Everyone wants more leads. But before you chase them, it helps to ask: what exactly counts as one? If you ask five people on your team, you’ll probably get six answers.
In marketing, “leads” have become the catch-all term for any name in the database, form fill on the website, or email in a nurture sequence. Somewhere along the way, we stopped agreeing on what that word actually means and started treating lead counts like scoreboard numbers instead of meaningful signals.
So let’s chat about what a lead really is, why your dashboards might be lying to you, and how marketing leadership can reclaim control over what counts (and what doesn’t).
What Is a Lead in Marketing?
At its simplest, a lead in marketing is any person or organization that has shown genuine interest in your product or service and could potentially become a customer. That’s the official answer.
The real one is a little messier.
Just because someone downloads a whitepaper or fills out a contact form doesn’t necessarily make them a lead. A real lead shows intent—they’re signaling a level of interest that could turn into action.
Here’s where most teams go wrong: they confuse activity with intent. A person who opens an email is active. A person who books a demo is intentional. Those two behaviors aren’t the same, and your reports shouldn’t treat them that way. Every form fill isn’t necessarily a lead. Sometimes, it’s just someone killing time before their next meeting.
Understanding what a lead means in your business is the foundation for every KPI that follows.
Who Is Considered a Lead?
This is where things get interesting. A lead isn’t just anyone in your CRM. It’s someone who’s crossed a line from awareness to interest. They’ve taken an action that says, “I might actually want to talk to you.” Here’s the basic breakdown:
- Contact: Exists in your system. They might have subscribed, attended an event, or downloaded something.
- Lead: Has taken an action that indicates potential fit and curiosity about what you offer.
- Prospect: Has been vetted or qualified—someone with both interest and the right characteristics to buy.
If your reports lump all of these together, you’re counting business cards instead of measuring the effectiveness of marketing. Clear definitions separate noise from signal, helping your dashboards tell a true story about what’s working and what’s not.
What Is a Lead and a Prospect? (And Why the Difference Matters)
You’ve probably heard these words used interchangeably. But treating “lead” and “prospect” like twins is one of the fastest ways to mess up your reporting—and your sales relationships.
Here’s the simplest way to think about it:
- Lead: Someone who’s shown interest.
- Prospect: Someone who’s qualified.
The difference between the two might seem small, but it’s the difference between marketing curiosity and sales opportunity. Leads are about potential. Prospects are about priority. One belongs in your nurture funnel. The other belongs in your pipeline.
When you blur the line, your KPIs get fuzzy. You start chasing volume instead of value, and “marketing-sourced leads” stop meaning anything. This is why mature marketing organizations—and strong CMOs—spend as much time defining lead stages as they do running campaigns.
We see this pattern all the time.
A marketing team celebrates a record month of “leads.” The dashboard shows hundreds of new contacts—demo requests, support inquiries, job applicants, and newsletter signups. Technically, they’re all leads in some form: people who’ve interacted with the brand and entered the system.
Without clear definitions and segmentation, though, those different types of leads get blended into one metric. The result? Numbers that look great but don’t tell you much about performance or potential.
Once teams separate and label those categories—marketing-qualified leads, sales-qualified leads, partner or recruitment leads—the data becomes useful. Lead counts don’t need to go down; they just need to start meaning something. Sales knows where to focus, marketing can measure what’s working, and leadership finally sees a clear picture of growth. That shift turns marketing reports from defensive exercises into strategic tools.
Defining the Lead Is Defining the Strategy
Ask ten marketing leaders what their company’s biggest challenge is, and you’ll hear a familiar split: half say “proving ROI.” The other half admit, “We don’t even agree on what a lead is.”
When you define what counts as a lead, you are actually shaping how your organization understands growth itself. A “lead” definition reflects what your company values. Is it volume, aka any hand-raiser counts? Is it fit and intent — only those with clear potential to convert? Or something more sophisticated, like a dynamic mix of behavioral and firmographic signals that actually align with your buyer’s journey?
Those answers drive everything downstream from how you design campaigns, to how you hand off opportunities, to how you allocate budget. If “lead” means something different to marketing, sales, and leadership, then your entire growth engine is miscalibrated.
You can’t build a data-driven strategy on a language problem.
Yet, that’s what happens every day. Reports turn into debates instead of decisions. The fix is alignment. Defining your lead stages — collaboratively, precisely, and consistently — is an act of leadership that turns activity into accountability.
The Leadership Lens: Aligning Definitions, Data, and Decisions
When marketing, sales, and leadership all share a definition, data becomes a decision-making engine. When they don’t, you end up with three different versions of reality and one messy QBR. Alignment turns metrics into meaning:
- Reporting gets real. You stop padding numbers and start connecting marketing activity to revenue outcomes.
- Sales and marketing finally speak the same language. Fewer dropped handoffs, better follow-ups, and more trust.
- Leadership sees the whole picture. KPIs evolve from vanity stats to performance insights that guide investment.
Defining what counts as a lead might sound small, but it’s the foundation of strategic marketing. That’s how you move from chasing conversions to driving real growth.
The best marketing leaders know that clarity beats complexity every time. Define your leads, align your data, and suddenly every decision—from ad spend to messaging—gets sharper. You’ll stop chasing numbers and start driving real outcomes.
At &Marketing, we help growth-minded organizations do exactly that: connect the dots between marketing activity and meaningful business results.
Ready to turn your marketing data into decisions that actually matter? Let’s start with a conversation about what your leads are really telling you.
Not sure where to even start? You might need a C-suite level marketing resource to come in and help you define these stages and set realistic marketing goals and strategy. Take our fCMO quiz to find out!
