'James Obermayer, Executive Director and CEO of the Sales Lead Management Association and President of Sales Leakage Consulting is a regular guest blogger with ViewPoint. All real salespeople love sales leads and don’t ever believe anyone who tells you differently. The argument comes when salespeople define a lead. Until SalesForce came along and called every raw name in the database a lead, most of us thought—there are inquiries and there are leads. An inquiry is a name with some information (title, phone number, email, company name), but little else. failure of lead generation and marketing.