What a Content Syndication Lead Actually Contains, Field by Field

Most arguments about lead quality are unresolvable because the two sides are describing different objects. The buyer means "someone my rep can have a useful conversation with". The vendor means "a record matching the agreed specification". Both are being honest, and neither definition is written down.

The way out is to stop arguing about quality and start reading the record. Here is ours, field by field, including the fields that routinely cause disputes and the ones most syndication vendors do not deliver at all.

The person

Name, work email, LinkedIn URL, phone where held, plus role, seniority and function as separate fields.

That separation matters more than it looks. A spec written against job titles fails constantly, because titles are not standardised — "Director of Finance Operations", "Head of Finance Ops" and "Finance Operations Lead" are the same person to a human and three different strings to a filter. Specifying on seniority and function, with title as supporting detail, is what makes a spec enforceable instead of argumentative.

Work email rather than personal is the quiet quality line in this category. A record with a personal address attached to a business title has usually been through a list somewhere.

The company

Name, domain, employee band, revenue band, industry, region.

Bands rather than exact figures, deliberately. An exact headcount implies a precision that no data source sustains between updates, and a spec written against "100–499 employees" survives the company hiring twelve people in a way that "247 employees" does not.

Domain is the field your side will actually use, because it is what deduplication and CRM matching run on.

The stage, and the only thing that moves it

Two values: researching or in_market.

It flips to in-market when one of three events is recorded — an alternatives read, a comparison, or a pricing view — and for no other reason. Downloads, category reads and newsletter opens do not move it, however many of them accumulate.

This is a narrower definition than most of the market uses, and it costs us in pitches, because a looser one produces a bigger in-market number from identical activity. The compensation is that you can always ask which event moved a given record and get a page and a timestamp back.

The consideration set

The vendors whose comparison pages this person opened, by name.

This is the field that changes what a rep does. "Evaluating ERP" tells them to call. ["NetSuite", "Sage Intacct"] tells them what the first call is about — and if you are neither of those, it tells them something more useful still, which is that they are not yet on the shortlist and the conversation is a different one.

Almost no syndication vendor delivers this, and the reason is structural rather than a lack of effort: it can only be recorded by whoever owns the page where the comparison happened. A vendor who buys or rents audience access cannot produce it.

The event log

Everything that person did across the properties, oldest first, each with a type, the property it happened on, and an ISO timestamp. Comparison and alternatives-read events carry the page; downloads carry the asset.

Two things to do with it, both of which most recipients skip.

Read the gaps. A newsletter open in July, a download in September and a comparison in November is a slow, deliberate evaluation. The same three events inside nine days is a project with a deadline. The lead looks identical in a CRM list view; the right opening line is not the same.

Check the first event. It tells you how this person entered the category — through a newsletter they chose to subscribe to, or straight onto a comparison page from a search. The second group is further along than the first on arrival.

The consent record

The property the person opted in on, the timestamp, the exact opt-in wording shown, and whether your company was named at the point they opted in.

That last element is the one to look for, and the one most worth asking any vendor about. Consent to hear from a publisher is not consent to hear from a specific advertiser, and the distinction is exactly what a data protection officer asks about when a complaint arrives. If a vendor cannot tell you whether you were named, they are telling you something about the provenance of the record.

What "qualified to spec" has to mean

It means the record satisfies a specification that exists in writing, in the contract, before the programme starts — titles or seniority and function, company size band, geography, category, and any exclusions such as current customers or named competitors.

Everything that goes wrong in this category goes wrong because that document does not exist or is vaguer than both parties remember. A spec agreed in an email thread is not a spec; it is two people's recollections, and they diverge at exactly the moment money is in dispute.

The second half is the replacement policy: what happens to a record that falls outside it, and within what window you can say so. Ours replaces out-of-spec leads. The policy matters less than its existence — a vendor with no stated policy is one who intends to resolve disputes by negotiation.

Three questions worth asking any vendor

Can I see one record, with the personal fields redacted? The structure tells you more in thirty seconds than a capability deck does in an hour. A vendor who cannot show you the shape of what they deliver may not have a fixed one.

What event moved this to in-market, and when? If the answer is a model or a score, the stage is an inference. That may be fine — price it accordingly.

Was my company named in the consent wording? The most consequential question in this list, and the one asked least often before signature.