

Prospecting involves researching and engaging with individuals or organizations that may be interested in your products or services, ultimately aiming to convert them into customers.
It's an integral part of lead generation.
AI highlights
Disclaimer: This section was generated using AI and reviewed by a human based on the article's content.
Prospecting is the collecting intelligence part of the sales process. It involves identifying and engaging potential customers to generate new business opportunities.
Differentiate between sales prospecting and lead generation: prospecting is a proactive, outbound approach, while lead generation often involves inbound marketing efforts.
Here are the best actionable tips. We've collected these based on how our top customers use PhantomBuster. You can use these as examples and try them out by creating a free PhantomBuster trial.
Monitor Competitor's LinkedIn and Scrape Leads: Automate the process of monitoring and extracting leads from competitor engagement on LinkedIn.
Look at Webinars and Event Attendees: Use LinkedIn Event Guests Export to gather attendee information for personalized outreach.
Use Sales Navigator Advanced Filters: Narrow down prospects using LinkedIn Sales Navigator's 30+ search filters for precise targeting.
Nurture Leads to Prospects: Engage with leads on social media to build relationships and prepare them for direct sales outreach.
Automate LinkedIn Outreach Sequences: Set up automated LinkedIn sequences to maintain consistent engagement with potential leads.
Leverage AI for Personalized Messaging: Use AI to craft personalized messages based on engagement data, enhancing response rates.
Track and Analyze Engagement Metrics: Monitor campaign performance with analytics to refine strategies and focus on successful techniques.
These strategies, inspired by the successes of PhantomBuster's top customers, can significantly enhance your sales prospecting efforts. They can help you build stronger relationships with potential customers and ultimately close more deals.
Where does prospecting sit in the sales process?
Prospecting begins at the initial stage and can even help define a target audience. It is a sales team-driven process focused on identifying the best targets, assessing their interest and conversion potential, and nurturing them toward a sale.
Sales prospecting vs lead generation
Sales prospecting is a proactive outbound approach sales teams use to manage and develop their lead pipeline. In contrast, lead generation typically involves creating leads through marketing campaigns or cold outreach.
Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) vs sales qualified leads (SQLs)
MQLs are individuals who have expressed some interest in your company’s products or services, such as subscribing to emails or downloading a guide.
They are potential customers but not yet ready to make a purchase. MQLs require further nurturing and engagement before they are prepared for a direct sales approach.
SQLs, in contrast, are leads that the sales team has evaluated and deemed ready for outreach.
They have demonstrated a more serious interest and meet specific criteria, like having a budget or being identified online as seeking a similar product or service.
Therefore, SQLs are further along in the purchasing process and are more likely to purchase.
Why is sales prospecting important?
Sales prospecting sets the tone for your sales process's efficiency. Without adding qualified leads to your sales funnel, your chances of closing more deals drop. A good prospecting strategy will:
Speed up your processes: Accelerates your sales process by efficiently targeting qualified leads, allowing your sales team to focus on prospects more likely to convert. This targeted approach reduces time spent on unproductive outreach, enabling quicker progression through the sales funnel and faster deal closures.
Save time: Automating repetitive prospecting tasks such as sourcing, enriching leads, or lead scoring will help prioritize important leads.
Increase conversion rates: Where you source the leads and the accuracy of the data you collect will impact the results.
Who is responsible for the sales prospecting process?
The sales prospecting process is primarily the responsibility of the sales team, particularly sales reps, who identify and engage potential customers.
A sales rep uses different sales prospecting techniques and strategies to build a pipeline of qualified leads.
However, the process often involves collaboration with marketing teams to ensure alignment on the target audience, messaging, and support from sales managers, who provide guidance and resources to optimize prospecting efforts.
Sales prospecting methods
Many tactics are available to keen sales reps; here are the ones we've seen to produce the best results.
Social selling on social media platforms
Engaging and reaching out on social media to build relationships with potential buyers first is a pillar of prospecting.
It’s less intrusive than cold calling or emailing because it focuses on creating value and nurturing connections over time, and your data is enriched.
Cold Calling
Cold calling is a technique in which sales reps call prospects who have not engaged with the company.
The goal is to introduce products or services and convert these potential customers into qualified leads. This method works well for specific industries or demographics that prefer phone communication.
It works best with a well-researched list of prospects and a clear understanding of their business needs. This allows sales reps to engage in real-time conversations and tailor their sales pitches effectively.
Cold emailing
Like cold calling, cold emailing involves sending emails to potential leads who haven’t previously engaged with your company. This approach allows you to reach many people with a structured message tailored to the company's pain points.
While similar to cold calling in targeting unengaged leads, it is less intrusive, allowing recipients to respond at their convenience.
Warm outbound
Warm outbound shifts the focus to targeting leads who have shown interest in your company by visiting your website or engaging with your social media channels.
Using intent signals to identify these prospects makes this method more efficient and effective than cold outreach and far nicer for a sales team.
Leads who demonstrated interest are more likely to engage positively, resulting in higher conversion rates than cold methods.
Inbound prospecting
Inbound prospecting attracts potential customers through marketing materials and campaigns, such as content marketing and SEO. This approach works well for companies with strong content strategies, as it draws leads who are actively seeking solutions.
This method often results in higher-quality leads already interested in what you offer, contrasting with outbound methods involving reaching out directly.
However, the content-led approach can also attract existing customers and leads who may not be ready for a sales pitch and are simply seeking general information.
Account-based
(ABM) focuses on targeting specific companies or accounts that fit your ideal customer profile. By personalizing marketing efforts for key decision-makers within these organizations, ABM allows sales professionals to take a more tailored and impactful approach.
The downside of ABM is the time it takes, as you need to invest more resources into identifying companies, finding contacts, and enriching data. All of this is important before contacting potential customers so you can have a personalized pitch.
Steps of the sales prospecting process
If you're just starting out, here are the steps to implement an outbound prospecting strategy as part of your sales prospecting efforts.
Build your ideal customer profile (ICP)
Understanding your audience is the first step to selling effectively. Building an ICP is about identifying pain points a potential customer might have that your product helps solve.

