Lead Generation vs Sales Prospecting: Overlaps and Operational Differences

Lead generation and sales prospecting are two core activities for most businesses, but distinguishing between them can be tricky. Understanding the differences can help bring order to your marketing and sales strategies.

In this post, we will cover the key similarities and differences between these two strategies so that you can use them to your advantage.

Sales prospecting vs. lead generation: similarities and differences

“Leads” and “prospects” are often used interchangeably, which can cause no end of confusion. While these two terms share a few common features and goals, sales prospecting and lead generation are fairly different. 

Prospecting is usually carried out by sales teams, whereas lead generation is more in the realm of your marketing department. 

Simply put, leads consist of individuals or businesses that have expressed an interest in a product or service, such as Dialpad’s communication platform, by taking various actions such as clicking on an ad, following a link from social media, visiting the company website, or installing a free version of an app. 

Lead generation focuses on how a lead is made – what was the winning combination of marketing words and images that enticed someone to visit your website? Marketers will usually create a lead magnet on their social media, or somewhere else on the web, and wait for leads to start flowing in. It’s a largely automated process. 

Sales prospecting on the other hand focuses on the process of identifying potential clients as well as methods for nurturing them. Sales prospecting is a highly intensive and manual process whereby a salesperson actively searches for new business opportunities. 

Quick prospecting guide

A prospect is an individual or company that has been identified as a potential customer based on certain criteria outlined by your business. They don’t need to have shown any interest in interacting with your company. 

How does prospecting work?

Sales prospecting consists of a series of actions carried out by your sales team to spark new business opportunities by identifying and nurturing potential customers. The final goal of the process is to convert prospects into customers.

It can be a pretty challenging process because it requires a personalised approach, which requires time since you can’t rely on automation in the same way you can with lead generation. 

As well as approaching your prospects, you also need to set and track the list of criteria that you use to evaluate prospects in the first place. You need to find ideal customers, review their profiles, and ensure that they meet all of your criteria.

Sales prospecting strategies

First, you need to create a list of criteria that your prospect should fit for you to approach them. You can pose the following questions to figure this out: 

• Is the prospect a decision-maker in their company? 
• Is the prospect an influencer in some way? 

• Does the prospect’s business have a need that our product or services might be able to fulfill? 
• Is the prospect actively searching for solutions to challenges we can help with?
• What is the size of the company?

For your particular business, the questions will be more specific and tailored to your ideal prospects.

Finding prospects on social media

Sales teams will often use Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn to identify and interact with possible prospects.

LinkedIn is mighty when it comes to B2B sales. The platform is designed to make it easy to identify and connect with individuals who fit your ideal customer profile. You can specify the job title and description, such as whether someone works in managing a call centre, company size, location, industry, and more, and end up with a preliminary list of potential customers.

Group prospects into buyer personas

The next step is to group the contacts you’ve collected on the basis of common features, and then curate scripts for sales calls and design personalised emails for each group.

Nurture over nature

The next step is to start nurturing your prospects. After your initial contact with your prospect, be ready to follow up with more emails and calls. 

Quick lead generation guide

To recap, a lead is someone who has shown interest in your products but isn’t yet a customer. You will have their contact details and connect with them to try and convert them into a customer. 

You need to find out if they are qualified leads, i.e. a good fit for your company. You don’t automatically know whether a lead is relevant before you check their profile, unlike a prospect that has been vetted by your sales team.

What is lead generation?

Lead generation is a marketing tactic of piquing a consumer’s interest and acquiring their contact details. In order to do this, you need to offer them something of value – some companies will offer entries into giveaway competitions in exchange for contact details, for example. 

To help your lead-generating strategy, try to answer the following questions first: 

• What are your ideal customers’ needs? 
• What are their pain points?
• Which social media sites do they use? 
• What content do they prefer to read? 
• What kind of device do they use? 
• How do they behave on your website? 

Lead generation methods

To find qualified leads, you first need to create a lead magnet – something free that companies give away to get their audience to share their contact details with them. Using the right lead magnet is one of the best ways of attracting people who are a good match for your product. If you’re managing multiple sites, you can advertise the lead magnet in several places. 

You can figure out your ideal lead magnet by looking at your buyer personas and figuring out what their pain points, interests and behaviours look like. If they seem to engage heavily with a particular product page, you could launch a giveaway of that particular product. Choosing the right magnet will be good for maximising your return on investment. 

Once you have acquired your leads, you can engage with them through various means, such as email campaigns or press releases. A press release template can be an effective tool to communicate important news about your company or product to potential customers and generate interest, while ensuring you’re adhering to your brand values and hitting key selling points. By providing a clear and concise message, press releases can help you build brand awareness and establish your company as a thought leader in your industry.

Then, to convert your audience, you should only ask for the most relevant details, like a name and email address, and try to use interesting calls to action like “free guide to data engineer certification for beginners”. 

To summarise

Both lead generation and sales prospecting are interested in increasing sales, but the methods for achieving this goal are fairly different. Understanding how these can work together and as independent methods can help your business to flourish.