The client portal for independent marketing strategy consultants.
Get deliverables explicitly approved so revisions stop being free, keep execution requests outside a strategy fee, and bill the retainer without stopping the work.
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Generic client tools don’t know what you actually deliver.
Everyone at the client has an opinion about marketing
Nobody second-guesses a tax structure. Everybody has a view on positioning. A strategy deck that was approved on Tuesday reopens on Thursday because the founder’s co-founder saw it, and the revision round you priced for one pass becomes three.
Clients hire you for strategy and then ask for execution
“Could you just write the emails while you’re here?” The line between the strategist you were engaged as and the freelancer you are becoming gets crossed one small favour at a time, and there is rarely a moment where refusing feels proportionate.
Your deliverable is judged on taste, so approval is slippery
A positioning document or a brand narrative does not have a pass/fail state the way a model or a policy does. Without an explicit sign-off moment, “approved” is a feeling someone had in a meeting — and feelings are revisable.
Retainers get billed late because the work never stops
Marketing retainers have no natural pause. There is always a campaign in flight, which means there is never an obviously good moment to stop and do your own invoicing.
How marketing strategy consultants use ConsultBase.
How does a marketing consultant use ConsultBase?
You create an engagement per client with milestones matching the real arc — audit complete, positioning drafted, messaging framework approved, campaign plan delivered, launch support. Deliverables sit under those milestones for the client to formally approve, which converts a vague “they liked it” into a dated record of who signed off on what. The client sees it in a portal branded to your practice.
How do I stop revision rounds from eating the margin?
The revision cap gets written into the SOW, and the deliverable in the engagement gets explicitly approved rather than drifting toward acceptance. Once a deliverable is approved, reopening it is visibly a new request rather than a continuation of the old one, which is the difference between an awkward conversation and a routine change order sent as a fresh proposal.
How do I hold the line between strategy and execution?
Scope stops being a document nobody reopens. The engagement shows exactly which deliverables were agreed, so an execution request is visibly outside it. You send it as a separate proposal — priced as execution rather than absorbed into a strategy fee — and the client signs it online. The point is not to say no more often; it is that saying yes stops being free.
What does the client see between deliverables?
Which phase the engagement is in, what is complete, what is with them for review, and what you are waiting on from their side. On marketing engagements the honest answer is often that you are waiting on their brand assets, their customer interviews, or a decision from someone who has not replied — and a portal that shows it plainly resolves that faster than another polite email.
How do I bill a monthly retainer without thinking about it?
Set up a recurring invoice once — amount, frequency, payment terms, your own tax rate — and it generates and sends on schedule with a payment link attached. You can pause or end it when the arrangement changes. Payments run through your own Stripe account at Stripe’s standard rates; ConsultBase adds no markup.
What about scoping and contracting a new engagement?
The free SOW generator produces a formatted statement of work — scope, deliverables, timeline, payment terms — as PDF or Word with no account required, and the retainer agreement generator handles ongoing arrangements including included-hours and overage structures. With an account, either can be saved as a proposal, signed online, and turned into an engagement with milestones automatically on acceptance.
Questions marketing strategy consultants ask.
Is this a marketing project management tool with campaign calendars?
No. There is no editorial calendar, no campaign tracker, no asset library or DAM, and no analytics integration. ConsultBase manages the consulting relationship — engagement scope, deliverables and approvals, documents, proposals, invoicing. If you need campaign operations tooling, keep it; this handles the client-facing and commercial side.
Does it connect to Google Analytics, HubSpot, or ad platforms?
No, and there is no public API to build a connection against. Reporting on campaign performance stays wherever you do it today. What lives here is the engagement itself — what you agreed to deliver, what was approved, and what you invoiced for.
Can clients comment on or mark up a deliverable in the portal?
They can approve a deliverable or request changes with a note, and message you against the engagement. There is no inline annotation or version-by-version commenting the way a dedicated review tool offers. For a positioning document that usually goes back and forth in a call anyway this is enough; for heavy creative markup cycles it is not, and that is worth knowing upfront.
Can I bring in a writer or designer for delivery?
Pro includes up to three team members and Firm up to five, with owner, admin and member roles governing who can invite, remove, change branding and manage bookings. It is a workspace-level role system rather than per-engagement access, so a subcontractor sees the workspace rather than one client.
What does it cost, and is my client count capped?
Every paid plan includes unlimited clients. Plans differ on team size, AI access and white-labelling, not client volume. Firm removes the “Powered by ConsultBase” mark from every client-facing surface — which matters in marketing, where the client is judging your presentation as evidence of your judgement. There is a 14-day free trial and no credit card is required.
Marketing strategists have a harder scope problem than almost any other advisory field, for a structural reason: the client believes they understand the work. That belief invites participation, participation invites revision, and revision without a boundary is how a well-priced engagement becomes an underpaid one.
The fix is rarely firmer language in the contract. It is having somewhere both parties can look that shows what was agreed and what was approved, so the boundary is a shared fact rather than your assertion against their memory.
ConsultBase was built for advisory practices — engagements rather than projects, deliverables the client formally approves rather than tasks, retainers rather than subscriptions. For marketing consulting the approval record does the heavy lifting, and the branded portal handles the rest: looking like the kind of practice whose judgement is worth paying for.
Built for the way you work.
Unlimited clients on every plan, a branded portal your clients actually log into, and Ivy — a 50+ tool AI associate that knows your engagements.
Start your 14-day free trialPrefer to try something first? Use our free SOW and contract generators — no account needed.