Growth Gurus or Crooked Consultants? | E84 with Loren Shumate

Why do so many companies treat consultants like magic beans? 🤔 We’ve all seen it—bring in a “growth expert,” sprinkle them between teams, and pray they fix everything… without clear goals or accountability.

In this episode, we’re joined by Loren Shumate, growth consultant and our new Blame It On Marketing bestie, to unpack the consultant conundrum—why leadership chases silver bullets, where it blows up, and how to get real ROI instead ​E84.

We get into:
 ✅ The biggest myth giving consultants a bad rap—and why clear deliverables matter
 ✅ How to know when your startup needs outside help (and who should make that call)
 ✅ The right questions to ask before signing a statement of work
 ✅ Why siloed tactics fail—and how consultants drive cross-functional alignment
 ✅ Dodging “magic bean” tech plays: why you need vendor-agnostic advice
 ✅ Turning boardroom truths—like “my CRM’s a ball of yarn”—into actionable change ​E84
 ✅ Red flags that scream “run away” when you’re vetting marketing experts
 ✅ The LinkedIn soap-opera of fake influencer feuds—and why labels don’t make better marketing

If you’ve ever hired (or been tempted to hire) a consultant—and ended up with a mess—this one’s for you.

Transcript

0:00

welcome back to Blame It On Marketing we are going to slag ourselves off by talking about consultants. how can you spot silver bullet scam marketing consultants some consultants give other consultants a bad name. those consultants that aren't setting goals and aren't accountable are ruining it for the rest of us. sometimes as a consultant, you go into a company they think the problem is the marketing and you go in as a consultant and you're like, the problem is not marketing. I think a lot of companies are making very old fashioned decisions. the benefit of a consultant is coming in and being able to have fresh eyes. Hi everyone and welcome back to Blame It On Marketing with Emma and Ruta in today's episode, we are going to essentially slag ourselves off by talking about consultants. But before we get into the topic, we've got our fabulous guest with us today. Please introduce yourself. Yes, I'm Loren Schumate. On my substack, the revenue muse, but I am by day growth consultant. thank you so much for having me on today. Before we dive into the episode, we would love for you to tell us what is your deepest, darkest marketing confession. I worked for a hyper growth company that I had a very, a smallish marketing team and I was in a board meeting and I was being asked for all these, all this data, all this numbers. And the reality is my CRM was a ball of yarn. It was like, It was a tangled mess. The company wouldn't give me a, like a rev ops or a data operations person, like so many marketers struggle with today. And so in the board meeting, I just told the truth. I said, my CRM is a ball of yarn. It has a lot of dirty data and I'm only as good as what the data is showing me. And, after the board meeting, the CEO took me aside and basically told me that that he didn't want the board to know that. And I think that a lot of marketers struggle with that is that we are forced to put up numbers, but we're only as good as are the sales reps using the CRM accurately. that us being, no matter what metrics we know that we need to follow, it's only as good as if the data is accurate. so that's probably, yeah, that's one of the darkest ones that marketers deal with. Rootra and I always say... in the board meeting? Or do you stand by your decision? You know what? think I had to, I think I had to be honest. And I think, you know, I mean, when you're in board meetings, sometimes you've got to, you know, you've got to be quick on your feet and stuff. But at the end of the day, you know, if you're ahead of marketing, you have to own, you know, your job. think I would, I would have been honest again, because I was not set up for success. And quite frankly, right. I mean, that's what happens to marketing leaders. love it. ruta and i always say if you put shit in you get shit out. that's my favourite thing to say. and i.. i think i've actually said that in a board meeting as well. those.. that.. exact.. those exact words. I mean, that's how, it's more important than ever. Absolutely. now let's get into the topic. Obviously we're all talking as consultants, so we're kind of, I don't know whether we're slagging ourselves off or not. But what do you think is the number one myth, in particular like the CEO or the founder might have when it comes to hiring in a marketing consultant? Yeah, I mean, I think some consultants give other consultants a bad name. I think... those consultants that aren't setting goals and aren't accountable are ruining it for the rest of us. think at the end of the day, you can have a very good consultancy experience and you should, especially now more than ever, to have an outside view of your company. But you need to make sure that your consultants set goals and are accountable to their deliverables. And then you can have a very successful... relationship. Do you think it is just, just on your point there, Loren is it, do you think it's consultants peddling kind of like incorrect information that seems like glitzy and glamorous and attractive to the CEO or the founder, whoever it is that brings them in? Or do you think it's, the CEO and founder maybe doesn't actually truly understand the challenge or the problem that they've got. Is it a bit both maybe? think it's both. mean, at the end of the day, a consultancy is only as good as the answers to the questions that they ask. And I think today, a lot of companies are trying to do the same marketing and the same siloed sales effort that they used to do. They're still going, especially in the United States, they're still going to trade shows and spending a ton of money. when we