Selling to businesses is far too messy

Will Trumpet be music to salespeople's ears?

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.

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Will Trumpet be music to salespeople’s ears?

Trumpet’s founders… and a trumpet

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.

Trumpet’s dashboard

“[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.”