Distinguishing Leads: “Seeds, Nets and Spears” I’ve seen incredible confusion and misunderstanding, among CEOs, Marketing VPs, board members and Sales VPs, around “leads.” The parties lack a shared understanding around lead types and how to make rational projections, creating miscommunication, conflict and disagreements. The most common mistake is lumping all the types of leads into one bucket of “leads,” and then making future projections based on past results. After hearing time and time again about these frustrations, I came up with simple distinctions between the three fundamentally different kinds of leads: “Seeds,” “Nets” and “Spears.” However, different leads have different fundamental attributes: how well they qualify, how fast they close, ROI, etc. I find that thinking in terms of Seeds, Nets and Spears gives teams a simpler way to come to a common understanding (and to share this understanding with investors) of their leads analysis and projections. Seeds take a lot of time to cultivate and to ramp up, but once they get going, they are unbeatable with the highest conversion and close rates. These include developing happy customers, organic internet search/SEO, public relations, local user groups, most social media, publishing expert content.