Prospecting is a marketing strategy to generate and qualify leads for Sales via door knocking, telemarketing, texting, emailing, LinkedIn direct messages, physical mail, and bribery via gift cards. A euphemism for spam. A type of marketing activity, not sales.
Prospecting originated in the pre-internet era when Marketing lacked as much ability to communicate with buyers and to connect buyers with Sales. Buyers had limited access to information from Marketing, or from their peers (who Marketing also influences) to become aware of and to evaluate vendors. Most of the information a buyer needed was “gated” behind Sales. However, Marketing had difficult bringing buyers to Sales. Therefore, rather than Marketing bringing buyers to Sales, Sales would go "outbound" to buyers to try to sell to people that haven’t requested their help. Basically, Sales operating in the absence of Marketing.
Spam is unconsented marketing solicitations to buyers’ private inboxes: phone, email, LinkedIn, physical home or work address. Spam is not about the quantity or relevance, but the nature of the marketing communication. “Prospecting” or “cold outreach” is a euphemism for spam. “Cold-calling” is a euphemism for telemarketing, which is phone spam. “Cold-email” is a euphemism for email spam. “Social-selling” is a euphemism for LinkedIn spam. “Personalization” is the process of making spam more personal to the recipient to reduce the likelihood that it is ignored and rejected, and to reduce its unpleasantness and annoyance.
At first, prospecting came in the form of field marketing via door knocking (“Outside Sales” or “Field Sales”) and then telemarketing (“Inside Sales”). Sellers, meanwhile, did not want to do Marketing’s job, let alone prospecting. Prospecting was laborious and unscalable, and rejection constant. Sellers did not want to intrude and annoy
Given the low probability of prospecting to produce any results whatsoever, it must be done constantly, in large quantities, and predictably to amount to anything. Yet given the undesirable, time-consuming, and fruitless nature of prospecting, sellers were unable and unwilling to do prospecting part-time in addition to their actual sales job. Therefore, in the late 90’s and early 2000s, prospecting was specialized so it could be done full-time via Sales Development. Prospecting is the purpose of Sales Development. The Predictable Revenue model, which is based on the early 2000s, codified, popularized, preserves, and fuels prospecting and Sales Development as the core B2B Marketing strategy today, consuming significant marketing resources. Prospecting is sometimes referred to as “Outbound Sales” or “Outbound”.
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If you want to learn more about the model and these topics, check out my book “The Death of the SDR: And the Birth of the Buyer Centric Revenue Model”. It’s available on Amazon in ebook, paperback, and audiobook.
