marketing

Lead

A potential customer who has expressed some level of interest in your business.

Definition

A lead is any prospect who has identified themselves to your business - filled a form, signed up for a newsletter, attended a webinar, requested a demo. Leads vary in quality: some are tire-kickers, some are high-intent buyers. Lead volume is a vanity metric; lead quality is the real signal. The job is to filter and score leads so sales effort flows to the high-intent ones. A 'lead' without a defined next step is just an email address.

In your business

  • Define what makes a lead - not every email signup qualifies
  • Score leads on fit + intent before routing to sales
  • Track conversion from lead to customer by source - this tells you which channels are worth scaling

Related terms

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