About Contacts and Leads

Overview

The difference between a lead and a contact is the amount of interaction the contact has with marketing campaign activities. A scoring algorithm shows which leads respond to marketing efforts the most.

What Is a Contact?

A contact represents an individual person with specific demographic information. The unique identifier for a contact is their email address.

A contact’s information can be updated over time as you learn more about your contact. Contacts can also be added to contact lists for targeted marketing communications or segmenting your audience.

Standard contact fields are shown below:

First Name Last Name Company Title Work Phone Mobile Phone

Email Street Address City State Postal Code Country

You can also manage custom fields for contact data. For more information, see Contact Fields.

Contacts can be imported into your portal if you have an integration with your CRM. For more information, see Set up a CRM Integration.

Once you have loaded your contacts, you can group them into contact lists for marketing/communication purposes. For more information, see Manage Contact Lists.

What Is a Lead?

A lead represents a contact's interaction with one of your marketing campaigns or tactics. A new lead is created for a contact every time they interact with a new campaign/tactic. for more information, see About Leads.

Your supplier may also distribute leads to you. For more information, see Finding your Distributed Leads.

A contact’s profile page shows a list of leads that have been generated for it in the Lead Activity section. On the profile, you can select a specific lead to update its status, assign it to a sales rep, convert it to a deal, or register it as a lead with your supplier. For more information, see Manage Leads.

If you have an integration with your CRM, you can export leads from the portal. For more information, see Exporting a List of Leads.