Demand and conversion
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.
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.