Solved: Skills Needed When Hiring a B2B Advertising Consultant

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

That's a really good question, and honestly, it’s probably the most important one to ask before you spend any money on ads. It's easy to get burned by someone who can talk the talk but can't actually deliver. I'm happy to give you some of my initial thoughts, based on my experience, on what you should be looking for in a B2B consultant and, just as importantly, what a good one should be doing for you.

The first thing I'd check is their track record...

This sounds obvious, but you'd be surprised how many people skip this. Don't just take their word for it, you need to see proper proof. Look for detailed case studies on their website. And not just any case studies, they need to be relevant to you. If you're a B2B business, you need to see that they have experience with other B2B clients, ideally in a simillar niche.

Results are never guaranteed in advertising, anyone who promises you a specific ROAS or number of leads is lying. But a strong track record shows they know what they're doing. For instance, we've worked with a number of B2B software companies and have been able to acheive some solid results for them. One campaign we ran on LinkedIn brought in leads from B2B decision makers at a $22 cost per lead. For another B2B software client, we used Meta Ads to get 4,622 registrations at just $2.38 each. This kind of specific, verifiable result is what you're looking for. It shows they understand the platform and the audience.

After you've seen their case studies and it looks like they have the right kind of experience, get on a call with them. This is your chance to really grill them. A good consultant should offer some sort of free initial consultation or strategy review. This shouldn't just be a sales pitch. You should walk away from that call with genuine, actionable advice that you could go and implement yourself. They should be asking you tough questions about your business, your customers, and your goals. If it feels like they're just trying to get you to sign a contract, that's a red flag. You're looking for a partner who demonstrates their expertise from the very first conversation.

Also, have a look at their reviews. What are other clients saying? Are the reviews detailed? Do they sound like they're from real business owners with similar challenges to yours? This all builds a picture of trust and competence.

Tbh, if a potential client has seen our detailed case studies, read our reviews, and had a free strategy session with us, and then asks to speak to one of our current clients for a reference, it's an instant red flag for us. It signals a fundamental lack of trust from the beginning, and that kind of relationship is unlikely to be succesful. A good partnership has to be built on mutual trust, and the evidence should speak for itself.

A good consultant will first look at who you're actually selling to...

This is where most advertising fails before a single penny is spent. A consultant who just asks for your target audience and then starts building campaigns is not a consultant; they're a button pusher. The real work, the work that actually drives growth, is in deeply understanding your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). And I don't mean some sterile, useless demographic profile like "we sell to companies in the finance sector with 50-200 employees". That tells you absolutely nothing of value and leads to generic, ineffective ads.

You have to define your customer by their nightmare. What is the specific, urgent, expensive, and potentially career-threatening problem that keeps them up at night? Your ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state. For example, a good consultant won't see a 'Head of Engineering'. They'll see a leader who is terrified that her best developers are about to quit because they're so frustrated with a broken, inefficient workflow. They don't see a law firm that 'needs document management software'. They see a partner who is petrified of missing a critical filing deadline, exposing the firm to a massive malpractice lawsuit.

This is the level of detail required. Once you've identified that nightmare, a real expert will help you figure out where these people live online. It’s not about just targeting 'C-Level Executives' on LinkedIn. It's about finding the niche signals that seperate the real buyers from the noise.

-> Do they listen to specific podcasts like 'Acquired' on their commute?
-> Are they reading industry newsletters like 'Stratechery' every morning?
-> What SaaS tools do they already pay for? HubSpot? Salesforce?
-> Are they active members of the 'SaaS Growth Hacks' Facebook group?
-> Do they follow and engage with industry leaders like Jason Lemkin on Twitter?

This isn't just data; this is the blueprint for your entire targeting strategy. If a consultant isn't pushing you to do this deep, uncomfortable work first, they have no business taking your money. They're just guessing, and they're doing it with your budget.

Next, you'll need to understand the numbers...

Most businesses are obsessed with the wrong metric. They ask "How low can I get my cost per lead (CPL)?". This is the wrong question. The real question a strategic consultant should help you answer is, "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?". The answer to that lies in your Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

If you don't know this number, you're flying blind. It's the key that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth. The calculation itself is pretty straightforward. You just need three pieces of information:

1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): What's a typical customer worth to you each month?
2. Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after costs of service?
3. Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of customers do you lose each month?

Let's run through a quick example. Let's say your numbers look like this:

The calculation is: LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

So in this case:
LTV = (£500 * 0.80) / 0.04
LTV = £400 / 0.04
LTV = £10,000

This is the truth. Each customer you acquire is worth £10,000 in gross margin to your business over their lifetime. Now, armed with this knowledge, we can make smart decisions about ad spend. A healthy business model often aims for a 3:1 ratio between LTV and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). This means for every £1 you spend to acquire a customer, you should get at least £3 back in lifetime value.

With a £10,000 LTV, you can therefore afford to spend up to £3,333 to acquire a single new customer. If your sales process is decent and you convert, say, 1 in 10 qualified leads into a paying customer, you can afford to pay up to £333 per qualified lead.

Suddenly, that £250 lead from a perfectly targeted ad to a CTO on LinkedIn doesn't seem so expensive, does it? It looks like an absolute bargain. This is the kind of financial modelling a top-tier consultant should be doing with you. It frees you from the tyranny of chasing cheap, low-quality leads and allows you to confidently invest in acquiring the right customers who will drive long-term growth. Without this math, you're just gambling.

You probably should re-think your offer...

