You have decided to buy marketing from outside rather than hire it. That decision, and its timing, is a separate question, and it is answered in when a startup should hire marketing, and what kind. What follows assumes it is settled, because the next question is the one that actually gets founders stuck: three suppliers, three confident proposals, three different shapes of contract, and no obvious way to compare them.
The three are different contracts, not different sizes of the same thing.
A consulting engagement is bought against a question and ends when the question is answered. An agency retainer is bought against a scope of work and renews while the work continues. A fractional arrangement is bought against a number and a seat in your leadership meeting.
Read those again as commitments rather than as services. One buys you an answer, one buys you output, one buys you somebody who has to explain the result. They are priced differently because they are accountable for different things.
Most disappointing engagements are a mismatch of contract shape rather than a bad supplier. A company that needed an answer signs for output and gets a great deal of work pointed somewhere it should not have gone.
A consultant is scoped by the question.
The engagement that works here is narrow and short. Should we go after this segment or that one. Why did the paid channel stop returning. What is the honest reason our demos do not close.
Ask for the shape of the answer before you start: a recommendation, the reasoning behind it, and what you would do first on Monday. A proposal describing a discovery phase and a workshop series, with no named question at the end, is output wearing a consultant’s title.
You can end a good consulting engagement holding a well-argued strategy and no one available to execute it. Plan for that before you sign, or the answer sits in a document until it goes stale.
An agency is scoped by the work, and the work needs something to point at.
An agency is right when the decisions are made and the hands are not there. It is also right when you need four skills at once and cannot justify a hire for any of them, which is the ordinary situation before a Series A.
It is the wrong shape when you cannot say what you want in a sentence. Agencies will write the plan for you and some write good ones, but you are then paying execution rates for a decision, and you cannot judge whether the plan is right, because judging it is the thing you outsourced.
A retainer signed before that decision is made has nothing to point at, and the misfit shows up early on both sides.
A fractional CMO is scoped by a number and a seat.
Neither of the other contracts is accountable for an outcome. A consultant answers for the advice, an agency for the deliverables. If your problem is that no one senior is holding the whole thing together and reporting on it, that is what fractional leadership is bought for.
It only works where there is something to lead. A fractional CMO with no team, no budget and no channel running is an advisor on a longer contract. Two days a month is a leadership arrangement, not a marketing department.
The smallest version tells you the most.
Whichever shape fits, buy the smallest one first. One question for a consultant. One channel or one project for an agency, not a year. One quarter against a stated number for fractional leadership.
Then judge the supplier on how they handle a small engagement rather than on the proposal. Ask what they would stop doing if the first month went badly, and who exactly does the work. Vague answers to either question are the signal, and they are easier to get early than late.
COMNIO takes the second shape: five services, delivered as the work, for founders who have made the decision and want it built. If you are still short of the decision, say so on any call before you sign anything, here or anywhere else.
Tell us what you’re building.