What is a lead? Cold, warm and hot leads, MQLs and SQLs.

A lead is a potential customer you can reach. Two things make it a lead: a reason to think they might buy (they run the kind of business you sell to, or they asked about your product), and a contact detail (a phone number, an email address or a postal address).

A name without a way to reach it is not a lead. A contact detail for someone who could never buy is not a lead either. A row that says “roofing company, Austin, phone number, website” is a lead for a business that sells to roofers.

The temperature of a lead says how much contact there has been and how ready the lead is to buy. It is a description of the relationship, not of the lead’s quality.

Leads move in one direction if things go well: cold to warm to hot. A bought or built list is a list of cold leads. That is not a flaw; it is the starting point of outbound sales, where you make the first contact.

MQL and SQL are labels teams use to hand leads from marketing to sales. They describe who has qualified the lead, which means checked that it is worth more effort.

Marketing qualified lead (MQL)

A lead that marketing judges likely to become a customer, from what it did: opened several emails, visited the pricing page, filled in a form. Nobody has spoken to it yet.

Sales qualified lead (SQL)

A lead that a salesperson has checked and accepted: it has a real need, the person can decide or influence the purchase, and the timing is plausible.

Qualified lead

The general word for either. When someone sells you “qualified leads”, ask who qualified them, against what test, and when.

Each company sets its own test. A common one checks four things: is there a budget, does the contact have authority, is there a need, and is there a timeline. The exact rule matters less than both teams using the same one.

These three words are often used loosely. The usual order is:

1. 1Lead. Might be a customer; you can reach it.
2. 2Prospect. A lead you have checked against your target customer and decided to pursue. Some teams only call it a prospect after a two-way conversation.
3. 3Opportunity. A prospect with a specific deal under discussion: a product, a price and a decision date.

An inbound lead comes to you: a form on your website, a call, a referral. An outbound lead is one you go to: a business you found, chose and contacted first.

Inbound leads start warmer but you cannot choose who they are or how many arrive. Outbound leads start cold, but you decide exactly which businesses to contact and how many. Most companies that sell to other businesses use both. The guide to lead sources compares the ways to get each kind.

A B2B lead is a business. Its contact details are business details: a company phone number, a website, an email address on the company’s own domain. A B2C lead is a private person, and its details are personal data.

The difference matters for the law and for where leads come from. Rules on contacting businesses and private people are not the same, and they differ by country. Lists on LeadsByCity are business-level data only: no consumer data is sold here, by us or by sellers on the Lead Market. See the buyer compliance guide for what that means when you send email.

• It matches who you sell to: the right kind of business, in a place you serve.
• The contact details work: the phone number rings and the email address accepts mail.
• It is current: the business is still trading at that address.
• It is yours to use: you know where it came from and that you may contact it.
• It is not shared with everyone else. A lead sold to twenty competitors on the same day is worth less to each.

The first point is the one you control most. A small list of exactly the right businesses beats a large list of roughly right ones, which is why lists here are built one niche and one place at a time. You can search a niche and a city and see the count and sample rows before paying.