How to build your ICP:
Collect and analyze internal data (if you have any already) or "spy" on who engages with your competitors to find industry trends. Consider:
Industry: The niche that the company works in
Geography: Where the company is located and the language they use
Budget: How much the company is willing to spend
Company size: The number of employees
Problem: Whether your service can sustainably meet their need
Build targeted lead lists
Sales prospecting isn't about churning through piles of irrelevant data or bought lists and hoping for conversations. That's why building targeted lead lists is a critical step.
You'll want to find people with high buying intent that match the ICP you've just built.
You could scrape people who liked your competitor's LinkedIn post, followers who follow your social media account, or an influencer.
At this step, you want to build lists of people based on intent signals.

While multiple prospecting tools exist to build lead lists, it's important to centralize those lead lists inside your CRM. This way, all sales and marketing teams work with the same data, and you can easily track your sales pipeline.
We recommend you use PhantomBuster, which allows you to sync data with your CRM automatically, ensuring the health of your sales pipeline.

Keep your HubSpot contact up to date with PhantomBuster pre-built automations. Try it free!
Prioritize leads
Now that you have several contacts across one or more lead lists, it's time to prioritize them so don't waste time reaching out to profiles that don't match your ICP.
A lead scoring model will help with this.
Use AI help to score leads based on specific criteria. You can try PhantomBuster's AI and customize prompts to leverage the data you have inside your lead lists and automatically score leads.
Browse our AI prompt guide to learn more about writing better prompts.

Decide on methods and messages
The next step is choosing the best channel and writing the outreach message.
You can use chatGPT directly or PhantomBuster's AI—LinkedIn AI message writer to create connection messages for each lead in your list. The benefit is that you can leverage the data you've collected when building the lead lists to personalize the messages.

Automate the process
A sales prospecting process isn't something you do once and forget about; it's an ongoing journey. Automating parts of the process can help you focus more on the personal engagement part and let tools and AI do the rest.
You can automate extracting leads, enriching them, analyzing sales calls to gather insights, writing emails or connection messages etc.
Automating is critical to avoid burnout. We recommend using PhantomBuster, as it can help automate list building and enrichment. Its AI functionalities will also help you leverage the data collected for better outreach messages.
You can also automate syncing your data to HubSpot to better integrate with your tool stack.

