What is a lead?

A Lead in Salesforce is an unqualified prospect — a person (or sometimes a company) that has shown interest in your product or service but hasn’t yet been confirmed as a real sales opportunity. Leads are the first stage of the Sales Cloud funnel, separate from Accounts and Contacts. When a Lead is qualified, it’s converted into a combination of Account, Contact, and (optionally) Opportunity, after which the Lead record is no longer used.

Why Leads exist as a separate object

Some CRMs lump all people into one “Contacts” table. Salesforce intentionally separates Leads from Contacts for these reasons:

• Data hygiene: Leads often come in with incomplete or unverified data (form submissions, list buys, business cards). Mixing them with Contacts (real, qualified people associated with paying Accounts) pollutes your contact database.
• Sales motion separation: Lead-working is qualification — phone calls, emails, BANT scoring. Contact-working is relationship management on already-qualified accounts. Different workflows, different teams, different reports.
• Conversion as a deliberate gate: A Lead only “graduates” to Account/Contact/Opportunity when an actual qualified deal exists. This forces discipline.
• Marketing vs sales boundary: Marketing nurtures Leads; Sales works Opportunities. The two-table model makes this handoff explicit.

Lead standard fields

A Lead carries hybrid Contact + Account information on a single record:

Salesforce stores both person-level and company-level fields on the same record because at the Lead stage you don’t know yet whether you have a real Account or not.

Lead lifecycle

Captured (Web-to-Lead, manual entry, import)
   │
   ↓
Assigned (auto-assignment rule or queue)
   │
   ↓
Worked (calls, emails, meetings)
   │
   ↓
Qualified or Disqualified
   │
   ├── Disqualified → Closed (status = "Unqualified" / "Dead")
   │
   └── Qualified → Converted
         │
         ↓
         Creates Account + Contact + (optional) Opportunity
         Lead is locked (read-only); IsConverted = true

Common Lead Status values

Out of the box: Open - Not Contacted, Working - Contacted, Closed - Converted, Closed - Not Converted. Most orgs customize this list to match their sales process — New, Attempted Contact, Contacted, Qualified, Disqualified, etc.

The status picklist is controlled by a Lead Process (similar to Sales Process for Opportunity stages). Different Record Types can use different Lead Processes.

How Leads enter Salesforce

Common sources:

• Web-to-Lead form — Salesforce-generated HTML form on your website
• Manual entry — sales rep creates after a conference, cold call, or business card
• Data import — CSV from a list buy or trade show
• Integration — connectors from marketing automation (Pardot, HubSpot, Marketo, Marketing Cloud)
• API — custom integrations creating Lead records

Where Leads differ from Contacts

Common interview gotchas

• Lead is not an account. You don’t sell to a Lead — you qualify it, then sell to the Account that emerges.
• Once converted, a Lead is locked. You can change a few fields (mostly system) but you can’t reopen a converted Lead.
• Leads have their own assignment rules (separate from Case assignment rules).
• Leads support Web-to-Lead for inbound capture.
• Leads have auto-response rules for instant email replies.
• Marketing campaigns track Leads via CampaignMember.

When to skip Leads entirely

Some orgs (especially B2B with named accounts, or B2C with well-known customers) skip Leads and have marketing-qualified contacts go straight into Accounts/Contacts. This is a valid strategy when:

• You have a small known universe of target accounts
• Marketing-to-sales handoff doesn’t need a qualification gate
• Your inbound volume is too low to justify a separate object

For most orgs with significant inbound flow, Leads remain valuable as a hygiene filter.

Verified against: Salesforce Help — Leads. Last reviewed 2026-05-17.