Lead

Leads are the pool a business grows from. They chose to engage, which makes them worth contacting, and in many places the rules on consent and legitimate interest depend on how the contact was obtained, so check local law. Without a clear line between a lead and a stranger, marketing produces activity nobody can measure and sales spends time on people who never asked to hear from anyone. Grading leads by quality prevents two kinds of waste: a rep losing heart on weak names, and a strong lead going cold because nobody called.

• Capture only deliberate signals, such as a form, a demo request or a reply.
• Record where each lead came from and what they did first, so it is clear which channel earned the interest.
• Add company size, industry and role within minutes, so the lead can be routed to the right person.
• Score fit and engagement together. A senior buyer at the right kind of company should move faster than someone who opened one email.
• Agree a handover rule with sales, such as first contact within a set number of hours.
• Retire leads that never respond, so the list stays clean.

A lead is more than a visitor. An anonymous visitor is only a session in an analytics report. A lead has taken a step that signals interest, such as filling in a form, requesting a demo, downloading a guide or leaving a card at an event, and has handed over a way to be contacted. A purchased or scraped list is not a set of leads, however long it is, because none of those people raised a hand.

• Calling every contact record a lead, which inflates the numbers and hides real demand.
• Treating all leads the same, whatever their fit.