The Sales Tube

Hidden inside the sales funnel is the sales tube, a core group of customers that will love you but don't yet know you exist.

Outside of the tube are all the customers that either aren't ready for you yet, or don't really care that much about your offer, or otherwise won't make it all the way through your sales funnel to become customers anytime soon. Spending a lot of your limited time on these customers isn't going to get you sales as quickly as spending your time finding the easy sales.

For early-stage companies, there is no funnel. There is only tube. Small companies simply don't have the resources to properly maintain a full sales funnel. I mean, look at it. It's much bigger than the tube.

When you have a tube, you need to focus on two things: aiming the tube, and fixing holes in the tube.

Aiming the tube means finding customers that are a great fit for what you offer them. If your product is well designed, when you find your people (or they find you) moving them through the tube should be pretty easy. You just need to watch out for holes in the tube that prospective customers fall through.

If you plug the holes, converting prospects into customers should be easy. If it isn't, you have one of two problems: locating customers, or product design.

Once you've got the sales tube finely honed—well aimed, and low friction—then you can start worrying about a more complex sales funnel.

Until then, grab your tube, aim it at customers, and suck as hard as you can.