What is prospecting? The definition, and where the hours actually go
Prospecting is deciding who is worth contacting, before you contact anyone. The sales definition, how it differs from lead generation, and where the time goes.
Prospecting is deciding who is worth contacting, before you contact them. It sits between having a list of names and sending anything to those names: you check each one, keep the few that hold up, and throw the rest away. The throwing away is the job.
Prospecting is the step where you decide which names on a list deserve a message. It is not lead generation, which produces the names, and it is not outreach, which sends the message. Done properly, most of the list does not survive it.
If you came here expecting gold, that is the older sense of the word and it is a better metaphor than the sales industry deserves. A prospector moves a lot of gravel. The skill was never in the digging.
Prospecting is not lead generation, and confusing the two gets expensive
Lead generation produces names. Ads, content, a badge scan at a conference, a list bought from a data vendor. At the end you have rows in a spreadsheet.
Outreach contacts names. An email, a call, a DM, a comment under a post.
Prospecting is the judgement in between, and it is the step that gets cut first because it is the only one of the three that does not feel like progress. Buying a list feels like buying prospecting. It is not. It is buying the raw material and moving the filtering onto the recipient, who does it in about a second, and who does it for your whole sending domain rather than for that one message.
There is a clean test for which one you are doing. Lead generation is measured in volume. Outreach is measured in sends. Prospecting is the only one measured by what you decided not to do.
The four steps, and the third one eats the hour
Define who qualifies. Not a description, a filter. "Mid-sized healthcare companies" is a description. "Physiotherapy clinics with two to nine practitioners and no online booking on their website" is a filter, because two people applying it to the same list get the same answer. This is an ideal customer profile problem and it sits upstream of everything else on this page.
Build the raw list. Any source will do. This part got cheap, which is exactly why it stopped being an advantage. Everyone in your category can buy the same rows you just bought.
Verify each one. Open the site. Check that the thing your filter claimed is still true today. This is where the hour goes and it is the entire discipline.
Write down the reason. One sentence per survivor, with a link to where you found it. If you cannot write that sentence, the name did not survive, whatever the filter said.
The last step is the one most tooling automates, and it is four minutes. Worth knowing before you buy anything.
Sales prospecting techniques, and what each one actually costs
| Technique | What it costs | Works when | Wastes the day when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Trigger watching: job posts, funding, shipped features, permits | 10 to 20 min per account, mostly reading | The trigger creates the problem you solve, this quarter | You count "they exist and headcount grew" as a trigger |
| Answering questions in public | Slow to start, compounds for years | Your buyers ask questions somewhere you can find | You post promotion into a venue that removes promotion |
| Mining your own network for warm paths | Nearly free, hard ceiling | You are working under 50 accounts | You are trying to cover 500 |
| Buying a list, then filtering hard | Cash, plus all the verify time you did not avoid | You discard most of it | You send to all of it |
| Chasing anonymous website visitors | Setup, then cheap | The signal names a person | The signal is an IP guess |
Each of these has a cost and a yield, and the two are not correlated the way you would hope. The last row is the one people argue about. Most anonymous visitor tools resolve an IP to an organisation, and for anyone on home broadband or a phone that resolves to their ISP. You get a list that looks like intent data and is partly a list of internet providers. It can work for large companies on corporate networks. Check the hit rate before you build a process on it.
How long a real session takes
Fifteen accounts researched properly is a morning. That is the number worth planning around, and it stays roughly true whether you are doing it yourself or reviewing what something else drafted, because the reviewing is the same reading.
Two consequences. First, if someone promises you sixty well-researched accounts a day from one person, one of those words is doing something dishonest. Second, the only real lever is cutting how many accounts need the full treatment, which is the filter, not the research.
One account list, worked end to end
You sell booking software to independent physiotherapy clinics. You buy a list of 400.
400 rows. Names, addresses, a phone number, and a practitioner count field of unknown provenance.
Filter on the profile. Two to nine practitioners. The count field is wrong often enough that you check it against the clinic's own team page. 400 becomes 212, and roughly forty of the drops were bad data rather than bad fit.
Filter on the problem. Does the site already have online booking? If it does you are a migration, which is a different message and usually a worse deal. 212 becomes 61.
Filter on the trigger. Something that makes this month the month: a new practitioner announced, a second location, a Google review complaining about phone hold times, a post asking for software recommendations. 61 becomes 19.
Filter on the sentence. For each of the 19, write one line naming the specific thing, with a link. Running these gates cheapest-first is the whole method. Six produce a sentence you would be happy to have read back to you in a reply. The other thirteen produce something that could have been written about any clinic.
Six messages, from 400 rows. People find that ratio alarming the first time they see it, and it is the correct ratio. The other 394 were not wasted. They were the cost of finding the six.
One of those six sentences might read: "You added a second physio in August and your booking page still routes everything through the front desk phone." Checkable, about them, and the entire reason the email exists. That is the difference between a message that gets a reply and one that gets deleted.
What prospecting does not fix
A product nobody wants. If six well-researched messages get six polite refusals, the problem is upstream, and no amount of filtering finds a buyer who does not exist.
Scale. It does not scale linearly, and anyone promising it does is selling you step two. Going from six good messages a day to sixty means sixty times the research or a lower evidence standard, and it is almost always the second.
Being unknown. Outbound reaches people who have not heard of you and who will be suspicious for exactly that reason. Teams with good reply rates are usually also answering questions where their buyers already ask them, so the cold message lands on someone who half recognises the name.
A tool that cannot show its work. Anything doing step three for you, person or software, has to produce the source and the date. The evidence standard does not change because a machine did the reading. Revtive runs this as a prospecting agent that has to cite where every signal came from, which is the only version worth having. A confidence score with no link is a guess with a decimal point on it.