A lead is a potential customer who left contact details: someone who filled a form, called, wrote on WhatsApp, walked into the shop saying “I saw the ad”. Ask a company how many leads came in last month and you get one of three answers. “I don’t know.” “About a hundred from forms; phone is separate.” And, rarely: “A hundred and forty-two; forty-three from Google, sixty-one from Instagram, thirty-eight by phone, forty-nine of them reached a sale.” The third company doesn’t spend more on ads than the first two. It just counts.
Where the leak is. If the lead count is unknown, nothing derived from it can be known: cost per lead, lead-to-sale conversion, channel comparison, agency performance. Every conversation about the ad budget swings between “seems fine” and “quiet this month”. The second cost of the uncounted lead is more concrete: if the phone enquiry isn’t counted, nobody follows it up either. An uncalled lead is a product you’ve paid for and never collected.
Three levels. At level one there is no number. At level three the monthly number is known, but the source is muddled: “a hundred from forms, phone we don’t know”, or “all of it from social”. At level five count, source and quality are reported together: how many leads came from each channel and how many from each channel became sales. Without the quality column, the source column misleads; the channel that brings the most leads is often the one that brings the fewest sales.
A field example. In one company marketing said “a hundred and twenty leads a month”, sales said “forty”. Both were right. Marketing counted forms and whatever the ad platform called a lead; sales counted only the people they reached and spoke to. Neither counted phone enquiries; the switchboard log showed sixty-three calls a month, thirty of them from ads. The cheapest lead was the one nobody counted. With one definition and three sources on one table, the number came to a hundred and ninety-one — and the conversation about the monthly budget changed that day.
The simplest check. Today, ask three people the same question: the marketing lead, the sales lead and the agency. “How many leads came in last month?” If you get three different numbers — and you will — the leak is in the definition before it’s in the number. One counts forms, one counts people reached, one counts what the ad platform labels “lead”. Until the three numbers match, no conversion rate means anything.
First action. Write one definition: “A lead is a person who left contact details and whom sales can reach.” Then set one counting method per channel: the form log for forms, the call log for phone (most switchboards keep one), the business-account label for WhatsApp. This month, one table: channel, leads, called, converted. Four columns, five rows. The first month will be incomplete; phone leads will probably be half-counted. Fine. The second month is less incomplete. By the third month that table is the most-looked-at page in the company, because it’s the only real conversation about the ad budget.
In Growth 360, lead generation is the second point of the Sales Funnel dimension, and one of the Full Assessment’s evidence questions looks straight at it: “How many leads came in last month?” “I don’t know” is a valid answer; the report carries it into the score’s reliability and puts counting infrastructure into the first action.
FRAMEWORK · GROWTH 360 · CAPTURE
Sales Funnel 10.2 — Lead generation
measures whether leads are counted and whether source and quality are known.
LEAK POINTS · 5 / 15
The question in this piece is Quick Scan question 5.
What’s the answer in your company? The fifteen-question scan takes ten minutes and shows your score in four areas, with your first action, on screen.