What are “leads”?
Leads are individuals or organisations who have shown some interest in a product or service: making them potential customers worth engaging with. Leads are the input to the sales pipeline: they get qualified, progress through stages, and either close as customers or get disqualified. The quality of leads determines sales-team productivity more than any other input.
Lead types
- Inbound leads: contacted you first: typically warmer; higher conversion.
- Outbound leads: contacted by your team; lower initial intent; require more nurturing.
- Referral leads: introduced by existing customers, partners or advisors; highest conversion.
- Event leads: met at conferences, webinars or industry events.
- Cold leads: identified via list-buying or scraping; lowest quality; high effort per close.
Lead qualification
Common qualification frameworks:
- BANT: Budget, Authority, Need, Timing.
- MEDDIC: Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify pain, Champion. Used for complex B2B sales.
- CHAMP: Challenges, Authority, Money, Prioritisation. Modernised BANT.
Lead vs. lead generation vs. leads
- Lead generation: the activity of producing leads.
- Lead: a single interested party.
- Leads: the plural: the pool of prospects in the system.
Lead management in Turkish B2B
In the Turkish B2B market, lead quality tends to be highest in LinkedIn outbound and referral channels; pure form-fill inbound usually converts poorly. Under KVKK, the information duty must be met for every lead collected and the retention period must be documented. HubSpot and Salesforce are common CRM choices; local alternatives such as ETA are more widespread in the SME market.
Do: qualify leads ruthlessly: bad leads burn sales time without producing revenue.
Don’t: chase raw lead count: converted revenue is the only output that matters.