Overview/Roles/Sales and marketing

Sales and marketing

For the people who bring clients in. Your work is the front of the business: capturing leads, qualifying them honestly, running the pipeline with discipline, and getting a won deal to a confirmed payment.

Your Home screen

The growth experience is built around momentum: pipeline on one side, newly activated clients on the other. You will see active projects, work waiting on the client, and anything overdue, plus two pulse blocks — pipeline health and activation progress.

What you deliberately do not see is production detail. Your questions are commercial: is the deal moving, is the client engaged, is the money in. Production noise would obscure that.

Pillar 1 — Marketing: generating qualified leads

Marketing's job is not volume. It is producing leads that sales can actually close, which means qualification happens before handover rather than during an awkward first call.

SourceHow it works
Outbound DM outreachDirect messages and calls to qualified prospects in the UAE market.
ReferralsExisting client referrals channelled into the pipeline rather than left in conversation.
Paid adsPaid advertising, treated as a system under construction and tested deliberately.
MDM Instagram contentSales-informed content designed to attract inbound qualified interest.

What “qualified” means

A lead is only ready for sales when all four conditions hold. Slate records each one rather than letting it live in someone's memory.

UAEIn the market
AutoAutomotive industry
12K+AED budget
DMDecision maker confirmed

Handling a lead well

  1. Capture it with its source

    Every lead enters with the source recorded — outbound, referral, ads, Instagram, or other. Source is required, because it is the only way to learn which channel actually produces revenue.

  2. Record the qualifying facts

    Country or market, industry, budget band, whether a decision maker is confirmed, notes, and who owns the lead.

  3. Qualify, or disqualify with a reason

    A lead cannot become an opportunity until the mandatory qualifiers pass. If it does not qualify, mark it disqualified with a reason. A lead should never simply disappear — that is how the same prospect gets contacted twice by two people.

  4. Hand over to sales explicitly

    Marking a lead qualified creates the opportunity, carries the conversation context across, assigns an owner, and records a handover receipt. Nothing is retyped.

Work from the inbox, not from chat Marketing is designed to be used on a phone in short bursts: log a touch, schedule a follow-up, qualify, or disqualify. Managers see funnel health and source quality on desktop, which is a different question from “what did we say to this person”.

Pillar 2 — Sales: converting a lead into a paying client

Sales runs a fixed pipeline. The stages are not advisory — moving a deal forward means the stage's requirements are genuinely met.

StageWhat happensExit condition
QualifiedThe lead arrives from marketing with its context intact.An owner is assigned and outreach begins.
OutreachCold contact by DM or call, a short agency brief, and the client showcase.A meeting is booked.
MeetingDiscovery questions, the agency pitch, and pricing discussion — packages are typically 15 videos for AED 13,000–16,000.Discovery is complete and the scope is clear.
Proposal draftingApril builds the proposal from discovery inputs, then submits it to the Sales Chief.The proposal is approved internally.
Awaiting approvalWaiting on the Sales Chief's sign-off before anything is sent. Submitting it puts it in their queue and notifies them.Approved, or returned with a reason.
Proposal sentSent the same day, with versioning, an expiry, delivery proof, and a viewed state where available.The client responds, or follow-up begins.
Follow-upAutomatic 24-hour and 48-hour follow-ups, then a two-month re-engagement cadence.Won, lost, or moved to nurture.
WonThe client has confirmed.Not yet a client — see below.
Lost / NurtureRecorded with a reason rather than forgotten.Re-engagement is deliberate and dated.
Won does not mean “client ready” A won deal creates a commercial handover packet and waits. The client is not activated until the contract is signed, the required documents are collected, the invoice is approved, and the initial payment is confirmed. Only a verified payment event unlocks client work.
Submitting is what starts the approval clock A drafted proposal is not waiting on anyone until you submit it. Submitting moves it into the Sales Chief's queue and notifies them; until then it is simply a draft. If it comes back, the reason is attached, and you can revise and submit again.

Features that make the pipeline reliable

One canonical thread per deal

Proposals, versions, documents, and messages attach to the opportunity, so a deal has one history rather than fragments across three people's inboxes.

Follow-ups that cannot be forgotten

The 24-hour and 48-hour follow-ups are created for you, and the two-month re-engagement cadence is scheduled at the moment the proposal is sent. Owners can pause or stop with a recorded reason.

Loss reasons, recorded

Every lost deal carries a reason. Over a quarter, this is the only honest answer to “why is our conversion rate what it is”.

Zero retyping at the boundary

Discovery inputs flow into the proposal; the won deal flows into activation. Data is entered once and inherited forward.

What you hand to operations

When a deal is won, what crosses the boundary is not a good feeling and a WhatsApp message. It is a structured handover: the signed scope, the agreed pricing and terms, the client contacts, the promises made during the sale, the expected start date, and any known risks.

Operations can accept the handover, or return it citing a missing item. This matters more than it sounds: most client-service disasters are promises made in a sales meeting that nobody wrote down.

Your daily rhythm

Daily

  • Action today's follow-ups — the 24-hour and 48-hour windows matter.
  • Move any deal that has actually progressed a stage.
  • Clear qualification gaps on new leads.
  • Check the proposal queue for anything waiting on approval that should have gone out today.

Weekly

  • Review deals that have gone quiet.
  • Check which sources produced meetings, not just leads.
  • Confirm that won deals have reached payment, and chase what has not.
  • Re-engage nurture leads whose cadence has come due.

Common mistakes to avoid

MistakeWhy it hurts
Creating the client record before payment is confirmedIt implies work can begin, and it breaks the rule that paid work is the only work.
Leaving qualification fields emptySales receives a lead it cannot assess, and re-does the discovery call the prospect already had.
Sending a proposal without Sales Chief approvalPricing and terms leave the agency unapproved. Slate will block it.
Tracking deals mentally rather than moving stagesPipeline reporting becomes fiction, and forecasts stop being usable.
Letting the two-month re-engagement cadence lapseThe cheapest revenue an agency has is the lead that said “not yet”.