Evaluate your sales pipeline performance and adjust
Once your prospecting process is in place, the last step is to track performance. This will help you inform improvements based on real insights. Important sales KPIs include:
Number of sales per month
Highest-paying customers
Time spent on different activities
Team leaderboards
Your sales forecast
Now that we've covered the steps to implement a proper prospecting strategy let's review some examples of the best strategies.
Actionable sales prospecting strategies for finding potential customers
Sales prospecting isn't about cold lead lists that mean nothing. Instead, you want to focus on the strategies that help you prospect using intent signals.
Here are the best actionable tips. We've collected these based on how our top customers use PhantomBuster. You can use these as examples and try them out by creating a free PhantomBuster trial.
Monitor competitor's LinkedIn and scrape leads
Using this LinkedIn Company Post Scraper, you can automate the process of monitoring and extracting leads based on profiles of those who engage with your competitors on LinkedIn.
Building lead lists using this intent signal will add relevant hot leads to your pipeline.

Look at webinars and event attendees
Use the LinkedIn Event Guests Export to gather information on attendees interested in topics relevant to your industry. You can use this intent signal to personalize the first outreach message, making connecting easier and improving productivity.

Use Sales Navigator advanced filters to build lists
LinkedIn Sales Navigator has 30+ search filters that allow you to narrow down a list of prospects.
You can filter by criteria such as job changes, news mentions, recent LinkedIn activity, and shared experiences.

Once you've built your prospect lists, use PhantomBuster to extract those contacts and enrich them with emails. Then you can automate a simple outreach sequence on LinkedIn to start engaging with them.
The Sales Navigator Search to Lead Outreach automation helps you reach out to prospects and automate sending connection invites and follow-up messages. As the sections above show, you can also use AI to personalize those messages.

Nurture leads to prospects
Once you’ve scraped and built your lead lists, not all leads will be immediately ready for direct sales outreach. Leads with lower engagement scores need additional nurturing to become viable prospects.
Start by engaging with these leads on social media.
Connect with them, interact with their content, and invite them to follow your company page. This builds a relationship and keeps your brand top-of-mind.
Use PhantomBuster's LinkedIn Company Page Inviter to automate inviting leads to follow your company page. This will streamline your efforts and allow you to focus on building meaningful interactions.
Nurturing these leads through consistent and relevant engagement will help move them closer to becoming qualified prospects.

Sales Prospecting Tips and Best Practices
Mastering the art of prospecting is important for sales reps aiming to convert potential leads into loyal customers. Implementing effective strategies and techniques can make all the difference as you refine your sales prospecting process.
Now that we've covered the most effective prospecting strategies let's explore best practices that can enhance your outreach efforts and ultimately increase revenue.
Test different sales cadences
Testing different sales cadences is a best practice that helps you find the optimal outreach strategy.
A cadence is a structured sequence of events that sales teams follow when reaching out to prospects.
Test different approaches, such as using the same communication channel consistently or switching between channels and adjusting the length and timing of your messages.
For example, you might try a sequence of emails followed by a LinkedIn message to see which combination yields better engagement.
Personalize your messages
Personalization is key to capturing the attention of potential leads. Use lead enrichment data to personalize your messages, whether emails, connection requests, or other communications.
For instance, if you know a lead has recently engaged with specific content, reference that in your outreach. AI tools can also help by analyzing tone and data to write messages that resonate better with individual leads.

Always follow-up
To increase your chances of conversion, it’s important to follow up multiple times with prospective buyers across the buying process.
However, knowing when to pause and re-enter the lead into a nurturing queue is equally important. This approach ensures you don’t overwhelm prospects while keeping them in the loop for future engagement.
Update your CRM
Maintaining an up-to-date CRM is essential for efficient sales prospecting. This ensures that all team members are working with the same information to avoid duplication of effort and overlapping outreach.
A centralized CRM system helps manage your sales pipeline effectively, streamlining your prospecting efforts and improving team coordination.
Use a targeted approach
A targeted approach focusing on smaller, more granular lists based on intent signals works best. We recommend using intent signals to build micro lists of leads as your primary prospecting technique.
This way, you can hyper-personalize outreach, shorten the sales cycle, and stop wasting time on cold calls that take a lot of time to close.
Conclusion
As you can see, implementing a structured process can significantly enhance your prospecting effectiveness.
Focusing on these best practices can strengthen your relationships with potential customers and increase your chances of successful conversions.