Sales prospecting and lead generation are both designed to fill your sales pipeline with potential customers. But they’re not the same thing.

So what’s the difference? 

Good question.  

Talk to a lot of people and you’ll end up more confused than before, as they’re often used interchangeably. 

It’s important to get it right, though, as the right process for your company depends on your product, customer base, stage of growth, and more. 

Get it wrong and you could be wasting valuable time and resources. 

We asked our top prospectors to clear up the differences between sales prospecting vs lead generation.

New prospects are skittish creatures. Approach them in the wrong way and they’ll take off faster than a gazelle who’s spied a lion at the watering hole.

And who can blame them? In today’s hyper-connected world where everyone is being prospected 24/7, time and attention are fast becoming more valuable commodities than gold. 

At Mixmax, we sell to sales professionals, so they’re on to us even before our magnificent manes come into view. That’s why we’re always looking for sales prospecting techniques to put us ahead of the game. 

We reached out to top sales influencers and chased down our own hardworking SDRs to learn how they gear up for prospecting success. 

Read on to find out how to stay ahead of the prospecting pack.

Question: Would you apply for this job?

Wanted: Highly resilient individual to perform thankless, repetitive tasks. 

Must have:

• The tenacity of a worker ant.
• The drive of a Ferrari.
• Skin of a rhinoceros.
• Overdeveloped chin (to take rejection on).
• Ability to walk through fire and emerge unscathed.

Tempted?

Us either.

Yet that’s what SDRs face daily when prospecting. It takes a special individual to tackle the many sales prospecting challenges involved in tracking down suitable prospects, performing cold outreach, and building pipeline.

And do it all at scale. With a smile on their face.

At Mixmax, we sell to salespeople, so we feel your prospecting pain. We asked our top sellers and reached out to sales influencers to get the tips, tricks, and tools they use to overcome common prospecting challenges.

Come with us if you want to become a quota-crushing productivity beast..

Building a healthy sales pipeline starts with effective prospecting. And that, done right, takes a lot of time and effort.

If you’re still manually researching potential customers and checking contact details you might as well be trotting around in a pony and trap while your competitors zip by in flying cars.

To make matters worse, with everyone stepping up their tech game, investing in a few stand-alone sales prospecting tools, and crossing your fingers just won’t cut it anymore.  

What you need is a killer tech stack that works together to supercharge your prospecting efforts and steer you out of the dark ages and into the 21st century.

We sell to sales professionals in fast-growth environments, so we know how important it is to have reliable data and insights at your fingertips. So we asked our top salespeople what tech they use to stay one step ahead.

Related post: 20 Best Sales Automation Tools to Give Your Reps Superpowers

You’ve decided to automate parts of your sales process, go you!

How you build and scale your sales automation workflow will massively dictate the success (and adherence) of your sales reps. 

But where do you start with automation? And more importantly—where do you stop?

There are many things that robots are better at than humans are, and that includes:

• Pulling data together
• Keeping track of conversations and files
• Enriching data
• Checking in with customers that have gone quiet
• Reminding you that you haven’t followed up on an important email
• Dancing

Okay...maybe humans still have the upper hand over dancing—but for some reason, human sales reps are still handling a lot of these tasks regularly when robots can do them better. Those should be automated.

Just like dancing, humans are better at creativity, empathy, and developing relationships with other humans.

So if you’re trying to build a workflow that combines the unique capabilities of humans and robots, this article is for you.

During the gold rush, miners spent days, lifetimes, sifting through piles of dirt searching for nuggets of gold. It was time-consuming, backbreaking, dangerous work.

Sound familiar? 

Ok, modern sales prospecting isn’t dangerous, but it has plenty in common with its namesake. Like sifting through piles of information to identify potential customers, which, done at scale, takes a lot of time and effort. 

To make matters worse, other prospectors are constantly encroaching on your patch and prospects are so saturated that even 30 seconds of their attention is like gold dust. 

We feel your pain. You see, at Mixmax, we sell to salespeople (yeah, that’s as tough as it sounds). 

The good news is, adopting sales prospecting best practices and investing in the right tech can make you a more efficient and effective prospector and help boost revenue. 

Related post: Customer Success and Sales: Your Next Dream Team

We asked our top salespeople for their top quota-crushing tips. By the time you’re done reading this, you’ll be fully equipped with all the tools you need to supercharge your prospecting efforts. 

Pick up your pickaxe and let’s get to it.

You’re hot on the trail of a juicy lead, so you send them an email packed with useful info. Everything they could ever want to know about your company and product. 

Then, you wait to hear back. 

And wait, and wait, and…

Nothing. 

Crickets.

What could possibly have gone wrong? 

Well, for a start, one-off emails alone are very unlikely to get a response. These days, competing for a prospect’s valuable time and attention takes a well-organized military-style campaign involving multiple channels and exquisite timing. 

Fortunately, sales email sequence tools make it easy for you to put one together.  

At Mixmax, we sell to salespeople, so we know exactly what you need. We asked our reps to share their secrets about how to write sales email sequences and achieve your goals faster. 

Kind folk that they are, they even threw in some sales email sequence examples you can steal. 

Let’s get started. 

We don’t need to tell you remote working is here to stay. In a recent Gallup survey, nine in 10 remote workers want to maintain remote work to some degree. 

The types of workers making this transition? Salespeople. As sales teams transition between working in the office and working at home, companies must launch new initiatives to help sales reps be successful in this new permanent way of working.

With fewer face-to-face interactions, like in-person meetings or watercooler check-ins, it’s vital to create a plan that keeps the sales department connected in an ultra-flexible working environment. Below are five tips to guide sales teams during the transition.

The pipeline reviews are in, and for some reason—despite what you thought were qualified leads—you can’t seem to eliminate bottlenecks and truly optimize the sales process.

You look at spreadsheets after a bad month, which tell you “if only we hired X more reps or did 10% more activity—we’d hit quota!”

But the solution to missing quota isn’t increasing activity that doesn’t work.

What you should be looking at after a missed target is the why—why isn’t your outbound engaging? Where do the relationships fall off? Which sequences aren’t engaging prospects? How could your reps be spending their time better?

That’s what sales engagement is. 

This work is time-consuming, and a lot of it can be repetitive, whether that’s the hours you spend typing the perfect, bespoke email to every prospect on your list, or keeping on top of simple admin tasks in the various tools you use—many of which seem to create additional work instead of reducing your load.

After reading this article, you’ll know how sales engagement can help your team book more valuable meetings, get more engaged, two-way conversations, and spend less time on things that can be automated.

We’ll cover: