Hiring is hard. Hiring outside your company, especially for sales and marketing, can feel like throwing darts in the dark and hoping you hit a bullseye. The stakes are high, the market is crowded, and buzzwords outnumber results by a long shot. But if you’re a business owner trying to grow in 2025, having the right external talent might be the difference between keeping the lights on and scaling into something much bigger.

Hire the Player, Not the Position

Too many businesses look for a “marketing strategist” or “sales consultant” and forget to ask if the person behind that title has ever actually driven real growth. The resume might be clean, the site might sparkle, but you need someone who’s gotten their hands dirty. Look for doers over talkers. Someone who grew a startup from scratch or built out a repeatable process that boosted conversions is way more useful than someone who knows how to run a brand audit in their sleep.

Make Collaboration Clear and Consistent

When you’re sharing documents with outside professionals, clarity matters as much as content. PDFs remain a go-to for a reason—they hold formatting steady across platforms, so no one’s dealing with weird line breaks or missing fonts. Tools that let you highlight key points, drop in sticky notes, or add callouts give you control without cluttering the file. If you're unsure whether it really matters, the impact of editing PDFs on documents becomes clear when feedback gets missed or misinterpreted in the handoff.

Test Small Before Going Big

Every contractor is a pitch deck away from promising the moon, and some of them might actually deliver. But you don’t marry someone after one good date. Start with a micro-engagement. Have them run a week-long email campaign, write a landing page, or audit your ad spend. Something small, measurable, and time-boxed. If the results feel right, ramp up. If not, you’ve bought clarity instead of a long-term headache.

Make Sure They Know How to Measure

There’s no room for fluff in 2025. If someone tells you your “brand story is evolving nicely” but can’t explain what that means for your bottom line, they’re wasting your time. Find people who can work in metrics, not metaphors. That doesn’t mean they have to be spreadsheet wizards, but they need to tie their output to a number. Impressions, click-throughs, pipeline growth, return on ad spend—pick your poison, but insist on clarity. This matters even more when you're choosing among high-impact sales freelancers and agencies pitching short-term turnarounds.

Check Who’s in Their Corner

You wouldn’t hire an employee without references, so why skip that step with external hires? Ask who they’ve worked with recently, what those engagements looked like, and how the relationship ended. Better yet, reach out to past clients. Don’t just ask if they liked the work, ask if the person hit deadlines, changed their mind when the data said so, and brought new ideas to the table. You’ll learn more in five minutes from a real client than in any proposal.

Look Beyond Your Industry

It’s tempting to only hire people who’ve worked in your niche before. But sometimes the best ideas come from someone who sees your space with fresh eyes. A B2B marketing expert might help a consumer product stand out in an entirely new way. A sales coach who’s never touched SaaS might challenge your assumptions about pricing or buyer personas. Cross-pollination works in business just like in nature, and outsiders often bring the sharpest ideas.

Pay for Value, Not Time

Hourly billing makes sense for legal advice or technical troubleshooting. It makes less sense for creative strategy or growth consulting. Don’t fall into the trap of measuring contributions by the clock. Some of the most impactful shifts in your business will come from a conversation or insight that took five minutes to deliver but ten years to earn. Be open to project-based rates, retainers, or success bonuses. When you pay for outcomes, you get people who care about them.

Hiring external help can absolutely boost your sales and marketing—but it won’t fix a broken foundation. If your offer isn’t compelling, your messaging is off, or your customer experience is clunky, no consultant in the world can spin that into gold. These pros can amplify what’s already working, help you double down on strengths, and point out blind spots you didn’t know you had. But you’ve still got to own the mission. They’re partners, not saviors.

Discover how the Forest Lake Area Chamber of Commerce can help your business thrive by connecting you with nearly 250 local businesses and a wealth of community events!