Lead Source vs. Opportunity Source

Lead source and opportunity source sit on different CRM objects and answer different questions. Lead source describes how a person entered your database. Opportunity source describes what produced the deal. Treating them as interchangeable is the root cause of most disputes between marketing and sales over who created the pipeline.

What Each Field Records

Lead source is a person-level field. It captures the channel that produced a specific record, and one account can carry a dozen leads with a dozen different sources. It is the right field for measuring channel volume and lead-to-opportunity conversion.

Opportunity source is a deal-level field. It captures the motion that created the opportunity, and it is the only one of the two attached to a dollar amount. It is the right field for any report that talks about pipeline or revenue.

Why They Disagree

Consider an account where a marketing lead came in from a webinar in March, an SDR prospected a different person at the same company in June, and the opportunity was created in July from the SDR's meeting.

Both values are correct. Marketing reporting the webinar as a source of pipeline and sales reporting the deal as self-sourced are describing different events on the same account.

Governance Rules That Prevent the Argument

- Fixed picklists on both fields. No free text, and the same taxonomy across both objects so the values map to each other. - One writer per field. Lead source is set at record creation and never edited. Opportunity source is set at opportunity creation with a defined default and an approved override path. - A written definition of each value. Outbound, partner, and inbound have to mean the same thing to every rep, or the picklist provides false precision. - A stated relationship between the fields. Publish whether opportunity source inherits from the converting lead and what triggers an override.

What This Costs When It Is Wrong

Source fields feed segment-level performance analysis, so bad values corrupt every downstream cut. Win rate by source becomes meaningless if half the opportunities inherited a stale lead value. Forecast accuracy work that segments by acquisition motion inherits the same error, because the model is grouping deals by a field that does not describe them.

ORM's position on data quality applies here: consistency matters more than perfection. Inconsistent source values that shift meaning by quarter break the pattern a model relies on. Lock the definitions, enforce them at write time, and audit them the same way you audit close dates. Sales forecasting best practices covers the same field-governance discipline across the rest of the pipeline.