Download this article as a PDFA founder rang me last year, full of energy, ready to sign up for a full sales campaign that afternoon. New product, big ambitions, and a genuine belief that all he needed now was someone to go out and sell it. I asked him a few questions. How were people finding him at the moment? Not many were. What did the website say? There wasn’t really one yet. How would a prospect who had never heard of him understand what he did in about ten seconds? He went quiet. I liked him, and precisely because I liked him, I told him the truth: he was not ready for a sales team, and that was completely fine.
We help businesses grow by becoming their outsourced sales team, from building the pipeline to closing the deal. We are about revenue, not activity. But one thing we have learned over the years is that not every business is ready for sales yet, and there is no shame at all in that. If you are just starting out, testing a new product, or struggling to get any attention from your ideal customers, going straight to sales can be like putting the cart before the horse. Without the marketing foundations underneath it, even a good sales campaign can fail to gain any traction. That is exactly why we created Mumble Marketing.
Why you might not be ready yet
Realising you need marketing before sales is not a weakness. It is a rather smart piece of self-awareness. You might recognise yourself in one of these: you are a startup still finding your feet; you have launched something and simply need the world to know it exists; you are not yet generating enough leads to justify a full sales campaign; your brand, your message or your online presence is still taking shape; or your budget is tight and every pound has to earn its keep. If any of that sounds familiar, a sales campaign is not the first move. Building awareness, credibility and demand is, and that is marketing’s job.
What Mumble does
Mumble Marketing is the partner for everything that comes before the sale. It is the team you want when the questions on your mind are: how do I get in front of the right people, how do I explain what I do in a way that makes anyone care, how do I generate leads without a sales team, and how do I look professional online without a large budget? That means brand strategy, so you know who you are and how to say it; lead generation built from scratch; content, from blogs to emails that actually convert; a website and the search visibility to be found; and social and paid campaigns to put your message in front of the right audience. It is creative work with a commercial point, which is getting you to the stage where sales makes sense.
Then we turn up the heat
Once Mumble has built you some momentum, that is the moment Hayward Miller steps in. By then you have the awareness, the leads and the audience interest, and our job is to turn that into real, measurable sales. As your outsourced sales team we do the calling, the emailing, the following up, the presenting and the converting. It is a natural handover, and it works precisely because the groundwork is already there.
The founder who rang me that afternoon did not get his sales campaign, and he was better off for it. He spent the next few months building the foundations instead, and when he came back the second time there was actually something for a sales team to sell. If you are not quite ready to scale sales, do not force it. Invest in the marketing that sets you up for it, and when the time is right, we will be ready to take it from there.
