This is a guest poost by Aaron Wittersheim from Straight North.

Imagine you run a grocery store and one day you receive a box from a supplier containing 10 pieces of fruit — a mix of apples and oranges.

If a customer shows up and asks for five oranges, will you be able to fill that order? You should know because you probably opened the box to find out how many of each fruit you received from the supplier.

However, in the world of online marketing, not everyone is opening the box. Far too many companies assume that every conversion on their website is a potential sales lead — but the truth is, they’re not.

Although many online marketers might believe that the number of conversions on their websites has a direct correlation to the number of sales leads they receive, the reality is that only about half of those conversions end up being sales leads. The rest typically are made up of job applications, customer service requests, incomplete form submissions and other interactions that aren’t really sales leads.

By mixing the apples with the oranges, businesses waste time and resources chasing after oranges when what they really want are apples.