The Funnel: Prospecting, Outreach, Qualification, Closing

Sales is a funnel, and treating it as one keeps you honest. The stages: prospecting (build a list of companies likely to have your problem), outreach (get conversations), qualification (confirm they have the problem, budget, and authority), then demo, pricing, and closing.

Prospecting starts with a sales hypothesis: who has this problem, and what observable signals give them away? Then build a list against those signals using tools like LinkedIn, rather than spraying everyone in the industry.

The funnel is a numbers game with steep drop-off at every stage. Expect most emails to go unanswered and most calls to go nowhere. That's not failure, that's the shape of the funnel. It means volume at the top matters, and it means one dead deal should never be devastating because it was never your only deal.