Demand and conversion
Lead
A contact who has given permission to be contacted about a specific thing. Not a customer, not a prospect, and not a metric a business should be run on.
Also called Заявка · Enquiry
A lead is the cheapest thing in the funnel to produce and the easiest to inflate, which is why it is the number most often reported upward. It costs nothing to lower a form's friction, and a report of “forty per cent more leads” can be produced in an afternoon by removing the phone field — while the number of people who will ever pay stays exactly where it was.
The word also travels between departments carrying different meanings. Marketing counts submissions. Sales counts the ones worth calling. Finance counts the ones that paid. All three say “lead”, all three are describing different sets, and the disagreement is usually only discovered when someone asks why the numbers do not reconcile.
The fix is not a better definition of the word. It is a written stage model — what makes a contact a lead, what makes a lead qualified, what makes it an opportunity — with one owner per stage and a date on every transition. Anything less and the pipeline is a story rather than a measurement.
This is the single most expensive vocabulary error in a small business. A submitted form is an expression of interest with no commitment attached; a client is someone who has paid. Reporting the first as the second inflates conversion, hides the real cost of a customer, and makes every downstream decision — budget, headcount, pricing — from a number that describes nobody. If one word has to be policed in a company, make it this one.
Definitions of the unit. Nothing here is calculated, and almost every argument about a marketing number is really an argument about one of these.
Is an input to
- Conversion rate
- The share of a defined population that completed a defined action — meaningless until both the population and the action are stated.
An error in this figure does not stay in it. It reaches one number above it, and each of those is quoted as though it were measured.
The term is a reading taken at a point in a sequence that is already running. These are the sequences, with the place each of them jams.
- From an enquiry arriving to somebody answering it
- A message from a person who might buy, travelling from the form they filled to somebody who can actually answer what they asked. 6 steps, one inbox per channel, and a person per inbox is the arrangement that fails while looking reasonable.
A definition is free. Being answerable for the figure it produces is the part that is bought, and this term is a working part of the engagements below.
- CRM, websites and omnichannel
- One customer, one record. Every metric downstream depends on it.
- The reply that arrives tonight
- An agent that will not say "I do not know" is not a sales asset. It is a liability with a fast response time.
The definitions are the easy part. Whether the figure on your dashboard was computed this way is a different question, and usually the more expensive one.