Lead generation is designed to attract potential buyers and build interest over time, while sales prospecting focuses on identifying qualified opportunities and turning them into real conversations.
When these two strategies work together, businesses create a stronger pipeline, shorten sales cycles, and close more deals. When they don’t, teams become disconnected, leads slip through the cracks, and revenue opportunities disappear.
In this guide, we’ll break down the difference between lead generation and sales prospecting, including what lead generation is, how to improve the lead generation process, what sales prospecting involves, proven prospecting techniques to try, and how sales and marketing teams can work together to drive more conversions and revenue.
Note: Ready for a sales pipeline that fills itself? Try Leadfeeder free for 14 days.
Leads and prospects are not the same
To say leads and prospects are the same is like saying there’s no difference between a juicy cheeseburger and a veggie burger.
Yes, they’re both “burgers” serving the purpose of fulfilling your hangry cravings. However, once you take a bite, you’ll notice the difference. A veggie burger is good, but a juicy cheeseburger is great.
You can apply the same analogy to leads and prospects. Both leads and prospects are part of the sales process and have shown varying levels of interest in a product or service.
A lead is good — it means they’ve shown interest and given their information. However, a prospect is great. For better context, let’s go over what a lead and a prospect are.
What is a lead?
A sales lead is a top-of-the-funnel contact (person or business) who has expressed potential interest in your company’s product or service.
They show interest by providing information in exchange for gated content — content that requires individuals to fill out a form before they can access it.
The requested information can range from basics like their name and email to more exploratory requests, like their job title and company size.
It’s important to note that the leads have not yet been qualified. There’s no apparent indicator of whether they suit your ideal buyer persona or if they’re interested in buying what you’re selling.
What is a prospect?
Once a lead meets predetermined criteria, it becomes a qualified prospect.
These contacts are further down the sales funnel and have a vested interest in more than one-way communication.
Prospects should have an unaddressed business challenge or problem that could be solved more efficiently. You need something you can leverage to promote value.
If they don’t, it’s probably time to disqualify them and save yourself from wasted time and heartache.
Trust me; we’ve all been there. Don’t make the mistake of thinking a prospect is a closed deal — the person or business has simply met the specified criteria. This is where sales prospecting comes in, which we’ll get to later.
What is lead generation?
Lead generation is a process for attracting potential customers by driving brand awareness and nurturing relationships to obtain contact information.
Typically, lead generation is a marketing function. It’s the first step in the sales process and a long-term strategy for building the sales pipeline.
To put things in perspective, think of lead generation as playing the “long game.”
Hear me out. Did you ever take an unpaid internship because you knew it was a great gig that could catapult your career?
Sure, the whole not getting paid thing is a downer. However, that small step, which may have been inconvenient at the time, was something you did in pursuit of the bigger picture.
The long game — if you will.
Examples of business-to-business (B2B) lead generation include:
E-books
Whitepapers
Webinars
Once a contact has provided their information, the marketing team can begin lead nurturing for those who match your target audience. The outreach at this stage takes a one-to-many approach.
How to improve the lead generation process
1. Nurture the leads
You wouldn’t ask someone to marry you on the first date, would you? No, you wouldn’t. You’d first nurture and build the relationship. The same goes for leads.
In sales and marketing, you need to nurture leads at every stage of the sales funnel. This allows you to send personalized content based on a lead’s actions and stage in the buyer journey.
The most popular example of lead nurturing is creating personalized email marketing campaigns.
2. Develop high-quality, gated content
I briefly touched on gated content earlier in this guide, but I wanted to expand upon it here. Gated content is an effective form of content marketing that can help generate leads.
It’s an excellent way to capture high-quality leads who are interested enough to provide contact information. In exchange, they get a high-value piece of content.
For example, Salesforce requires you to fill out a seven-field form to access the third-edition of its State of Sales report.
However, not all material should be gated, including blog posts or infographics. These content types are developed for the awareness stage of the buyer journey — where the buyer has just realized a business problem or challenge.
3. Use lead generation software like Leadfeeder
I’m all about working smarter.
Using lead generation software like Leadfeeder can streamline efficiencies and put time back on your schedule.
Leadfeeder’s software identifies anonymous website traffic from decision-makers or businesses who are already visiting your website.
You can also see the exact webpages contacts are viewing to enable more personalized follow-ups.
Leadfeeder can also be set up to automatically update your customer relationship management (CRM) tool when a lead visits again.
What is sales prospecting?
Put simply, sales prospecting is the act of reaching out to interested contacts from a list of leads to find prospective customers.
The sales team manages sales prospecting. It’s the process that comes after lead generation and involves a one-to-one approach.
Standard outbound sales methods include cold calling and cold emailing, which can work well when used together.
