Lead

The word gets stretched to cover everything from a company name to a signed proposal, which is how two people can both claim 500 leads and mean completely different things. The useful definition is narrow: an identified business plus a channel you can actually open — an address that accepts mail, a number that rings, a form that reaches a human.

Everything short of that is a target. A list of 4,000 dental clinic names pulled from a directory is a target list. It becomes a lead list at the point each row has a contactable address attached, and a good lead list at the point those addresses have been verified.

This matters commercially because most vendors price per row, and a row with no contact method costs the same as one with. Buyers rarely check the ratio until the first campaign bounces.