Prospecting
Prospecting is finding businesses that match your customer profile and gathering enough about each one to send a message worth reading. It is the step before outreach, not part of it.
Done badly it is a browser with forty tabs open and a spreadsheet. Done well it is a repeatable cycle: define the segment, pull the list, enrich it, clean it, hand it to whoever is sending.
Separating prospecting from outreach explicitly matters because they fail differently. A campaign at a 0.4% reply rate might have a copy problem or a list problem, and if the two steps are tangled you will spend three weeks rewriting subject lines when a third of the list was the wrong industry.
Treat the output as a product with a quality bar: every row has a business name, an address that passed verification, and one fact specific enough to open a message with.
Goes deeper: B2B Lead Generation: A Practical Guide