Not a sale. Just a name and a reason to believe they might become one.
Lead generation sits at the front of the sales pipeline: before a salesperson can close anything, someone has to identify who’s plausibly interested and get their contact details, whether through content, ads, referrals, or — increasingly — an automated outbound system. Academic treatment of the mechanics is recent and mostly applied: Banerjee and Bhardwaj’s 2019 study on multi-channel marketing, for instance, models how compensation should be designed differently for the person who generates a lead online versus the person who converts it offline, since rewarding both the same way misaligns incentives.
That’s the exact automation this essay describes selling: “personal assistants, lead generation, email management, calendar scheduling” are listed as a bundle precisely because they’re the mechanical, repeatable front-half of a sales process — the part that doesn’t require human judgment about whether to close, just consistent execution of outreach.
Source: Banerjee, S. & Bhardwaj, P. (2019), “Aligning marketing and sales in multi-channel marketing: Compensation design for online lead generation and offline sales conversion,” Journal of Business Research, 105, 293–305.