It’s been said about time management skills that the workday is the daily tension between the important and the urgent. There are the tasks in your calendar you know you have to get done, and there are the ones that you didn’t know you had to get done until they drop in your lap. Oh, and they need to be done, not soon, but RIGHT NOW.

None of you asked, but there’s quite a bit of regimentation and structure to my work week. There are recurring calendar entries for things I have to get done daily, semi-weekly, quarterly, etc. One of those regular occurrences is check-in calls with the contacts at the vendors I work with. One, in particular, is a weekly call with a strategic partner where we update each other on what we’re working on and coordinate our efforts to serve our dealer base. Part of those weekly updates is to brief him on what large projects my dealers have in their pipelines so that he can add those to his deal funnel and report those back to his bosses.

All of that background was a long-winded way to introduce funnels as a sales management tool. If you’ve been in sales at all, you’ve at least had your boss ask you what you’re working on. And many offices, like the one my vendor contact works at, have a more structured format for updating your boss on the status of your sales efforts.

Frankly, even if it’s not expected of you as a salesperson, defining your sales funnel is a valuable tool for managing your time and focus.

Think of it as visualizing or graphing your activities. Picture a funnel: possible new clients deals entering your orbit and spiraling closer through the decision-making process towards the outcome you want, which is closing the deal and getting paid.

I like it as an analogy because the sales process is not linear. It would be nice if it was, but it’s not. Some clients take more time than others. Some prospective deals, for a variety of reasons, may hover around the rim of your funnel for weeks, maybe even months or years. But the important thing is you’re tracking them and you know where they are.

One thing I had to explain to my vendor contact that he found hard to believe is that I have dealers who have sales funnels and ones who don’t. The salespeople (a surprising number of them) don’t actively cultivate a funnel, at least not as such. Instead, they have a matured pool of existing clients they service, and through that pool, big deals almost literally fall into their lap with very little heads-up.

Yes, it surprises me too. I had one job where I was hired for business development, specifically to go out hunting for new clients for the firm. I did actually do that, but what also happened was that my employer already had a huge pool of incumbent clients who would either have a new project for us or send us a new referral business directly. So I spent as much or more time managing the relationships we already had than I did chasing new ones.

If you’ve built your business to the point that you’re in a position where new projects literally fall on top of you, congratulations! If not, you probably ought to coach your salespeople to track the opportunities that are in their funnel more closely.