Sales leads are people or businesses that could be a potential customer of a business’s product or service. They represent the initial portion of the sales process – they are prospects that may have shown some interest or meet criteria to be considered potential buyers.
Sales Lead Types:
Cold Lead: People or businesses that haven’t shown any interest prior. They are typically picked up from lists, networking, or outreach campaigns.
Warm Lead: Prospects that have shown some interest (e.g. they visited a website, signed up for a newsletter or downloaded free resources). They may have engaged with marketing content describing the business’s product or service.
Hot Lead: Prospects that are highly interested and close to making a purchase. They have shown serious intent (e.g. asked for a demo, pricing, or talked to a sales rep).
How are sales leads generated?
Sign up forms for inbound marketing: Lead information is generated through content marketing, SEO, social media and search engine lead capture sign up forms.
Outbound marketing: Leads may be generated through cold emails, cold calling, direct mail, or networking outreach events.
Referrals: Sales leads can also be generated by existing customers, business partners and other businesses.
Lead generation services: Sales leads can also be generated outside of the business by purchasing leads from a third-party company.
Sales Lead Attributes:
Contact information: Name, email, telephone number.
Company attributes (B2B): Industry (B2B), company size (B2B), geographic location (B2B).
Interest level or buying intent.
How is the lead qualified? Budget, authority, need, and timeframe (or best summarized as BANT).
Sales leads vs prospects:
Lead = potential customer with minimal engagement or sharing of information.
Prospect = A qualified lead that sales teams will pursue with identified value proposition and personal communication.