Glossary
What is sales prospecting?
Sales prospecting is the first stage of selling: you find people or companies that fit your customer profile and make first contact, to see whether there is a need. The output of prospecting is a set of real conversations with qualified people, not sales.
Published by Sellinger AI. Numbers and settings checked on 19 October 2026 against the fact register. Report an error.
What are the steps?
- Define who fits, your ICP.
- Build a list that matches it.
- Fill in the contact details.
- Rank who to contact first.
- Make contact and follow up.
What does the funnel look like?
| Step | Count |
|---|---|
| Prospects found | 300 |
| With a usable contact | 240 |
| Contacted | 200 |
| Replied | 60 |
| Meetings | 8 |
Example. Meetings per prospect contacted is 4 percent here.
Where does time go?
Most manual time is list building and writing. Both are repeatable, which is why teams tend to automate them first. Research is the third: reading a profile before writing takes a few minutes per person, and it is the step that makes a message specific.
Keep the list small enough to check by eye in the first week. A sample of fifty tells you whether the filters are right before you load five thousand names.
How Sellinger handles it
People Search covers a database of 700M+ contacts and filters by job title, industry and location. You add the people you pick as leads and run lookups for verified emails and phone numbers. Segments group leads, and the AI score ranks them by fit against the campaign. A lookalike signal can start from example posts you found valuable.
The agents then do the contact and follow up, working through the queue in order so each lead is researched and scored shortly before its first message, and an assistant in your dashboard or through MCP can search people and import them as leads. See ICP, lead generation and signal based vs database prospecting.
Common questions
Is prospecting the same as cold calling?
How big should a first list be?
Can an AI do prospecting?
Sources and method
Sellinger people search, enrichment and segments, checked 19 October 2026.
Related: Lead generation, ICP, Lead enrichment, Find new prospects recipe.