know that the majority of touch points are digital, but yet we go and spend crazy amounts of money for the highest ROI. So we're still, I think a lot of companies are making very old fashioned decisions. And I think the benefit of a consultant is coming in and being able to have fresh eyes. But again, we're only as good as foundationally that the business understanding, themselves in their market position and ultimately understanding and talking to their customers. sometimes consultants are particularly brought in when there's funding being raised and you get brought in as a consultant because of the funding. It's like, this funding, go do stuff or like go figure out what to do or this funding. So now we need to review everything. But I feel like the parameters around that are usually quite blurry and not well defined and again, the questions that you asked and to be maybe not as useful as they should be, or like, you know, the question should be like, should you even be spending money on marketing activities and doing these kinds of things rather than just, we've raised money, get people in. Well, if you don't believe in marketing as a company, have a much bigger problem than any consultant can ever solve, right? I think the problem is a lot of consultants are brought in for very tactical, disparate things. Like it's like, here, consultant, do our digital advertising, right? And we know that it is an omni-channel strategy. And we know that it's the overall strategy in all the different channels working together. go to market teams, know, marching to the beat of the same drum, marching in the same direction is really quite key. So you can't go and just go and put duct tape, you know, on one part of the marketing effort or make an investment in another part of the marketing effort with a consultancy and expect that to move the needle for your marketing. It doesn't work, you know, that way. And I think companies are looking for especially now more than ever, are looking for magic, that, you magic bullet. And if you're looking to an agency to be your savior, you're looking in the wrong place. You're looking for a consultancy to come in and ask you the right questions and bring your organization together and be, you know, an outside perspective to empower your teams to get the right answers. That's how you should be thinking about how you use. consultancy and I think now more than ever, it's very important to do that because our teams are not communicating with one another. That leads us on beautifully onto our next question that we wanted to ask, which is, let's say you are a marketer at a pretty scrappy start up. There's not too much going around in terms of resource. How do you know when it's time to get that outside help and when you need those consultants or agencies to come in and to kind of boost what you're doing? Yeah, I mean, honestly, I think it's more of the CEO or even the private equity or the VC's responsibility. I think we're putting too much responsibility on marketing leaders and most of the time it is not the marketing leader's job. Marketing is only as good as the go-to-market strategy. Marketing is only as good as the product fit in the market. the CEO has a responsibility to make sure that they have the right product fit and the right message to their audience. marketing is only as good. And so I think It needs to be proactive that a consultant is brought in. And I think that everyone listens to the consultant. It's actually, it's quite wonderful I was a vice president of marketing four plus times and it's so interesting. It's like, even if you have all the skills and I hope marketing leaders are listening to me. today, even if you have all the skills and all the know-how, it's sort of like, it's like my husband says to me, it's like, he will tell me something 10 times and I won't listen. But then someone who I deemed the expert tells me the same thing. It's I, I have a more open-minded to listen. And then he says, I've been telling you that all along. And I think it's the same for marketing leadership. And I think that they should be using consultants as a superpower because it, if anything, It reinforces their opinion in the first place. It also really helps stakeholders cooperate. And we know as marketing leaders, it's about herding cats. The marketing part's the easy thing. It's getting people to cooperate and also to evolve the way they think about how you build revenue in this day and age. Because it used to be that we could be very disparate departments. Hey, marketing, you do this. And then there's a handoff and it's so pretty, the MQL gets scored up and then you give it to sales and you give it to the BDR team and you have like these very siloed teams and everybody knows their role and they're very defined and very disparate. Well, we know today that really these teams need to work together and they need to be one team. For better or for worse, a marketing leader doesn't always have the voice at the table. We're not always in the boardroom. Once in a while, we get to be visitors and be able to address the board, but it is... And it's only getting worse with the role of the CRO. We're being pushed, you know, a level down. And we don't always have a voice. So a consultant can be a great way to say, yeah, your marketing leader knows what they're doing, but we need to pull everyone together. Absolutely. So the thing is as well if you're a marketer listening and you're thinking about, okay, maybe we do need a consultant or your CEO is thinking we need to bring this marketing consultant in. People get really easily drawn in by stuff that they see on LinkedIn. And that is both like the kind of influencers and vendors. So who should marketing actually listen to? And how do you actually, I guess, sort the wheat from the chaff? Yeah. Well, I will say, you know, everyone