Listen instead on your Monday Morning Drive:

I get calls every day from folks who want to talk about marketing. It was the number one topic in 2025.

For 20 years, I watched this industry struggle with marketing. Now, you’re ready. You’ve realized the sales funnel is the last piece of your business puzzle, and marketing is how you fix it.

So, we chat. You tell me your plans.

Then, I ask about your email list.

The 7,000-Person Mistake

“We’ve got 7,000 contacts in our database, but we haven’t curated it. We think there’s only about 800 or 1,000 people that matter. Once we cull that list down, we can start marketing.”

Stop. If you’ve got 7,000 people on your list, send out 7,000 emails.

“We don’t want to bother people.”

If you’re bothering them, they’ll unsubscribe. If they’re interested, they’ll pay attention or tell other people about you.

Don’t cull your marketing email list before you start marketing. Those 7,000 people need to hear from you.

Marketing Moves Leads Through Your Funnel

Picture a funnel. Big end at the top, little end at the bottom.

At the top are leads. If you have a contact, they’re a lead and a potential evangelist.

As we create movement, leads trickle down. Some become customers, some become clients (more on this later). They write you a check, which becomes gross profit at the bottom of the funnel: money that covers overhead and creates net profit.

If you’ve got 7,000 people on your list but you only market to 1,000, you’re creating a cylinder, not a funnel. It’s barely bigger at the top than at the bottom.

If you market to a small group, you need a huge conversion rate to make it worthwhile.

What determines if your funnel is right?How you control your marketing message.

Marketing filters your funnel. Your funnel doesn’t filter your customers. The funnel moves ideal customers through.

Your Funnel Has a Geometry Problem

Picture that job you really want to win. It’s bigger than any other job you do.

Let’s say you’re a $2 million company. This is a $500,000 job — a quarter of your business.

Picture that job as a big cube. Push it into your funnel. It only gets a quarter of the way down. It’s hard to fit in.

Now, picture your other jobs. If your average order is $15,000, you’ve got tiny cubes, medium cubes, and some larger cubes.

Then, we’ve got the big cube — that huge job. If it hits our funnel, it keeps all the other cubes from getting in.

To have movement, we can’t move all projects. We have to move what’s important.

Get that big job, but treat it like a windfall. Get it out of your funnel and back to marketing to move leads through.

How Leads Become Prospects

Leads are potential buyers. We talk to them through marketing.

They could be vendors, freelancers, or your Aunt Agnes. Any one of them could say the right words to the right person or share the right social media post.

Market to all your leads. You don’t know what those leads can do for you.

Marketing’s goal is to have leads identify themselves as prospects. A prospect is somebody who has identified themselves to you as a potential buyer.

We can tag somebody as a prospect, but if they don’t know they’re a prospect, they’re just a lead.

Marketing lets leads self-identify as prospects.

From Prospect to Opportunity

Marketing moves prospects into opportunities. Business development can also move a prospect to an opportunity.

Prospects are the focus of churn in our funnel. Marketing and business development aim to move prospects. Potential buyers become actual opportunities.

We use calls to action in blog posts, newsletters, open houses, lunch and learns, etc. The call to action is this: When can we talk about your next opportunity?

We work with prospects so that when an opportunity shows up, they bring it to you. We put effort on the top of our funnel. We pull these folks through. They make the choice.

We can’t force a lead to become a prospect. We can’t force a prospect to become an opportunity. We lure them through.

Marketing works on them constantly, keeping you at the top of their mind.

Customers vs. Clients

Once we have an opportunity, business development and account executives talk about proposals and winning bids.

When you get that job, you’ve won at least a customer. If you’re successful, the customer will do business with you again.

The customer doesn’t leave your funnel after the job is over. A customer who could buy from you again is a prospect. They deserve marketing and business development energy.

A client is someone who plans to work with you again. A great client brings every adjacent opportunity to you. If they have regular recurring business, that job converts back into the next opportunity.

Clients move back into opportunities. You’re already talking about the next job.

Account executives work on client opportunities, walking them through the next job and project.

Marketing Fuels Your Funnel

Your sales funnel runs on marketing.

You can get by without business development if you have the right marketing. Your marketing has to move leads into prospects and create opportunities so your sales team can act.

If you want to grow, add business development that focuses on prospects, creating opportunities, and working on retention for customers back in the prospect space.

Business development extends your marketing, continually generating more leads and prospects.

We want a healthy funnel — wide enough at the top to market to enough people to create the evangelism and opportunities we need and correctly narrow at the bottom so we’re working with the best customers and clients at the highest margins.

Without the top of the funnel, the bottom of the funnel becomes weak. We chase whatever revenue comes our way.

When someone tells me they want to cull their 7,000-person email list down to 800 people before they start marketing, I tell them to stop.

Send those 7,000 emails. Let people self-identify. Let them unsubscribe if they want. Let the funnel do its job.

That’s what marketing is for.