Leads and prospects

You'll find people sometimes use these terms in different ways but generally, most people use the following analogy for marketing:

Lead -> Prospect -> Decision

Where a lead is a name or an email address you have that hasn't been exposed to the business yet. You have a name but you haven't approached them in any way.

A prospect is someone you've made some kind of approach to, sent an email, given them a DVD, someone who is considering the proposition - we hope.

So we need to make some kind of approach to turn a lead into a prospect.

Once they are a prospect, we turn the handle and move them along our prospecting pipeline until they make some kind of decision that we can work with, so we can take them off the radar for now.

That decision might be to

• Become a player
• Become an affiliate
• Say no, not at the moment
• Say no full stop

Any of those decisions are fine for us - we've achieved our objective in getting a decision from our prospect. Otherwise, we have to keep following them up, wasting our time and theirs. If they've said "no, not at the moment" then we can simply set a reminder to ourselves to call them some time in the future.