Lead research is indispensable in business development. B2B lead generation and prospecting often go hand in hand with each other. But do they mean the same?

B2B Lead Generation as a Moving Force of Your Business Success

Let’s put things straight – selling goods or services is impossible if customers do not trust or simply have never heard of you. This is where business-to-business lead generation mechanisms start to play a crucial role in the business life-cycle. By choosing the right ways to impact the audience and draw their attention to your products, you increase the chances for a successful conversion. But what are the proper methods of impacting? If you struggle to answer this question right away, check the algorithms of B2B lead generation at belkins.io. When you get the idea of how to expand your presence in the business world, it will greatly contribute to the growth of your company. Why is taking care of leads so important?

• The more you expand, the more potential clients you attract
• Building up a solid presence strengthens your positions on the market 
• Creating a stable lead flow optimizes other business processes in a company

To make plans real, consider cooperation with the team that knows how to create new juicy business leads and turn them into successful sales. Here’s what – we are more than capable of doing that. We know how prospecting and lead generation works in and out. Wait, do these terms differ from each other? Let’s find it out!

Lead Research in Comparison to Prospecting

Very often, these two definitions are confused even by the experienced specialists in the sales business. While the core notion of them is more or less similar, there are a few considerable differences worth mentioning. The most noteworthy difference is how these approaches work in relation to the targeted audience. Depending on that, the variety of impacting methods to choose from also changes. 

Prospecting is connected with a direct, influential approach of a sales rep to engage the chosen prospect into business relations. As a rule, your targets have never heard of you before, they are cold and have no intention to negotiate (at least at the beginning). This is why they are called suspects. A suspect is not yet a prospect. To become the one, your sales rep must work hard and make suspects interested in your business offer. What are the typical activities in prospecting? These could be cold emailing or calling, Linkedin direct messaging, automated voice messaging, etc. Thus, the main idea is to predict the demands of a particular group or class of customers on a short-term basis, to make them spend money with your business. 

If we speak about B2B lead generation, it is best described as data-based activity that aims at a much larger audience than prospecting. It’s launched on a long-term basis and suggests a steady and slow expansion of your business on the market. The companies that opt to improve b2b sales lead generation should think about increasing the quality of the content they produce. That’s right, the better quality of the content is, the faster new leads will appear on the horizon. Because the main tools of catching leads are blogs, Youtube channels, advertising videos. Such type of content is designed for lots of people to learn about the advantages and values of your company, this way it warms them up and makes them more prepared for a deal. Make sure your content creators are perfectly aware of the inner life and working methods of the company they talk or write about. Good content brings in a lot of traffic and helps to spread the word about your enterprise. Lead research measures are performed by companies to estimate what people or businesses are best to begin cooperation with.  

As you see, prospecting and lead generation can’t be treated as equals. Every approach has its own methods and audiences to target. How do you know which one to resort to? 

Lead Generation vs Prospecting – What is the Best Choice for a B2B Company?

The answer should be quite simple – take the best from both worlds. There’s no use in trying only one particular approach. Business requires flexibility and this principle perfectly works for our dilemma. Prospecting can be a perfect choice at the initial stages of business development. When the awareness has not been built up yet, it’s a good option to knock at all doors directly. The first task is to collect a credible database of potential customers. This is where direct or outbound messaging becomes necessary. A good template for an email or a well-planned call pattern allows you to warm up your suspect a little. If your customer database requires quick replenishment, prospecting is a perfect choice. 

Let’s take cold emailing, for instance. Some sales reps believe it’s an old-fashioned method, yet reality proves it still works out fine. It’s all about a well-molded introduction message and reliable data. While you can’t handle the manual messaging all by yourself, it’s advisable to use a bit of computer magic to know your messages will hit the right spot. Special software like Folderly will watch over that your B2B mail won’t find itself in the spam folder. The built-in spam checker is a pleasant addition to the offered set of features. 

When your enterprise feels confident enough and ready to conquer new segments of the market, it’s time to implement lead generation techniques. They can not only increase the revenue and stimulate activity on your website, business sales leads you get will set a solid ground for further development in the business area. The best thing to start with is to create an ICP to determine the approximate features of your potential buyers. Thus you will get the idea of who to sell your services and how to do it properly. The next step is creating unique content that will reflect the very core of your business ideas. It should be engaging, easy to perceive on the one hand, and SEO-optimized on the other hand. If you want to know more about content creation, check out lead research at Belkins.Io to learn a couple of useful tips and add them to your sales reps’ arsenal.  

Prospecting Techniques

The basic methods of prospecting are the following:

• Social sales. LinkedIn or Instagram messaging may serve as a good start for business relations if you’ve chosen suspects carefully. 
• Cold calling. This approach is slowly losing its ground, however, if you need to fill in the pipeline quickly, grab the phone and start working. 
• Emailing. An undying classic of sales. It used to be tough to send the whole bunch of messages manually. However, now it’s very easy to automate the process to speed things up considerably

Lead Generation Techniques

Now it’s time to mention how a b2b company can opt to lead generation:

• Content creation. It should be diverse and catch the attention of people by offering them something that matches their demands. While short informative videos are easier to perceive, blogposts can generate traffic and serve as a useful FAQ tool for their readers.
• ABM – marketing. This kind of lead generation works within a specific site where potential leads might be found. The idea is to boost your account, make it look as credible and representative as possible, personalize the content and then reach out to people. 
• Social media representation. With the growing popularity of social networks, it becomes necessary to follow…in every sense of this word. Following up and browsing relevant communities is a good example of a lead research method.

Final Thoughts

Sooner or later every b2b company faces the crucial choice to make in terms of lead generation. Prospecting and lead creation, though being different in the mechanism of their implementation, may be taken as two sides of the same medal. They are both intended to boost the presence of the company on the market. The perfect move will be to use these approaches in connection with each other, switching one for another at a right time. In this case, your pipeline will never be empty and juicy suspects will regularly turn into prospects.