How is prospecting different from lead generation?
B2B lead generation is the broad concept. It covers every path a contact can enter the funnel through, including passive ones, like the form someone fills in after reading an article. Sales prospecting is its active side. The team decides which companies it wants to sell to, finds the right person inside each one and takes the initiative, without waiting for interest to arrive on its own.
That difference changes the daily work. Prospecting means building account lists, researching each company, finding contact details and writing messages that earn a reply. It is the activity that depends most on the quality of the underlying data, because a poorly segmented list turns hours of outreach into silence.
How do you prospect at trade shows?
Trade shows are the most fertile ground for prospecting, because they solve the most expensive problem in the process, knowing which companies are active in your market. Every trade show naturally publishes a list of participants, and that exhibitor list works as a living database of your industry, carrying the intent signal of having invested to be there.
The method is direct. Get the event’s company list, filter it with your ideal customer profile to keep the relevant accounts, and reach out before the show to propose concrete meetings. The event stops being where you search and becomes where you close what you searched for. Doing that work by hand takes weeks per event, and it is exactly what DataOrigin automates, as we show in the comparison between DataOrigin and manual prospecting.