Okuzeka
Marketing vocabulary · Marketing Metrics

Lead

Meaning in marketing, with examples

/liːd/nounCore term

In marketing, lead means: A person or company that has shown interest in a product, for example by filling in a form, and might become a customer.

In Turkish: potansiyel müşteri, aday müşteri, lead

How it is used

Very common in B2B, real estate, insurance and education. Marketing generates leads and passes them to sales. People talk about qualified leads (likely to buy), cold, warm and hot leads, and cost per lead (CPL).

Example sentences

  1. The webinar brought in 300 leads, and sales has already called the top fifty.

  2. These leads are too cold; most of them only wanted the free e-book.

Common collocations

  • generate leads
  • qualified lead
  • sales lead
  • cost per lead
  • nurture leads
  • lead generationMarketing activities that attract people who are interested in a product and collect their contact details so that the sales team can follow up.
  • funnelA model of the stages people pass through, from first hearing about a brand to buying, with fewer people at each stage, like liquid in a funnel.
  • B2BShort for business-to-business: selling products or services to other companies rather than to individual consumers.
  • conversion rateThe percentage of people who take a wanted action, such as buying, signing up or calling, out of all the people who had the chance to do it.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Marketing Metrics

Practise with graded reading

Reading at the right level is the fastest way to make new words stick. Pick free English books by level: