Lead

Origin & evolution

The structure underneath the lead predates the word. In 1898 the advertising executive E. St. Elmo Lewis sketched the stages a buyer passes through, attention, interest, desire, action, later codified as the AIDA model and described in *Printers' Ink*). A lead is what enters the top of that shape: a contact with attention but no commitment.

Qualification gave the lead its first real rigour. BANT, generally traced to IBM in the 1950s and 1960s, proposed four tests a salesperson should run before investing time: Budget, Authority, Need🫀NeedUserA user need, pain, desire, or constraintView reference →, and Timeline. The framework endures because it is fast and memorable, and it is criticised for the same reason, since a buyer with no budget today may still have the most acute need in the room.

The modern split came from demand generation. As marketing automation let firms score behaviour at scale, SiriusDecisions formalised the distinction between a Marketing Qualified Lead and a Sales Qualified Lead in its Demand Waterfall, rearchitected in 2012. An MQL has cleared a marketing threshold, often a points score on content engagement. An SQL has been inspected by a human and judged ready for a sales conversation. The two-stage handoff turned the lead from a single object into a graded one, with an explicit moment where ownership crosses from marketing to sales.

How it works in practice

A B2B analytics company runs a webinar🎥WebinarCustomer EducationA live or recorded webinarView reference → that draws 600 registrations. Each registrant becomes a lead. Automated scoring promotes the 140 who also visited the pricing page and opened two follow-up emails to MQL. A sales development rep works that 140 against a lighter version of BANT and finds 38 with a named project, a rough budget, and a decision⚖️DecisionStrategyA recorded decision with context, rationale, and consequencesView reference → they expect to make this quarter. Those 38 become SQLs and pass to an account executive.

Six weeks later the team reads the source data backwards. The webinar leads that converted clustered around one topic, integration with a specific data warehouse, and almost none came from the generic feature⭐FeatureProduct SpecificationA product capability or featureView reference → talk. That finding belongs to the product team as much as to marketing: it says where the felt need actually sits, recorded at the cheapest possible point of contact.

Lead vs. its neighbours

• Prospect is a lead that has survived qualification. The working line most sales teams draw is intent and fit: a lead has shown interest, a prospect matches the ideal customer profile👤Ideal Customer ProfileGo-To-MarketThe ideal customer profile (ICP)View reference → and has been engaged one to one. Every prospect was a lead; most leads never become prospects.
• Account is the organisation, where the lead is usually a single person inside it. One enterprise account can generate a dozen leads across departments. The edge lead_becomes_accountLeadbecomesAccountcausal marks the conversion point where a qualified individual signal becomes a tracked organisation.
• MQL and SQL are not separate entities but graded states of one lead, defined by who has vetted it and against what bar. Conflating the two hides the handoff, which is exactly the seam where leads are most often dropped.
• Acquisition channel🎣Acquisition ChannelGrowthA channel through which users are acquiredView reference → is where the lead came from, not the lead itself. The same person arriving via paid search and via a referral carries different odds, which is why source is a property worth keeping past the point of conversion.

In the graph

In the Unified Product Graph, a lead sits in the sales and pipeline region as the earliest tracked unit of demand. Its edges trace the full arc from attraction to conversion: product_attracts_leadProductattractsLeadhierarchy and event_generates_leadEventgeneratesLeadcross-domain record where it originated, lead_sourced_from_acquisition_channelLeadsourced fromAcquisition Channelcross-domain keeps the attribution, pipeline_sales_qualifies_leadPipeline SalesqualifiesLeadhierarchy records the vetting, and lead_becomes_accountLeadbecomesAccountcausal marks the moment a person turns into an organisation worth serving. Holding source as a first-class edge means a product team can ask which channels produce leads that actually convert, and read the answer as structured demand evidence🔎EvidenceValidationData supporting or refuting a hypothesisView reference → the product can act on.