Back in my day a lead meant the same thing everywhere.
Then I started talking to franchise people.
Here is what I had wrong. I thought a lead definition was a vocabulary problem. Somebody writes it down, everyone agrees, done.
In a franchise it is a money problem. The definition decides who gets credit, and credit decides whether the money a franchisee puts into the ad fund reads as an investment or a tax. Nobody is arguing about the word. They are arguing because the word has a dollar sign on it.
The one that keeps coming up: the customer lives in one territory and gets served by another. Both owners paid for ads. One did the job. Whose lead was it?
And it compounds, because Meta claims the booking and Google claims the same booking. Add up what every platform says it drove. If that number is bigger than the jobs you actually did, you do not have an attribution problem. You have an arithmetic problem.
The version I keep coming back to: stop making one number do two jobs. Marketing credit goes to the territory the customer came from. Revenue credit goes to the location that did the work. Publish both, side by side, same page, every month. The fight was never about who was right. It was that two people needed one number to say two different things.
Originally posted by Taylor Minnis on LinkedIn, September 2026. Taylor Minnis is a Growth Strategist at TapClicks in San Jose, California. More about Taylor.