Lead

A lead is a thread you can pull: someone who might buy what you sell and whom you can contact. In B2B that person acts on behalf of a company. You are not selling to Julie, you are selling to the company whose hiring Julie runs, and her role is what makes her a lead.

The definition is deliberately broad. Depending on the team, a lead can be a name from a LinkedIn search, a website visitor who downloaded a guide, or someone who commented on your post. Two things tie them together: a plausible interest in your offer and a way to reach them. Without a way to reach someone, you have a target on paper, not a lead.

That is why teams almost always add a qualifier: cold lead, warm lead, MQL, SQL. Each qualifier says where the person stands and what should happen next. The bare word tells you nothing about value.

The terms overlap and every company draws its own line. The most common convention: a lead is an unverified opportunity, a prospect is a lead that fits your target and that you have decided to work, and a customer has signed. Some teams swap the first two words. That is fine as long as everyone uses the same definition.

What matters is the rule for moving from one stage to the next. A lead becomes a prospect when it matches your ideal customer profile (ICP): right industry, right role, right company size. It becomes an opportunity when a need is confirmed, usually during a discovery call. Writing these rules down ends the arguments in pipeline reviews and keeps your pipeline free of names that will never buy.

A contact, finally, is just a record in your CRM. Your accountant is a contact. Your accountant is not a lead.

On LinkedIn, a cold lead climbs nearly the same steps every time. You find them, you invite them, they accept or not, you send a first message, they reply or not, and the conversation turns into a meeting or stops. Every step has its own pass rate, and the weakest step caps everything after it.

MimikFlow's 2026 LinkedIn Prospecting Observatory (published in French) gives orders of magnitude measured on real sends. Out of 50,930 invitations sent to strangers at least 30 days earlier, 30.2% were accepted, 9.7% of invited people replied and 1.6% led to a meeting the platform could observe. That last figure is a floor: meetings arranged by phone or email are not all visible.

Where a lead comes from matters more than most settings. In the same study, people who had reacted to a post replied 74.6% of the time, against 35.6% for strangers found through search. A lead who already made a move toward you should not be treated like a name pulled from a list.

In MimikFlow, every lead found is first checked against your target, then moves through a readable status: invitation sent, first message, conversation, goal reached. The AI that answers prospects moves it toward a meeting, and someone who asks to be contacted later gets a scheduled follow-up on the date they gave.

Lead count is the easiest number to inflate and the least useful. A thousand off-target names cost time, invitations and sometimes your reputation. Look at what your leads become instead: the share that truly fits your target, the reply rate to your first message, then meetings per hundred leads contacted.

Then compare those rates by source. If leads who viewed your profile book meetings far more often than leads from a cold search, that is where your effort belongs, even if the volume is smaller.

Be careful with fit scores on their own. In the 2026 Observatory, the score given before first contact barely predicted replies: between a score of 6 and a score of 9, the reply rate moved by about two points. A score tells you who to talk to first. It guarantees nothing.

The costliest one is confusing collection with prospecting. Exporting 5,000 profiles and inviting all of them in the same week burns your invitation allowance and your goodwill. LinkedIn caps invitations, and a badly targeted lead who ignores your invite rarely comes back.

Next comes giving up too early. According to the 2026 Observatory, 46.4% of replies arrive after at least one follow-up. A lead who stayed silent after your first message has not said no. They just have not answered yet.

The last common mistake is not recording where a lead came from or what they said. Three weeks later nobody remembers that they asked to be contacted again after the summer, and the deal goes to a competitor.