is looking for the magic potion, the magic beans, the silver bullet, whatever you want to call it. Right. And so we, you know, we love to get advice from everyone. I think there's two things that are fairly factual to me is that you should not receive all of your education from vendors. And especially, A lot of the marketing vendors, we've always known that they're self-serving, obviously, but by the same token, once you become their customer, they don't teach you how to be a marketer. They teach you how to use their tool. And the reality is, is that no tool is going to help you to optimize a strategy that you don't have. And so that's what happens and that's what's happening more. than ever, it's like we, everyone wants that widget that's going to save them because there's so much, call it revenue desperation. marketers had it hard before, now with AI and with all of the content noise, It's even harder than ever to be able to know your audience's intention and be able to put out the right message at the right time to, you know, to have your brand and your voice be heard. so everyone wants that technology that's going to help you cut corners aside, think one of the things that is quite terrifying about especially what you see on LinkedIn at the moment, we've had basically everyone who's been on the podcast over the last few months has said they, you know, they're just even marketers just finding LinkedIn just so full of noise. And I think that's the that's the fear, right? If you don't know what you're looking for. you see someone who is going to, i don't know, potentially promise you the earth, wind and sun, you know, and they're like i can do all of this for you and they can give you the the silver bullet. but yet when you dig into their content there's not a lot of depth to it. or there's not a lot of honesty. so the people i i i often think beware of the people who have anything that says how to 10x that in their profile. like that to me is a big red flag. and i think yeah if i was looking for someone who was going to support from a consultancy perspective as much as people probably don't like this and don't want to hear it i would look for someone who is being honest and when i say honest they are saying things like it's not easy right now you need to have a good marketing strategy what does your data say all of those things And even though it's not sexy, it's not flashy and it's not like, you know, that's not fixing all of my problems in like one minute. I think that's the kind of stuff I would want to see. mean, and I know that that is a turn off. I don't know if it's the same for you, Loren. as marketers, we have to spend the time to self-educate and follow a lot of different influencers and people that we admire and see, figure out who are transparent, who are vulnerable, who really know good marketing. I think in our hearts, we know good marketing. They can go and rebrand, you know, old concepts like they do. But we know good marketing. And so I do think, I mean, we have to listen to the vendors and know the new technologies, yes. But we also need to really pick a few influencers that we really like. But you can find really, really good content, but you have to always be self-educating. But I think moreover, when you choose a consultant, find a consultant that is technology agnostic. because the consultants that are paid for license revenue and by the vendors, you know, they may have relationships with the vendors as far as they help the vendors that make happy customers, but the ones that get kickbacks from the technology just don't like, just run the other way because anytime there is any incentive, really causes organizations to make recommendations that are not necessarily a true consulting vein. And I think right now through all of the AI noise, it's all in everyone's building their brand. It's all about that trustworthiness is so important to come through. I like that. I also think with, with consultants, it's one, it's about honesty, but also it's about nuance. If someone comes across to you and they're like so gung-ho confident that this is the only way to do this. This is how you should be. Like every business is very different. You cannot be making absolutes like that unless it's like you should be doing marketing. Like it's on a very general level, but When it comes down to like specific ways of marketing, I think it's a huge red flag if someone's like mega, mega confident out the bat and they don't even know how to apply that to your business yet. I love that. I've been doing account-based marketing for a long time. There is a really big difference between actually doing successful account-based go to market and conceptual. So there's a lot of conceptual. influencers out there that they will tell you like how it works. So the vendors will tell you how their technology works. Actually having a successful go-to-market motion in an account-based way as one revenue team is something that a consultant like myself has a lot of experience. That we know how you evolve behavioral changes for the departments to work together, how to compensate them differently. how to change the role of the SDR. Like there's stuff that because I've been through that multiple times, not only as a vice president of marketing, but also as a consultant with dozens of customers, the reality of that is something that I hope that I can bring credibility to speak about. But sadly, there's so many that speak about it that it's just on a conceptual level and that does not help. because what happens is companies dive in and jump in with both feet. They go and buy an ABM platform prematurely. And they think the vendor is going to help teach them how to do marketing, and they don't. And then they're all of sudden stuck with this six figure piece of technology with no strategy in place and only a conceptual