In this instructional video, Shaun Whynacht distinguishes between marketing and prospecting for small‑business owners and professional service providers. He defines marketing as any public‑facing activity that showcases a brand—social media posts, emails, signage, vehicle decals, etc.—and stresses the need to carve out dedicated time for it, either in weekly small chunks or a full day each month to plan and schedule content. He then explains prospecting as the proactive outreach to warm leads who have previously shown interest but didn’t convert, as well as daily outreach to new prospects. Whynacht advises setting daily prospecting windows, targeting the right buyer personas, and avoiding the wrong leads. He outlines platform choices: LinkedIn and Alignable for B2B, Instagram and Facebook for B2C, and suggests participating in forums and groups. He also recommends a conversational, value‑focused outreach tone rather than a hard‑sell approach. The video concludes by inviting viewers to share alternative viewpoints on marketing and prospecting.
Chapters
So I want to talk to you for just a brief moment here about the difference between marketing and prospecting. Now, I know you're busy, you run a business, you run a financial practice, a professional services practice. You know, you've maybe you've got an e-commerce store, there could be a million different business opportunities out there in which one fits your lifestyle. So I know there's a lot going on. And then you got family on top of that. So let's first talk about marketing. So when it comes to marketing, it is anything that's public-facing, that's going out to the public, uh, that really portrays your brand and talks about the experience that people would have with you, the solution that your product or service would create for them. Um, and ultimately it is a clear representation of you and your brand. So that can be anything from social media posts emails that go out, voicemails, vehicle decals, store frontage, signage, you name it. There's a ton of different things out there, a ton of different touch points that would portray your marketing. So the first part is, do you have time to market? A lot of people feel that they don't because there's a lot of things going on in their business that they have to tend to where they don't have a lot of time. So my tip here is you're going to need to make time. Not really a tip, but more of, you know, straight into the point. And there's two different types of times you can make for that. You can make it in small chunks, so you break it up into weekly, so you set some time aside to do that, or you set aside an entire day once a month to, to go through and create all your marketing content, your content calendar for either the month or the quarter, and get that scheduled and rolled out. You can ultimately then hire somebody to help you with that or fulfill upon that, but in most cases, you're probably going to want to do that yourself or have a hand in doing it. Now, the second thing is prospecting, and prospecting is different than marketing. What prospecting is, is this is where you have the opportunity to reach out to people who either have made contact with you in the past and you didn't have a deal with them, and some time has passed and you're gonna prospect back to those. Those are probably your best bet to re-engage those initial leads that came through, and maybe it was not the right time for them to buy your product or service, or maybe it just wasn't the right product or service and now you have a new one. So there's a different reason for you to reach out, right? So those are warmer type leads that you can prospect to. The second one would be spending some time, and I would recommend usually daily if you are in a business where you're heavily reliant on sales and closing sales, or if you got a sales team, giving them time or asking them to spend some time every day prospecting, you know, whether it's the first of the morning or at the end of the day. I'd recommend at the end of the day, and they can set their, their targets for the next day as to who they want to reach out to. But this is looking at your buyer personas. Who is the ideal person that you want to do business with? And then also knowing who is not the most ideal person so that you can't fall in that trap of following the wrong type of leads or prospects. So with that being said, what you want to do is you want to go and you want to look on other social channels. Now, if you're a B2B type business, that's business to business. If you're not familiar with that acronym, you're going to want to look at places like Alignable, or LinkedIn is a great place for that. If you are a business to consumer, so a B2C type of structure, then you're going to be looking on places like Instagram, Facebook. You know, you can look— you Google searches for, for people that are having those issues that you would solve. Being part of different forums and different groups are very helpful to that, and being engaged in that and reaching out to people and saying, hey, you know what, let's have a conversation. I think I might be able to help, right? Don't say, hey, call me, or, or, you know, when can I call you because I want to sell you this awesome thing, because that's really cheesy and you don't want to do that. So that is the difference between marketing and prospecting. Now, this is my opinion, this is my viewpoint on it. If you're watching this and you have a different viewpoint on it, then by all means, you are open to have that viewpoint. That is awesome. Please share it, please spread that word. There's so many different takes on what is marketing, what is advertising, what What is prospecting? These are the ways that I delineate between those two. So hopefully that was helpful to you and, um, you find that something that you can utilize in your business.
