Grasshopper Plus

"It is always easier to sell to a satisfied customer than to an unsatisfied one or a prospect.

E-Commerce Strategy
"The great paradox of the Intent is that its very benefits making information widely available; reducing the difficulty of purchasing, marketing, and distribution; allowing buyers and sellers to find and transact business with one another more easily also make it more difficult for companies to capture those benefits as profits."

Prospecting is a vital part of every company’s marketing. Prospecting is the act of “finding” prospects or individuals who are expressing interest in one or many of your company’s products/services.

Prospecting

What is prospecting? According to Wikepedia it is "the physical search for minerals, fossils, precious metals or mineral specimens". In other words, it is a search for something valuable, and in the case of selling, it is defined in your text as "the process of identifying potential customers". In sales, customers are the precious metals.

Eighty percent of new sales people fail within their first year of work due to insufficient prospecting.