes and working with recruiting can eat up a lot of time. Working with a partner can take that pressure off and speed up the process.
Right Side Up is a great resource for this. Their team is made up of former in-house growth marketers, so they know what strong marketing talent looks like because they’ve done the work themselves. They’ll help you figure out what you need, who’s right for the role, and how to fill your company’s gaps.
They have a solid roster of heavily vetted talent and can recommend someone within two days. Their terms are flexible too. You can adjust hours up or down as needed, cancel with seven days’ notice if it’s not working, or bring your consultant on full time when you’re ready.
Before you hire someone on, make sure you have properly diagnosed the problem and appropriately vetted interviewees so you don’t have to start the whole process over again.