Lead

People showed interest long before there was a word for this. There was just no name to call them by, so everyone got lumped together as a potential customer. Someone who clicked an ad and left after three seconds and someone who typed in a work email address to get a report were described with the same phrase.

The trouble showed up in what could actually be done with each of them. With the first person, nothing. Nobody knows who they are and there's no way to reach them. With the second, you can send an email, or come back four months later and try again.

In the monthly review this gap turned into one recurring exchange. Marketing would report thirty thousand visitors for the month, and sales would ask who exactly they were supposed to call. Thirty thousand looked like a big number, but there was nothing sales could do with it. The two teams were sitting in the same meeting counting different things.

Lead draws a line through the middle of that. Only people who left a way to be contacted get the name. Once the line existed there was a list, and once there was a list there was work to do on it. It is the first unit marketing and sales genuinely share, so the same word carries straight into sales conversations.

The only certain fact about someone at this stage is that they left contact details. Whether they intend to buy, whether they can sign anything, and whether there is a budget are all still unknown.

They arrive through four doors.

1. Download forms. A checklist or an industry report given in exchange for contact details — a lead magnet — sits here. This door brings the most names and the thinnest interest.
2. Sign-up forms. Webinar registrations and demo requests, where someone has agreed to spend time. The effort involved makes these warmer than the first group.
3. Direct questions. Pricing inquiries and quote requests, where the person spoke first. Fewest in number, highest in close rate.
4. Offline. Business cards collected at a conference booth. Register them the same week or the other side forgets who you are.

What defines this stage is that all four sit in one list together. In one month at Pagedeck, 400 of 30,000 visitors left contact details: 310 had only taken the report, 60 registered for a webinar, 20 asked about pricing, and 10 were cards from a conference. The single number 400 hides that composition completely.

A fair share of those 400 were never going to buy anything. Competitors download reports, students show up for coursework, and some people type whatever letters they like into the company field. Count the whole list as prospective customers the moment it arrives and that share gets counted as performance.

Moving from lead to the next stage, a marketing qualified lead (MQL), takes one more piece of evidence. Leaving contact details isn't treated as enough on its own, so two things get read together: who the person is, and what they have done.

Who they are is the part that doesn't change — company size, industry, job function, the tools they already use. A planning lead at a 500-person company and a freelancer working alone behave very differently after downloading the same report.

What they have done is the behavior recorded after they joined the list. Opening the pricing page three times, opening every email that gets sent, or reading a case study to the end all say a review is underway.

Turning those two axes into a score and ranking the list is lead scoring. Rules are set in advance — 20 points for a work email address, 10 for a pricing page visit, 30 for a company over 50 people — and anything past 60 gets promoted to MQL. Sales then filters once more, and what survives as worth meeting in person becomes a sales qualified lead (SQL). A lead confirmed by product usage rather than by anything they said gets its own name, product qualified lead (PQL).

The other half of this stage is not throwing away the people who fall short. A lead sitting at 15 points today buying four months later, once a budget lands, is ordinary in business sales. Sending them something worth reading every few weeks so you are still in mind when that happens is lead nurturing.

"We took in 400 leads this month and only 6 percent converted to MQL."

Plenty of names are piling up but few move to the next stage, so the incoming channels need work.

"That isn't a lead yet. We don't have contact details."

Visit records alone don't earn the name.

"The 120 cards from the conference — please get them registered as leads this week."

Contact details collected offline belong in the same list, or nothing downstream picks them up.

At Pagedeck the two people who argue over this number are Ravi and Sofia. Ravi collects leads with reports; Sofia picks out who is worth calling. When Ravi brings 400 to the monthly review, Sofia brings the count that made it to an actual call.

Last month that was 18 out of 400. When Sofia pointed out that half the list used personal email addresses, Ravi made the company name a required field on the download form. The next month brought 260 leads and 31 calls. The smaller number was the better result.

The most common mistake is reading a lead as someone who intends to buy. Typing in your contact details feels like a real commitment, so the reading is easy to reach. But what most people handed over was the price of a document, not interest — they needed the report and never looked at the product. Miss this and sales will call all 400, spend a week, come away with a handful of conversations, and eventually stop trusting any list marketing sends over.

Believing more leads is always better grows from the same root. The count is easy to measure and easy to raise, which makes it look like a good performance target. The fastest way to raise it, though, is to lower the bar: a prize giveaway pulls in 3,000 names, multiplies the number eightfold, and adds zero future customers. Lists like that slow down every stage behind them. When a lead count becomes a target, the conversion rate of the stage below it has to be a target too.