The word funnel is so bonded to sales and marketing that people never feel the need to explore it further. You hear funnel, you think wide top, narrow bottom, leads trickling down into a close. That is the whole picture, apparently. And that is precisely the problem.
What I have discovered is the opposite of that flatness. Funnel thinking, done properly, is one of the deepest operating frameworks available — not just for selling, but for how you design offers, qualify prospects, build products, and decide where your energy goes. Let me explain how I got there.
The permission contract problem
I have been in sales a long time. Prospecting in person first, then cold calling. I worked it at Marble Spaces, sharpened it as a sales director at a recruitment company, and really got the engine rolling selling for a legal tech startup. Each environment taught me something. But the biggest lessons came after I stepped away from corporate sales entirely.
Here is the core problem with how cold calling is taught: everyone is telling you to ask for permission. Give me thirty seconds. Is now a bad time? The contrarians are not really contrarians — they are just saying to ask for permission later, or to dress it up differently. The fundamental posture is still the same: please tolerate me.
That is a backwards way of thinking. You are reaching out to a stranger and effectively asking them to buy you a free lunch on the off chance they might enjoy it. Then you call it a numbers game. It is a numbers game, but it is a losing one — and worse, it is one you cannot audit. You cannot improve it in any meaningful way because the outcome depends entirely on the mood of the person who picked up, not on the quality of your thinking.
The job is not to pitch. The job is to give people what they want and disqualify everyone else as fast as possible.
The two failures of standard prospecting
Standard cold outreach fails in two places. First, you may book a meeting with someone who is not actually your prospect. You filled your calendar but you failed the real job, which is to identify people who can genuinely benefit from your solution. Second, the resistance you introduce so early in the conversation is enormous. Even if the person on the phone has the exact problem you solve, you have already made yourself a pest before you said anything useful. They are just waiting for it to end.
So I wanted them to opt in. Not reluctantly, not as a courtesy — actually opt in. Because if someone has opted in, they cannot hit you with a random no at the endpoint. They have already said they are interested. Any objection now has to be a real objection, which means you can address it. That shift in logic opened everything else up.
Topics as the opt-in mechanism
The next discovery followed naturally: topics. If your solution is addressing a real and salient problem, there is already a conversation happening about it somewhere. You can Google it. You can see what people are saying, what they are frustrated by, what questions they keep asking. If there is no activity, it does not necessarily mean your solution is wrong — but you may need to attach it to a more salient topic where your capability can still be deployed.
Once you find the right topic, the opening almost writes itself. You are not asking for time. You are asking if this is something they think about. That is a completely different contract. I stopped using permission-based openers about four months ago. Since then, I have booked dozens of appointments — no website, selling solutions that are not simple to explain — because the topic did the qualifying work before I ever made the ask.
What funnel thinking actually means
Here is where it comes together. Once you see everything through this lens — relevance, opt-in, disqualification — you realise the funnel is not a sales tool. It is a way of operating. It shapes how we design offers at Om Coda. It shapes how we transform offers for clients. It is implicit in how Tower was built.
Think about what the job really is. You research a market, identify the gap, architect a solution across technology, operations, partnerships, people. You price it, model the cost of fulfillment, build the whole thing. And then you go to market. If that solution is real — if your assumptions actually bore out — there should be no fear in the conversation. The only questions a qualified prospect has are: can you deliver, what does it cost, and is it safe to keep talking to you. If you have good answers to those three things, why would they not want to sit down?
There is no pitching in that model. Pitching is adding noise. It introduces variables that are unnecessary and resistance that is unearned. Funnel thinking strips all of that away. Your job is to get relevant people into a conversation and get irrelevant people out of it as quickly as possible. Everything else — the offer design, the go-to-market, the product — follows from that same logic.
That is what the word funnel actually means, when you stop letting marketing own it.