Selling to businesses is far too messy

Hello there,

Today’s startup has just announced the closure of its pre-seed round, so I wanted to dig into how the company plans to make life easier for B2B salespeople and their prospects alike. There’s more here than just another no-code microsite platform. Scroll down to read all about London-based Trumpet.

As usual, PreSeed Now members get the full story, including Trumpet’s big vision, a Loom presentation of the product, and more. If you’re not already a member, you can upgrade below.

Some of you might have noticed on Twitter yesterday that I am very conscious that PreSeed Now currently over-indexes on London and Manchester startups. I have feelers out around the UK, but if you know a great early-stage B2B or deep tech startup from elsewhere in the UK that hasn’t got as far as closing a seed round yet, I want to know about them! Just drop me a line.

— Martin

This issue is supported by Manchester Angels. Read more about them in our 21 June issue.

Will Trumpet be music to salespeople’s ears?

One thing I hear a lot in the early-stage startup space is that ‘all the low-hanging fruit has been picked’. This is the idea that all the easy wins from transferring offline processes to online have been achieved. 

While this might largely be true, there are still massive potential gains to be had from bringing together and simplifying common groups of activities that suffer from inefficiencies when they’re combined.

Take the typical B2B sales process, for example. You might start with a cold pitch, then a presentation, then some back-and-forth on the details, then more serious negotiation, and finally sealing the deal and onboarding the new customer. But that means a lot of emails, calls, presentations and PDFs flying around to different people, and CRMs to be updated to keep everyone informed on progress. In short, it can be messy.

At first look, Trumpet is a new startup offering slick microsites for sales teams. But dig a little deeper, and what we have here is a central home for the complete end-to-end sales journey.

Design my sales process

London-based Trumpet is founded by Nick Telson and Andrew Webster, the relatively high-profile duo behind DesignMyNight, alongside Rory Sadler, the former sales lead at Hotjar. 

The startup yesterday announced a £1.6m pre-seed round led by Switzerland’s Lightbird Ventures, with participation from Triple Point Ventures, Haatch, Anamcara Capital, and angels including operators from Loom, Cognism and Reachdesk.

That’s a good excuse, I thought, to dig into the specific tune Trumpet is playing, and how it sees its business expanding as it brings more users online.

I spoke with an upbeat Sadler, the startup’s CEO, earlier this week. He says the world of sales has been “stuck in the dark ages for a long time.” Trumpet’s solution is ‘pods’. And while they’re essentially no-code microsites (something there are already other ways to produce), they’re “supercharging the full sales cycle from cold outreach to onboarding.”

Sadler explains that most business-focused microsite platforms are aimed at marketing teams and make a good fit for use cases like campaign landing pages. 

“Most sales tools are focused on discovering more leads and closing more deals - it’s very salesperson focused. The approach we're taking… is a buyer-first approach. Buyers have been forgotten about in the sales journey, they've been left behind.

“[B2B sales] is an elongated process; there’s far too many attachments, too many messy email threads. We believe that can be centralised through a microsite, giving a far more engaging and modern experience rather than attachments being chucked at them, hoping that they'll be opened. ‘Ripe for disruption is a fair way to put it.”

Sadler likens the experience to a budding online retailer turning to Shopify to easily create a good-looking and highly-functional ecommerce store. “Salespeople aren't designers at heart… I've been in B2B sales for five years and I've made some terrible looking decks and one-pagers.”

He explains how users can set up a pod from a template or build their own. Widgets are available to assist with everything from cold outreach to booking meetings, conducting meetings, submitting proposals, and onboarding. 

A lot of this functionality is provided by third-party integrations with the likes of Salesforce, Loom, Calendly, Vidyard, Pitch.com, Google Drive, and more. Trumpet has also built its own widgets, to round out the functionality.

The result is a single location for buyers to visit at all stages of the sales process. Sadler explains: “You can keep adding to the pod as the deal progresses down the funnel, all the way to having the meeting, putting the meeting recording into that pod, signing the proposal in there through DocuSign, and then onboarding.”

You can check out Sadler presenting a walkthrough of Trumpet in this Loom video.

How to build a Trumpet

Sadler says Trumpet was born of the sales frustrations Telson and Webster had while scaling DesignMyNight, which they sold to The Access Group in 2017. Sadler crossed paths with the duo while working at a hospitality industry company called Catapult, which did business with DesignMyNight.

Once Telson and Webster were out of their previous startup, they teamed up with Sadler to figure out how to simplify B2B sales.

Trumpet currently has 100 companies active on its beta, with 1,600 signed up on the waitlist, according to Sadler. The startup is testing its offering with startups and scaleups ranging from 22 to 300 employees. 

Sadler says LinkedIn has proved fertile ground for growing the waitlist, with no money spent on marketing to date. The founders leveraged their networks to promote a free list of 300 sales tools they recommended. This proved popular, and a great way to attract exactly the right kinds of people to sign up.

While there’s nothing exactly like Trumpet out there already, Sadler sees DocSend as a form of validation (“it just tells you that someone’s opened your PDF - Trumpet does that out of the tin”). He also sees the likes of Pitch.com as validation that people want to create beautiful experiences for their prospective customers.

Then there are tools like Highspot, Seismic, Zoomforth, and Paperflite, but these act largely as content-led systems that help salespeople present the right information to the right customers, rather than managing the entire process from a single destination.

Trumpet is beginning with a free version that offers full functionality but a limited number of pods, plus a £29 per user per month subscription for unlimited pods. 

“If there's a new way of doing things, you don't really want to create too many barriers to signing up and approval,” says Sadler. “We never want to limit user generated content… At the bottom [of a pod] it says ‘powered by Trumpet’ [so] more people will learn what it is and discover it. So we're keeping it super simple.”

Sadler says that when the time is right Trumpet will add plans aimed at the needs of larger businesses and enterprise customers.

Trumpet’s next tune

Sadler says Trumpet was bootstrapped with £100,000 from Telson and Webster, which got the business off the ground and allowed them to hire their tech lead. “We went full-time in December, and we closed the [£1.6m pres-seed] round in May.”

He says the team headcount will be up to 10 by next month, and the funding round will allow Trumpet to convert its waitlist up into users, iterate on product development, and launch publicly later this year.

“Building content around the brand is key. [We need to educate people about] how versatile Trump is, and like how it can be used. We're already seeing that with beta users; lots of different use cases, and which is exciting. So it's just refining the messaging, getting content out there, focusing on the product, and also some very, very exciting integrations and partnerships, which we've got lined up very soon.”

As for the future, Sadler cites Gong, a tool that analyses salespeople’s interactions to help them improve, as an inspiration. He sees Trumpet as one day being able to advise users on the best performing combinations of widgets and when, and how, to deploy them.

“We can start to say what ‘good’ looks like; what widgets you should drop into a pod at what stage of the conversation, depending on who you're speaking to, what industry, what type of pods and design and number of widgets performed best for any particular industry. He also sees potential in offering a different way to do CRMs, “because any sales manager can see where a deal is up just by checking out the pod, the communications, and the status.

“We want to leverage A.I. and data to help salespeople convert more deals in a more efficient way.”

Trumpet certainly isn’t the only startup with that ambition. But if its pods catch on, it could have a really good beachhead from which to offer much more to success-hungry salespeople.

In summary:

Name: Trumpet

What they do: The entire B2B sales process from a single destination

Location: London

Raised to date: £1.6m pre-seed round

Currently raising?: No

That’s all for now

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We’ll be back with another great startup on Tuesday.