Is B2B prospection better than B2B marketing?
Each has its own advantages and bottlenecks
3/26/20263 min read
B2B Marketing vs. B2B Prospecting
When I was a kid and used to practice judo, I sometimes wondered: what's the best martial art if you want to become the strongest fighter? Karate or judo? If you put a karate practitioner against a judoka, who would win?
The real answer is: it depends on the type of karate, the type of judo, and the individual karate practitioner and judoka!
It's exactly the same with B2B marketing and B2B prospecting: it depends on the type of marketing, the type of prospecting, and how each is executed.
That said, there are some major differences between the two. Depending on the product or service you're selling, one acquisition channel will often have a clear advantage over the other.
1. Deal Size and Market Scale
A commonly held view is that, in B2B, the average deal size determines which customer acquisition channel has the greatest potential.
Typically, for a product or service with a lifetime value (LTV) of less than €6,000 (meaning the total value of a B2B customer relationship over its entire duration), marketing will often be the acquisition channel with the greatest potential.
Conversely, for products or services with an LTV above that amount, B2B prospecting tends to become the more profitable acquisition channel.
Here's why:
Marketing generally has less direct impact on prospects than direct outreach, which means it tends to be more effective when targeting broader markets. In fact, it can take anywhere from 1,500 to 5,000 impressions on Meta to generate a single B2B meeting.
For products and services with relatively high average deal values, the pool of potential buyers is often much smaller. When your target market is limited, marketing alone may not generate enough opportunities.
That's when B2B prospecting becomes essential: you need to reach decision-makers directly, generate a stronger impact, and achieve the best possible ROI.
At least, this is a point of view that Alex Hormozi, the American billionaire and business entrepreneur, has publicly shared.
2. Is B2B Prospecting Just Another Form of B2B Marketing?
That being said, B2B prospecting involves several different channels: cold calling, cold emailing, LinkedIn DMs, and so on.
Some of these can actually be considered forms of B2B marketing, particularly email outreach and LinkedIn messaging.
Well-executed B2B cold email sequences can generate approximately one meeting for every 100 emails sent. Depending on the type of cold email campaign, however, the ratio may be closer to one meeting per 200 to 500 emails, or sometimes even worse.
Cold email can therefore become a volume-driven acquisition channel, much like traditional marketing.
Conversely, B2B marketing channels such as Meta Ads can also be used as part of highly targeted, multichannel prospecting campaigns aimed at a relatively small number of prospects. In this case, advertising acts as an additional marketing touchpoint, often at a relatively low cost.
The only B2B prospecting channels that cannot really be equated with traditional marketing are cold calling and LinkedIn DMs, because their volume is necessarily limited:
LinkedIn prospecting: You cannot send an unlimited number of messages, otherwise your account risks being restricted or blocked by the platform.
B2B cold calling: It depends on the cold caller's capacity, but very few can consistently handle more than 30 conversations per day. However, cold calling is arguably the channel that allows you to generate the most meetings in the shortest amount of time when targeting a limited number of prospects.
Conclusion
To achieve the best possible results, you can combine different types of B2B marketing and prospecting.
Cold calling, as a highly targeted and precise acquisition channel, is particularly relevant for high-value deals, where you need to maximize your impact on a relatively small number of decision-makers.
Email outreach and Meta Ads can be extremely effective when targeting broader markets. For mid-sized markets, typically consisting of tens of thousands of companies, B2B cold email can deliver impressive results.
Content marketing, which is essentially free to distribute, can be extremely valuable in both mid-sized and larger markets, even though it generally requires significant time and consistent effort.
Since content distribution comes at virtually no cost, it can potentially deliver the highest ROI of any B2B customer acquisition channel, although the number of opportunities it generates may remain limited.