A lead is a person or business that has given you their contact details and opened the door to a conversation: they filled in a form, called you or sent a message on Messenger. For service and B2B businesses, leads are the basic currency of marketing. Every sale starts with a lead that someone in sales can actually talk to.
Lead volume isn’t everything
A hundred leads a month sounds great until it turns out that 80 of them have no budget or are outside the area the business serves. That’s why we track lead quality alongside volume: how many get as far as a sales call and how many end in a signed contract. In Meta Ads lead campaigns, adding one extra question to the form (about budget or timing, for example) usually brings in fewer leads, but much better ones. It’s almost always a trade worth making.
How do you work out what a lead is worth?
Work backwards from the money: average margin per job × close rate = the highest cost per lead that still makes sense (CPA). If you close one conversation in four and a job earns you £390 in margin, a lead is worth up to about £100. Every pound below that is profit. Without this maths, there’s no way to judge whether a campaign ‘works’, however nice the charts look. See also our article How to promote your business online effectively.
Related terms: conversion, marketing funnel.
