What is the difference between prospecting and marketing

Watch our explainer video below. Prospecting is an activity usually carried out by sales reps , on a one-to-one basis. The idea is to generate interest from targets who may not know who you are. The types of B2B prospecting activities that sales reps engage in include cold calling, outbound emailing and LinkedIn direct messaging.

What is B2B lead generation? Lead generation is commonly a data driven marketing activity; a one-to-many approach. Examples of B2B lead generation could be a blog, a whitepaper or YouTube video, designed to attract leads to your organisation and start a relationship. Leads generated in this way will be warmer and pre-qualified, because they have already engaged with your marketing content and brand.

If your pipeline is looking light and you need to replenish it quickly, you should look at prospecting. With prospecting, you can book appointments with qualified leads, fast. You will have to think on your feet and be comfortable with frequent rejection, but if your salespeople have the right skills , you can do it.

On the other hand, if time is on your side, lead generation is the way to go. By enticing new business to your brand, you will build awareness and grow engagement - and ultimately, fill your pipeline with a steadier flow of warm leads.

You can also invest in lead generation tech to help accelerate your pipeline. Lead generation is a one-to-many approach, with a focus on the longer term. Examples of lead gen include writing a blog or making a YouTube video to attract leads to your brand. Lead gen and prospecting work well in tandem, as SDRs will find it easy to convert warmer leads into opportunities.

Cold calling is still a fast and effective method of prospecting. You can also have a conversation rather than a sales pitch where you ask questions, listen to the answers and follow up. It only takes a second to send an email and once you have a template that works , you can prospect at scale. However, an email is usually a precursor to a phone call to add a more personal touch.

A useful email prospecting approach is to create email sequences that run your prospect through your product's benefits, as opposed to features. You can use software like Cognism Prospector to set up sequences that also monitor responses on the back end.

In B2B, all your leads are on LinkedIn. Many SDRs find success by recording short videos for their prospects, which they send through LinkedIn. This allows you to inject a bit of personality into the process and use information you find about your prospects on LinkedIn to add personalisation. Whatever method of prospecting you choose, do it right.

Find out as much as you can about your prospect before you make contact. LinkedIn is ideal for this, as all the information you could ever need is all there on one screen. Look for ways you can make a connection with your prospect, over and above trying to sell to them. In B2B, personalisation is the key to delighting most prospects. We were both so invested in the topic, we spent nearly half the episode going over it! In my mind, prospecting is essentially outbound marketing.

The goal when prospecting is to chase people that may or may not be interested in the services you offer and, ultimately, convert them into clients. One classic if a little bit cliche to view prospecting is the cold calling or door-to-door sales people that branded themselves as financial planners. This strategy was incredibly common in the early days of the financial planning universe, but since then prospecting has evolved a little bit.

Some people still utilize the cold-calling method. Some advisors choose to go down the webinar or free seminar path, while others still join up with a local networking group and pass out their card until they land a client.

Still, if your livelihood and business depends on getting clients to sign on the dotted line right now , after chasing them down, you can make prospecting work for you. Some methods are better than others. For example, heading to a networking event or conference even as an introvert will be a lot less overwhelming than calling people in a day and getting hung up on by 99 of them. The process is a numbers game. The more people you contact, the more likely it is that a small percentage of them will sign on as clients.

The goal of marketing is to attract people to your services rather than chasing after cold leads. Marketing often has a long-term strategy behind it. There are about one million ways you could get involved with inbound marketing.

Just to name a few:. XY Planning Network focuses largely on marketing over prospecting - both in our own strategy and what we advise members to do. In fact, we provide a ton of support, services, and content to advisors looking to set marketing goals.