Lead source: where each lead came from

Lead source answers the budget question of where the next dollar and the next hour should go. If referrals close at three times the rate of paid ads, your plan should change. When the field is empty, every channel looks equally good.

Common lead source values in B2B:

• Organic search. Found you through a search engine.
• Paid. Search ads, social ads, sponsored content.
• Referral. Introduced by a customer, partner or friend.
• Events. Conferences, webinars, meetups.
• Outbound. Cold email, calls, or direct messages from your team.
• Community or social. Found through a post, a thread or a reply someone on your team wrote.

Keep the list short and fixed. With ten overlapping values typed by hand, the report is useless.

A public post counts as a lead source on its own. When someone asks for help and your team replies, record the community and the thread as the source, so you can see later which places produce buyers. Here are sample sentences, scored 0 to 100 for buying intent the way HearBuyers scores posts:

• Sample, score 92. "Looking for a recruiter who specialises in senior engineering hires, we have three roles open." This is a lead, and its source is that thread.
• Sample, score 50. "Is it worth paying a recruiter for engineering roles?" Not a lead yet, but the community is worth watching.
• Sample, score 0. "Recruiter here, open to new clients!" This is a seller.

Our scan, checked on 2026-10-16, found requests like the first one in the recruitment agency niche, all on Reddit.

• Overwriting the source. Keep the first source and record later touches in separate fields.
• Leaving it blank. A blank lead source usually gets counted as "direct", which hides what worked.
• Ignoring private sharing. Many "direct" leads were recommended in a chat or DM. See dark social.
• Too many values. Merge near-duplicates like "Social ad" and "Paid social" into one.

• Inbound vs outbound: the two broad families of lead sources.
• Dark social: the source that goes missing most often.
• Lead scoring: weighting leads by fit and intent, often by source.

To track public threads as a source, set up Reddit keyword alerts and tag each reply with the community it came from.