Women At Desk With Laptops Prospecting
  1. Identifying potential customers 
  2. Creating a list of your potential customers
  3. Communicating regularly and strategically with your potential new customers
  4. Hoping that they convert from potential customers to new customers!


A prospect is a potential customer.

Prospecting is a fancy way of saying looking. (Originally, the verb to prospect was used for mining, such as ‘They were prospecting (looking) for gold’.) When you are prospecting, you are actively looking for new customers. (If it makes prospecting more fun why not pretend you’re a miner digging through your list of contacts trying to find the gem of a person who will be your next customer 💎)

One of the biggest problems for direct sellers and network marketers is finding new customers. Prospecting encapsulates the process of searching for and connecting with new potential customers as you work to convert them to your newest customers. 

For network marketing and direct sales, most people first look for prospects within their own networks. If you have a social profile on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn etc. It is the perfect database of people who already know who you are. (For more information on Prospecting, check out our blog: A Beginners Guide to Prospecting)

Lady Working At Laptop

Definitions for common words

Cold prospecting

These prospects don’t know anything about you, your products, your company or your service. At this point in the prospecting journey you’re not trying to sell to them, you’re trying to make them interested in you and what you’re offering. This may include several initial touchpoints where they are just learning about you.

Hot prospecting

These prospects have already shown an active interest in your products and services. They just need the right promotion or the perfectly timed message to tip them into being a customer. 

Leads (vs prospects)

Is this contact a lead or a prospect? 🤷‍♀️ The two terms are often confused and some people use them interchangeably, but really they define your potential customers at different stages of your sales journey. A lead is a contact you have limited information on and perhaps haven’t connected with yet. Perhaps they entered their email address for a giveaway you were running? At this point, they are a lead. Once you have researched them, reached out to them, and decided they could be a potential customer—then they become a prospect.

Pain points

A direct seller promoting organic skincare might seek to find clients whose pain point is sensitive skin and they haven’t found a product that works for them yet. You want to identify your prospect’s pain points so you know what problem you can solve for them with your service or product. 

Sales cycle

Typically, once you’ve identified a prospect and moved them from cold to hot, you will be moving them through your sales cycle so that they become a customer.

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Prospecting with Penny

If prospecting sounds daunting, then that is where Penny can transform your life (or at least save you A LOT of time)!

Prospecting traditionally looks like a spreadsheet with a lot of names and a lot of notes. With Penny, you can import all your contacts from Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and add any extras from your mobile contacts. 

Penny is a cross between a CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) and a personal trainer. This unique mix means Penny is managing all of your customer information, but also analyzing it so she can suggest daily tasks that will maximize your time.

Using Artificial Intelligence, Penny then sifts through your contacts and will identify which of your friends and contacts are most likely to convert to potential customers. (Is this magic? No, but in the world of prospecting it’s pretty close! ✨)

Want to learn more check out: A Beginners Guide to Prospecting

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