Lead : Is someone who you think have the potential or characteristics to become your customer.
So, let me give you an example – suppose you are running an educational institute which upskills professionals working in the IT sector. Now just give a thought about who can be interested in your product/services!
Can’t think about who could be those right people? Well, that holds the key. Identifying the segment who would be very much interested in your product or service is the very first step. As per my experience and domain knowledge, for this case where the institute is looking to reach to their target audience, those people in the audience can be:
- Freshers just passed out graduates.
- Software professionals who are not in very great profile.
- Business school pass outs.
- A business analyst who want to gain some software skills.
- Any other enthusiast.
Okay now you know they can be different segments within your target audience who can become that institute’s customers if they are approached correctly and you tell them the value of upskilling and why they should join that institute over joining others.
And all these people sitting in those respective segments can become your lead if you have their contact available. Right, but you can’t find all those people contact’s so you will try to find different channels to get those leads contacts.
Consider a case where you buy an email list from some vendor giving them your target audience persona. Can you make sure all those email lists are correct and from same target segments? Most of the time a ready-made list contains some data which varies from what you wanted. So, the point I am trying to make here is can you term all people from these email list as leads, if data is not so accurate?
Well, the answer can be confusing sometimes and misleading. The takeaway here is that the definition of lead can slightly vary from company to company and from marketing to sales. A marketing lead may not be lead for salespeople! Well, don’t get confused. It’s simple.
From my understanding, a lead is someone, for whom putting efforts is worth. If that lead is useless, trash it!
Stay tuned for details post on varieties of leads like cold leads, warm leads, qualified leads etc. which I will publish soon in my next post. I hope you find this article useful.