Now we get to what is, without a doubt, the number one reason most B2B advertising campaigns fail: the offer. I've seen so many businesses with a great service or product fall flat because their call to action is lazy, arrogant, and offers zero immediate value. I'm talking, of course, about the dreaded "Request a Demo" button.

Think about it from your prospect's perspective. They are a busy, important decision-maker. "Request a Demo" asks them to commit their valuable time to a meeting where they know they are going to be sold to. It's high-friction, low-value, and instantly positions you as just another commodity vendor clamouring for their attention. A good consultant will tell you to delete that button immediately.

The only job of your offer is to create an "aha!" moment. It must deliver a moment of undeniable, tangible value that makes the prospect sell *themselves* on your solution. You have to solve a small, real problem for them for free to earn the right to ask them to pay you to solve the whole thing. If a consultant isn't challenging your core offer, they're neglecting a huge part of their job.

If you're a SaaS company, this is your unfair advantage. The gold standard is a free trial or a freemium plan, with no credit card details required. Let them get their hands on the actual product. Let them feel the transformation it provides. When the product itself proves its own value, the sale becomes a simple formality. You stop chasing Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and start getting Product Qualified Leads (PQLs) who are already convinced.

If you're a service business, you're not exempt. You must bottle your expertise into a tool or an asset that provides instant value. For a marketing agency, this could be a free, automated SEO audit that instantly shows a prospect their top 3 keyword opportunities. For a corporate training company, it could be a free 15-minute interactive video module on 'Handling Difficult Conversations' that a new manager can use right away. For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy, our offer is a free 20-minute strategy session where we audit a company's failing ad campaigns and give them a clear plan. We solve a real problem for free.

This thinking must also extend to your ad copy. You don't sell features; you sell outcomes. A good consultant will help you craft a message that speaks directly to the 'nightmare' we talked about earlier.

For a high-touch service, you use the Problem-Agitate-Solve framework. You don't sell "fractional CFO services." You sell a good night's sleep. The ad copy would be something like: "Are your cash flow projections just a shot in the dark? Are you one bad month away from a payroll crisis while your competitors are confidently raising their next round? Get expert financial strategy for a fraction of a full-time hire. We build dashboards that turn uncertainty into predictable growth."

See the difference? It's all about empathy for their specific pain.

We'll need to look at the right platforms to actually reach these people...

Only after you've done the hard work of defining your customer's nightmare, understanding your LTV, and crafting an irresistible offer can you start thinking about which ad platform to use. A good consultant will choose the platform based on the strategy, not the other way around. For B2B, you generally have two main battlegrounds.

1. Google Search Ads: The Intent Harvester
This is for capturing demand that already exists. People are actively going to Google and typing in their problems. The skill here is in targeting keywords that show high commercial intent. A poor consultant might target a broad, informational keyword like "what is AI". A proffesional will target a keyword that signals an urgent need, like "AI implementation service for finance" or "software for lead generation". You're meeting a pre-qualified buyer at the exact moment they're looking for a solution. This is often the lowest hanging fruit for B2B.

2. LinkedIn Ads: The Surgical Strike
This is for creating demand where it might not yet exist. Its power lies in its incredibly specific targeting. You're not just targeting an industry; you're targeting the Head of Sales at a specific list of 500 companies you want to work with, who have between 100-500 employees. This is where your deep ICP work pays off. You can get your message in front of the exact decision-makers you need to reach. The key here is testing different ad formats. Sponsored Content with a Lead Gen Form can work well to lower initial friction, but pointing ads to a dedicated landing page with your high-value offer will almost always generate better quality, more qualified leads, even if the cost per lead is higher.

3. Meta (Facebook/Instagram) Ads: The Unconventional Weapon
Many dismiss Meta for B2B, but a savvy consultant knows how it can work. The targeting is less precise than LinkedIn, but you can still find pockets of opportunity by targeting interests like "small business owners" or users who follow specific industry publications or competitors. The real trap here is the 'Brand Awareness' objective. When you tell Facebook to get you "awareness", you are actively commanding its algorithm to find you the cheapest, least engaged users who are least likely to ever buy anything. It's a waste of money. A good consultant will insist on running conversion-focused campaigns (e.g., for leads or sign-ups) from day one. Awareness is a byproduct of sales, not a prerequisite for them.

A consultant’s job is to build a cohesive system where the audience, the message, the offer, and the platform all work together. Anyone can learn to click the buttons in Google Ads. The real skill is in building the strategy that makes those clicks profitable.

So, to put it all together...

Finding the right B2B advertising consultant isn't about finding someone with a long list of technical certifications. It's about finding a strategic partner who forces you to answer the hard questions about your business. They should be obsessed with your customer's problems, fluent in the language of LTV and CAC, and ruthless about crafting offers that provide real, immediate value.

This is a very different skillset from just 'running ads'. It's a blend of psychology, finance, and direct-response marketing. When you find someone who thinks this way, you're not just hiring a freelancer; you're investing in a growth engine for your business. I hope this gives you a much clearer framework for your search.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you to look for in a summarised table below:

As you can see, there's a lot that goes into a truly effective B2B advertising strategy. It's a complex process, and getting it right can be the difference between burning through cash and building a predictable pipeline of new customers. This is exactly the kind of strategic deep-dive we conduct with businesses during our free initial strategy sessions.

If you'd like to have a chat and see how these principles could be applied to your specific business, feel free to get in touch and we can set something up.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh