Start with the outcome, not the job title
Most briefs that come to us open with a role: "we need a PPC person." That is a reasonable place to start, but it is rarely the useful one. The better opening is the number you are trying to move — more demos booked, a lower cost per qualified lead, a list that converts instead of just growing.
The reason is simple. The same outcome can belong to several roles. "More qualified leads" might mean a PPC specialist if your offer converts and you just need volume, a cold email specialist if you have a clear target list and no inbound, a B2B lead generation specialist if the buying cycle is long enough to need several touches, or an SEO specialist if what you actually need is demand that keeps arriving after you stop paying for it. Tell us the outcome and we will tell you which role owns it.
What actually moves the rate
Marketing rates through Cutbound range from around $5/hr to well past $95/hr, and monthly retainers from roughly $350 to $5,000 and above. Four things explain most of that spread:
- Seniority. Someone executing a playbook you hand them costs a fraction of someone deciding what the playbook should be.
- Channel. Technical channels — deliverability, attribution, marketing ops — carry a premium because fewer people do them well.
- Accountability. Running campaigns is cheaper than owning a pipeline number. The second one includes the judgement calls.
- Commitment. Longer engagements open up marketers who will not take one-off work, and often at a better rate.
Paid buys attention, organic earns it
Worth deciding early, because it changes who you hire. Paid channels — search, social, outbound — give you volume you control and results you can read within weeks, and they stop the moment the budget does. Organic channels — SEO, content, owned social — take longer to show anything and keep working after you stop spending.
Most companies need both eventually, and hiring for both at once is usually a mistake at small budgets. If you need pipeline this quarter, start with paid or outbound. If you are building something you expect to still be selling in three years, start the SEO and content work now, because the lag is the whole problem with it. Say which of those two you are in when you send the brief and we will weight the recommendation accordingly.
Retainer or hourly?
A monthly retainer buys ongoing ownership: someone whose job it is to keep a channel running, notice when it stops working, and tell you why. It suits anything continuous — paid media, lifecycle email, outbound.
Hourly suits defined pieces of work: an account audit, a migration, a campaign build, a one-off funnel fix. If you are not sure which you want, say so in the brief. We will quote whichever fits the work better, and we will tell you if you have asked for the wrong one.
Ad spend is not the same as the retainer
Worth stating plainly, because it causes more confusion than anything else on this page. The rates and retainers quoted here cover the marketer's time. Ad spend, tooling, data, and sending infrastructure sit on top and go directly to the platforms, not to us or to the marketer.
When you tell us your budget, tell us which one you mean. A $2,000 monthly budget that has to cover both the person and the ad spend leads to a completely different recommendation than $2,000 for the person alone.
You do not need a marketing plan first
You do not need a formal marketing plan, a channel strategy, or a documented ICP to hire through Cutbound. Describe what you sell, who buys it, what you have already tried, and what you want to be true in three months. Our team turns that into a requirement.
If part of what you need is someone to write the plan itself, that is a real brief too — it points at a more senior hire, and we will say so rather than quietly sending you a junior.
Be honest about what has not worked
The most useful line in any brief is the one about what you already tried and why you stopped. It tells us which channels are genuinely exhausted, which were abandoned too early, and which failed for a reason that has nothing to do with the channel — usually the offer or the targeting.
It also stops us recommending the thing you have already burned money on. If you want a second opinion on whether something was abandoned too early, put that in the brief as well.