understanding of the way that it works to put into motion. And that is what's happening. can't even tell you how many. companies I've walked into in the last few weeks to hear the same story over and over again. So who's going to take responsibility for that? And right now, nobody. But a consultant can really help dive in and kind of pick up the pieces and help kind of put things in place. And moreover, the infrastructure and the behavior of your go-to-market team is really more impactful than even the technology itself. think that's it, Loren. Like one of the things that stands out to me from your point there is like, it's not like hiring a good consultant. It's not that they just know how to do the thing. It's that they understand how to manage the relationships of the internal team to get the thing happening. So whatever the thing is, they get it and they understand the dynamics of the team and they take time to understand that and work with your team and to help people like along the way. It's so much more than just coming in and just being like, plunking something and buggering off. It's like, no, it's about more than that. It's about, yeah, how do we actually make this thing successful? And that is, a lot of that is change management. it can be difficult if you bring in something like account-based marketing and you're not used to it. You know, that's a big company culture shift, even in the mindset of like your, you know, your C-suite through down to your SDRs. So yeah, I think that's, that's a really good point. that people need to be looking out for. Do you think the person in front of you when you're talking to a consultant can manage that change for you as well as the actual implementation of whatever the thing is? And I think a consultant can be a great source of coming in and again saying, Hey, you know, marketing has changed how you build pipeline revenue has changed. Do you know that you are, you have revenue challenges, you have this revenue desperation. This is a more optimal way to do it. And instead of focusing your whole TAM, or the 5 % that are in market only, you really need to think about the 95 % and build brand awareness and education. So when they're ready for your solution, they'll be thinking about you. And that's a very, I guess as marketers, we've always kind of known that, but we're always had so much pressure to do marketing wrong. We had a really interesting conversation in our prequel around, sometimes as a consultant, you go into a company and they think the problem is the marketing and you go in as a consultant and you're like, the problem is not marketing. The problem is X or it's everything else that you're doing. How do you handle that? If you do come across that and maybe what's a good way of, not what am I trying to say? What's a good way of. of educating at least the person that you're speaking to about that. it's sort of like layers of the onion and, and marketing and marketing campaigns is like the outer layer of the diagram. And in the center is product and around the center is about product fit and, and about just, you know, the market fit and the features of the product and the problem that's being solved. And then it comes to your sales team and how you're being compensated and how the teams are working together. And then the outer layer is the campaign. And what's happening is that we always want to blame marketing. Like it's easy to blame marketing. The average marketing leader has an 18 month shelf life in a technology company. There's a reason for that. It's easy to say, your marketing didn't work. So the first thing that I do is I say, you don't have a marketing problem, you have a go-to-market problem. And then it takes ownership of the CEO has ownership of that or the CRO, and the head of product as well. It is an executive team decision and the strategy of the organization. If that strategy is not sound and if they are not talking to customers, which again is the biggest problem, then a marketing leader is only as good as that. The other thing too is I don't think most executive teams know what marketing's purpose is. know, marketing's job is to create demands. We do not close deals. We do not control the last mile, right? I also think it's quite fascinating that for years, CEOs told me branding didn't matter. And what I'm really loving right now is how much we realize that branding really, really matters. Because if you're focusing that 95 % that are not in market, but are in various stages of whether they are aware they have a problem or aware of your company or your product or not, branding is really quite key. so if if you are looking for a consultant and they kind of you know you're like this this this person looks good or this consultancy looks good how can you spot kind of the kind of like silver bullet scam marketing consultants what are the things you would look out for Consultants who are good need to make sure that their deliverables are extremely clear I think that is first and foremost and that the consultant is truly treating you like a partner that you do not have a dependency on them. You should never have a dependency on a consultant. A consultant should be there to kind of get your infrastructure in place with you, get your resources on the same page, make sure, again, that you're marching to the beat of the same drum, and that is empowering your employees to be able to be educated and to be able to handle a successful strategy moving forward. I was talking into a consultancy last year and they had a statement of work for like an ungodly amount of money. And I was like, that is outrageous. Cause what's the ROI of that? And why would an organization even agree to? to that. It's one thing to get a consultancy to get you started or to be a solid resource in lieu of a headcount because it makes more sense to have a