However, focusing on leads that have been pre-heated — or engaged — by the marketing team is more effective.
Why?
Beyond making sense from a logical perspective, focusing time on the hottest leads with pre-established relationships helps move things along the pipeline.
Examples of B2B sales prospecting activities include:
Warm emailing
Warm calling
While this may seem like a simple process, it’s generally the most difficult.
A 2018 inbound marketing study from HubSpot revealed 37 percent of sales reps perceive prospecting as the most challenging part of the sales process.
In fact, 47 percent of North American sales representatives said receiving a prospect response was their number one challenge.
This shouldn’t come as a shock. Today’s buyers are more digitally savvy than ever and expect a personalized experience.
To push past the competition, you’ll have to be more thoughtful in your outreach.
Sales prospecting techniques to try
Finding prospects is one thing. Starting conversations that actually lead to sales is another. Effective sales prospecting is all about reaching the right people, at the right time, with the right message. Below are proven sales prospecting techniques to help your team build stronger relationships, generate more qualified opportunities, and close more deals.
1. Get social
Social selling is on the rise.
LinkedIn’s 2020 State of Sales report found that the time spent on LinkedIn Learning workshops about “social selling” more than doubled in two months across the globe.
The most popular platforms used by sales teams for social selling are Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. More than likely, social selling is something you’re already doing without knowing it.
Whenever you share a blog or video content specific to your company on your social channels, you’re doing social selling.
I’ve gone in-depth about this in a previous webinar, but the key is to engage with prospects after they’ve shown interest in the content you’ve shared.
I often find that a salesperson will publish an article or two and call it a day. Don’t be that person. The point is to engage potential customers to initiate two-way communication.
Use your list of qualified leads to find your prospects’ social channels to take things a step further. Answer their related questions and continue warming up those contacts.
2. Become a thought leader
Sadly, there is no magic wand to turn you into a perceived thought leader instantly. Establishing credibility will take time.
The good news is that B2B buyers will look for your content once you have developed a rapport.
DemandGen’s 2019 Content Preferences Survey Report shows 95 percent of B2B marketers seek out credible content from industry thought leaders.
You can become an industry thought leader by writing guest blog posts for reputable websites or becoming a speaker at upcoming conferences.
3. Please. Stop. Selling.
I understand why it might sound counterintuitive to tell salespeople not to sell.
Here’s the thing:
There’s a time and a place in the sales funnel to push your product or service — during the prospecting stage is not it. You don’t want to overwhelm your prospect too soon.
Instead, your sole focus should be on driving value for the potential customer and figuring out how your product or service can uniquely meet their needs.
4. Align sales and marketing to close more deals
A typical sales and marketing workflow can involve a lot of back-and-forths. Let’s run through an example.
Marketing runs a lead-generation campaign and builds a list of qualified leads. They then share it with the sales team.
The sales team takes those leads to begin the prospecting process. However, after a closer look, they decided the marketing team’s standards did not correctly qualify most of the leads.
The sales team returns to marketing to request new leads. This leaves the marketing team wondering: What happened to the “qualified” lists we just gave you?
It’s a never-ending simulation that is costing your business time and money. Marketing and sales alignment is essential to your business's success.
Here are the best ways to begin the alignment process:
Determine lead requirements: Establish what constitutes a marketing-qualified lead (MQL) and a sales-qualified lead (SQL) to eliminate confusion.
Develop a service-level agreement (SLA): An SLA is a contract between your sales and marketing teams that holds both departments accountable. It should clearly outline marketing and sales responsibilities.
Implement a lead scoring system: This assigns a predetermined value to specific actions taken by leads. Once a lead has reached the point threshold, it’s ready to hand off to sales.
Specify the handoff point: Once a lead becomes an MQL, marketing hands it off to the sales team. However, what categorizes a lead as qualified is unique to each business.
Lead Generation vs. Sales Prospecting: The Difference
Misaligned marketing and sales teams can waste time and leave leads unused. For a successful sales process, both departments must work together.
Marketing can help sales teams accelerate the sales cycle by generating higher-quality leads. There will be less confusion if you have clearly defined lead qualification criteria, and the marketing-to-sales handoff will go smoother.
Just remember lead generation ≠ sales prospecting.
Note: Ready for a sales pipeline that fills itself? Try Leadfeeder free for 14 days.
Director of Demand @ Leadfeeder
Jamie Pagan is Director of Demand at Leadfeeder, where he leads demand generation and pipeline growth initiatives. His work focuses on connecting marketing activity with revenue by combining intent signals, campaign performance data, and audience insights.
With experience building scalable demand engines and launching growth-focused campaigns, Jamie brings a practical perspective on how marketing teams generate and capture demand. His experience working with intent data and marketing analytics informs his approach to identifying high-intent buyers and converting interest into qualified opportunities.
