Difference between Prospecting and Lead Generation

What is the difference between prospecting and lead generation?

The answer is always: It depends on your perspective.

The traditional vision of marketing is lead generation. Marketing does their magic and comes up with a campaign to generate leads. Those leads are then turned over to the sales team which goes through the leads looking for prospects that will then be worked into sales.

There are three unfortunate realities. First, marketing and sales are not always on the same page. There might be lots of leads that could never become sales, and this is demotivating to sales and then to marketing. Second, too many salespeople lack the necessary skills to convert leads to sales. Third, this is a perspective issue because different departments are rewarded for different results.

If lead generation and prospecting were thought of as a singular activity, then sales might be improved. This can be one of the beauties of SN: It blurs the lines between functions and in doing so can drive the thought process to results as the clarifying purpose.

For example, is this blog lead generation? prospecting? or just too much coffee? or is it just Wednesday?

Hey, it's Wednesday and you know what that is 'It's Prince Spaghetti Day!' OK, so I've dated myself. You can check out the commercial on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tJUNlZF7Sw Is this prospecting or lead generation? It depends if you are a consumer or a grocery store, doesn't it? or does it?