consultant sometimes instead of a headcount. I recently saw a, God, what were they? SEO, PPC, one or the other, one of the standard, either organic or PPC agencies. And what they did is they created their own analytics account. They ran the Google ads on their own agency account. So once the client left, they couldn't see anything, any data, any following, any tracking. And I was like, What in the hell? And the client didn't know that that wasn't standard practice. was like, that's really, really naughty. Like nobody should be doing this. It's your data. It's your business. It's the money you paid. They should absolutely be using your Google accounts and doing it on your account that you can have access to. yeah, speaking of like those dependencies, things like that, just eat me up inside. Yeah. I I witnessed it every day that I'll talk to a company that's spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising with an agency and the agency's put no goals in place. they give them these vanity metrics. No, I know. I know. They put them vanity metrics and again, they're disparate from the rest of the marketing effort. I have a real horror story about this because when I started out as a consultant I had a few like a handful of my own clients and then through a marketing agency I was kind of their their pseudo you know director of marketing who they'd you know had roll out to their clients when their clients didn't have access to any of their marketing data But the thing that was so dodgy about it was that basically it was like the fact that the agency had kind of almost for a long, long time encouraged clients not to be interested about their data. And they kind of used me as a bit of a pawn in a game that was a bit like, but we can get you your data, know, kind of thing. It's like, do these poor people not realize that they should have had access to this stuff the entire time and that they shouldn't have been paying people? to create content for them when there's no data backing up the performance of any of the content they've created. And when I say, I remember like I did a review for them once of one of their clients, really big B2B professional services company, like huge global business. And they basically, in the SOW, it was basically a breakdown of that we will write 20 blogs, we will write 700 LinkedIn posts, and they're all charged like this, this, this, this, this, and this, and this. there's nothing in there about performance or quality or anything like that and so these people are just paying for the the content to be created and obviously at the end of it they're like what did we get like you should you just be happy that you got your 20 blogs But I would just say to people, you know, it's like, be wary the organisation that's the kind of marketing consultant or agency that says something to you like, you know, like, I remember one of the things I said in my review is why haven't you pushed your clients if they don't have marketing strategies to do a strategy? And they were like, we just, you know, and it's because they can't be asked and they're like, this is an easy, this is easy money. they don't have a strategy they don't know what they're looking for you know it's that kind of stuff that i would just be really careful of like you do not want somebody to churn out a list of stuff for you without any of those goals or metrics set in like with you you know with your team sitting down and trying to be part of your team and work with you collaboratively this is a good segue into our marketing gossip Loren is there anything you've seen lately that has either annoyed you or that you love that you want to tell us about? my gosh, so I've covered a lot of stuff. okay, let's start with things. there's always things that annoy me, which is terrible. I'm gonna start with that. So, what annoys me? What annoys me is the drama on LinkedIn of like people fake fighting with each other as influencers. I don't know if you guys. that. Yeah, like at first it's funny at first, because it's real. Like it might be like a real argument between people on LinkedIn and it's like organic. And you're like, wow, LinkedIn is even more fun than I thought, because there's kind of like this, know, differing opinions and they're, you know, back and forth and whatever, but I'm, I'm, it's becoming like, like fake wrestling to some degree that there's like these very orchestrated like, fights on LinkedIn. I don't know. It's never women. It's always men. And I don't get it. And I'm kind of tuning out. the sort of the angry fodder. Like I'm just tired of it. Like the... just the mediocre white men, Loren, just shouting at each other. It's just, it's just really, it's fascinating because, and I don't know. And it's, it's never, it's never really that productive. It's really not that productive because at the end of the day, a lot of them are talking about old marketing concepts and rebranding them under new names. That annoys me. I hate labels. At the end of the day, like I might have certain frameworks and things that I use or certain ways that I refer to things because people understand what I'm saying. But at end of the day, it's just good marketing. So I don't care what you call it. Especially because I focus so much on account-based marketing. There's always these arguments on social media, that's not account-based. This is account-based. That's not account-based. That's not ABM. That's ABX. That's not really one-to-one. That annoys me. That so annoys me. Cause who cares? Like at the end of the day, again, it's good marketing. It's what's best for the company. It's what they're able to do with the marketing resources they have. And at the end of the day, it's up to them how to test, you know, the things that work best for them. Thank you so much, Loren. It's been wonderful and we'll see you all again soon.