Lead Generation vs Sales Prospecting: Let The Battle Begin
Julie Williams
- June 21, 2022
- 1:24 PM
Lead generation vs Sales Prospecting is a never ending debate in the marketing and sales world. They are both considered to be similar to each other, but the truth is that they are poles apart since the aims and methods used for them differ from each other. Both Lead generation and sales prospecting are often used interchangeably as they both help you bring qualified leads into the pipeline.
According to Lead Genera, businesses often struggle to make sales and see growth without lead generation. Choosing the better one for your B2B business will depend on your product, customer base, stage of growth, and more. Understanding the difference between both methods will help you achieve more success in your sales efforts.
Let’s begin with: Lead vs Prospect
What is a lead?
Leads are people or business entities that have shown interest in your company’s products or services by taking actions such as visiting a website, downloading a report, or installing a free version of an app but haven’t become your client yet. Leads also show interest by providing contact details in exchange for gated content with lead forms that give them access to the said content
An example of this is, subscribing to your newsletter. You can reach out to them with sales pitches through the contact information you receive from them.
What is a prospect?
Prospects are people that the sales representatives qualify as highly relevant potential customers. The person does not need to provide you with their contact information or show interest in your products and services to become a prospect. Once they have predetermined characteristics, they become qualified prospects.
Prospects are usually shortlisted from a list of leads prepared by the marketing department and are nurtured to go down the sales funnel.
So, can you prospect leads?
The simple answer to this is no! The term lead prospecting directly results from marketing and salespeople confusing prospecting and lead generation. For the difference between leads and prospects, not all leads are equal for your company, since they may not be qualified and a good fit for your business.
While prospects have a higher chance of converting into a customer, you may have some sort of correspondence with leads, but not all leads are the right match for your business. Prospects are people who meet all the given requirements to qualify as perfect customers. We have also written another blog that gives you a detailed comparison between lead VS prospects.
Let’s understand what prospecting and lead generation are in-depth!
What is Lead Generation?
Most marketers already know lead generation’s definition, but let us simplify it for you! Lead generation services are all about converting potential customers into leads and capturing their contact information. This is done by creating lead generation campaigns with lead magnets for driving traffic toward the landing pages.
The main goal of implementing lead generation strategies is to convince leads to give their contact information in exchange for something of value. The first step of lead generation is planning out the lead generation process, implementing strategies, and building the sales pipeline
Examples of B2B lead generation include e-books, whitepapers, webinars, cold calls, email marketing, etc
What is Sales Prospecting?
Sales prospecting is a process in which you convert prospects into customers by nurturing them to go down the sales funnel. The main examples of sales prospecting are cold calls, cold emails, and social media outreach. An inbound marketing study done by Hubspot revealed that over 37% of sales representatives perceive prospecting as the most challenging part of the sales process.
Unlike the lead generation that can be automated, sales prospecting requires manual effort and cold outreach to bring in potential customers. The goal of sales prospecting is to identify by going through the process of nurturing and educating them about the company’s products and services.
Now let’s compare lead generation VS sales prospecting strategies!
Top Lead Generation Strategies
Content marketing
Content marketing is one of the most effective lead generation strategies as it engages with your lead through blogs, webinars, eBooks, or whitepapers. If you are planning to make gated content make sure that you provide high-quality content that will be of value to your target audience.
This post first appeared on 5-Ways Effective Account Based Marketing Can Benefit Marketers - ABM, please read the originial post: here
