What Is a Sales Lead?

A Sales Lead: The Building Block of Sales

If you’re new to sales, you might be wondering: What exactly is a sales lead?  Well, you’re in luck because in this article, we will break down sales leads in the simplest terms and share with you some helpful resources to find accurate leads to sell your product or service to. 

A sales lead is a contact (it could be a professional or a company) who isn’t a customer yet, but there’s potential there for them to become a paying client because they’ve communicated some level of interest in your business (signing up for a free trial, etc.).

Typically a sales lead isn’t just the individual person or company, but it also entails the information you need to reach out to them for the first time with value-driven and persona-driven messaging that slices through the noise. This information can include their name, position, email address, cell phone number, and/or direct dial.

The lead information you find will depend on the platform you choose. Some platforms will have more lead information than others, and some will be more accurate than others. 

Why Are Sales Leads Important?

Traditionally, sales lead generation falls on the marketing team. It’s their job to generate leads through advertising, social media, and email marketing, just to name a few. 

Then it’s the sales team’s responsibility to turn any qualified leads into buying customers.

Leads are imperative to every company, big or small, because there is no business without leads! A steady, consistent stream of leads brings in organic traffic and the revenue your organization needs to survive and thrive. The more leads you can pull, the more revenue you can generate, and the easier it is to scale your business. 

Check out this article on ten tried and true ways to generate more sales leads for your business.

A Word of Warning With Lead Generation Tools

With all the benefits of sales leads, what, if anything, could go wrong with finding potential prospects for your business? 

One of the greatest pain points with lead generation is quality. There are several platforms that guarantee customers they have the “best sales leads around” and the “biggest lead databases,” but often, you have to sift through mountains of stale data just to find a few good leads.

In today’s economy, with 82% of businesses failing because of issues with cash flow, it’s more important than ever to get accurate leads of ready-to-buy decision-makers in your target market. 

What Methods Can You Use to Get Sales Leads?

One of the best ways to generate leads is through referrals (here are nine of the best referral lead generation sources by industry). Think about it, if you’ve already got customers who love your product or service, there’s a good chance that they know people who work in similar industries, in similar roles, and have similar pain points and goals that would be a great fit for your solution. 

Plus, no amount of sophisticated and creative marketing or sales pitching can match the effectiveness of a colleague who is excited to share a product with you that helped them crush their goals and numbers.

Referrals can’t be beat! But you usually can’t rely on referrals to consistently bring in the volume of leads your business needs. This is why other great channels for lead generation include paid media and webinars. Webinars are a great way to inform people about your product or service and immediately earn their trust as an authority in your industry by playing the role of the educator. 

You can also generate leads through value-driven content writing like blog posts, whitepapers, and videos where you introduce leads to your brand and also help solve bottleneck issues that are costing them time and money.

The #1 Sales Leads Generator on the Market

Webinars and content writing are all great, but the #1 tool you can use to fill your pipeline with the world’s best sales leads…the #1 platform that has helped thousands of users generate millions in sales is…

Seamless.AI! 

As opposed to stale databases, where you have to waste countless hours running through outdated contact info to get an accurate email, Seamless uses comprehensive artificial intelligence. Our AI crawls through the web in real-time to find, verify, and validate the contact data of any professional.

With our automated features and Chrome extension, eliminate manual data entry and list-building and instead build lists of hundreds, even thousands of leads in a matter of minutes.

Additionally, if you sign up for our latest Job Changes feature, you can stay ahead in today’s volatile market and never worry about your leads going stale again.

If you’re curious to see the lead-generating power of Seamless, sign up for a demo today!