A marketing strategy consultant who ties every dollar to pipeline

Scaile is where you hire Guy Miotke as a marketing strategy consultant: a senior operator who works out what your marketing should do, which numbers prove it, and what to stop doing. I have spent 20+ years in marketing, digital marketing and revenue operations, and I have managed over $100M in marketing budgets. I work from Appleton, Wisconsin and with companies across the US.

A good consultant leaves you with decisions, not observations. This page covers what a marketing consultant should deliver, how to vet one, and how I work.

Marketing consultant for small business: what you should get

A small business does not need a 90-slide strategy. It needs answers to a short list of questions, in writing, that your team can act on Monday morning. Here is what a marketing consultant for a small business should hand you.

• A clear destination. One number the marketing exists to move, such as booked sales calls or qualified leads per month. Everything else is measured against it.
• An honest read of what is working. Which channels, offers and messages produce buyers, and which only produce activity.
• A prioritized plan. Three to five moves in order, with an owner and a date on each. Not thirty ideas.
• A measurement setup. You should be able to see cost per lead, cost per booked call and close rate without asking anyone.
• A stop list. The spend and tasks to cut. This is the deliverable most consultants skip.

How to vet a marketing consultant

Ask these before you sign anything.

1. What have you operated, not just advised? Someone who has owned a budget and a team gives different advice than someone who has only written recommendations.
2. What number will you be judged on? If the answer is impressions or followers, keep looking.
3. What will you not do? A consultant who takes every channel is guessing at all of them.
4. Who does the work after the plan? The plan should fit your team, or your budget for outside help. Ask to see how it gets executed.
5. Can I talk to your work, not your pitch? Ask for specific results and how they were measured. Vague case studies are a warning.
6. What happens when the numbers are bad? You want someone who reports it plainly and changes course.

Consultant, freelancer and agency are not the same thing. A consultant advises and decides. An agency executes tasks. Many small businesses do best by getting the strategy right first, then choosing who executes it.

Growth marketing consultant: test, measure, scale

Growth marketing is a loop, not a campaign. You pick a hypothesis, run a test small enough to be cheap, read the result against one number, and put more money behind what won. Then you repeat.

The part most teams get wrong is the reading. They look at clicks or leads because those are easy to see, and scale ads that fill the top of the funnel while the bottom stays empty. My rule is to align every KPI to one point, the qualified lead (the MQL), and cut the same data by funnel, ad, hook, media and copy. Then you combine the winners. In my experience the row label you choose to report on changes what your team optimizes for, so pick it on purpose.

At a FinTech SaaS company where I led marketing from a standing start, this approach let us cut the testing budget by 35% and redeploy that money into working ads. We also cut ad turnaround from 10 to 14 days down to 24 to 48 hours using data and AI, and found winners in 3 to 5 days. Faster tests cost less per lesson. That is the whole growth model.

Revenue operations consultant: connect marketing to pipeline

Revenue operations is the plumbing between marketing and sales. If the two teams count different things, every meeting becomes an argument about whose number is right. A revenue operations consultant makes the funnel one system with one set of definitions, from the first click to the closed deal.

I built the funnel at that FinTech SaaS company as a KPI stack, where each stage had a target and everything had to add up:

On top of those conversion rates sit three money metrics: cost per booked call, revenue per held call and ROAS. When a stage misses, you know exactly where the leak is. When ROAS drifts, you can trace it to a specific stage instead of blaming the ads.

The result in that case: 15,000+ demos booked in 2024 against 4,000 in 2023, and ROAS up 20% while budgets grew roughly 300%. A stack like this is what lets you spend more without getting blind.

Demand generation consultant: attention versus intention

Demand generation is about who you are talking to and how ready they are to buy. Eugene Schwartz described five awareness stages: unaware, problem-aware, solution-aware, product-aware and most aware. Each stage needs different marketing.

• Attention marketing reaches people who are unaware or only problem-aware. It earns interest, and it is slower and harder to measure.
• Intention marketing reaches people who are already solution- or product-aware and comparing options. It captures a decision that is already forming.

At the bottom of the funnel, with the most aware buyers, I go "kitchen sink": spend where the buyer is deciding, with every touch you can afford. Buyers usually need many touches before they act, so the cost of each touch decides your profitability.

I run demand generation as a direct-to-calendar model. Everything is measured by booked demos, which means the whole system points at one action: a real prospect on a real calendar. That keeps a demand generation program honest, because a booked call cannot be inflated the way reach can.

Consultant or fractional CMO: which do you need?

A consultant gives you direction and hands the work back to you. A fractional CMO stays and runs marketing with you: owning the strategy, the budget and the team. The short version:

• Choose a consultant if you have a capable marketer or team and need a senior mind to set direction, review plans and check the numbers.
• Choose a fractional CMO if nobody senior owns marketing and you want someone accountable for results week to week.

If that second description sounds like you, read what a fractional CMO is or go straight to fractional CMO services. Not sure which fits? The Scale Check takes two minutes.

Working with me as your marketing consultant

The consulting engagement at Scaile is the Advisor plan. It is monthly, with two sessions a month. Sessions are strategy work with you or your marketer, review of plans and campaigns, and guidance on AI tools and vendors. It is built for teams that already have a marketer who needs a senior sounding board.

If you would rather start with a defined project, the AI Growth Sprint is a fixed-price 30 days: a marketing and AI audit, a 90-day growth plan and two AI workflows built and handed off. Scaile does not publish a price sheet. I scope each engagement on a call so you pay for what you need. For AI-specific questions, see AI marketing.

Proof: what this looks like in numbers

I started at a FinTech SaaS company in January 2023 with no brand, no website and no staff. The company had started as a client of my own marketing firm. We passed $30M in total revenue in the first year, from zero, and had our first $1M new-business month in December 2023. I grew the team from nothing to 17 direct reports, with no outside capital. In 2024, revenue beat 2023 despite roughly 300% CPM inflation and dozens of copycat competitors, and the new website drew 2.2M new visitors.

I share these to show the method works when someone owns it. I will not promise your results, because your market, offer and starting point are different. I will tell you plainly what I think the numbers say.