TLDR: Contacts are raw person entities living in a pool. A lead is created once a contact is added to a campaign. When contacts are converted to leads, you can call them from Adversus.
Adversus uses two terms when working with data related to person records: Contacts and Leads. It's essential to know the difference when working with data imports and exports in Adversus.
Every data import in Adversus is inserted into a pool, which is when a contact is created. You can view the pool as your interactive Excel sheet, from which you can use your data for future operations. Some contacts will never move on from the pool, while others will be added to campaigns, thus creating a lead. A lead is essentially a contact that you add to a campaign.
How does the data behave?
A campaign has a set of related fields. These are the fields that store all contact-related data, such as name, phone number, and address. These fields can store all data relevant for your use case, but you can also decide to work with hidden fields; data that is attached to the contact, but data you don't wish to show on the single campaign (lead). This is useful when you want to build background logic based on field values but don't want to expose those fields to agents in a particular campaign.
Since the data field values are stored on the contact object, any changes to the lead fields will be visible across all related leads. So, if you're updating the phone number on one campaign, this change will be visible for any lead associated with the same contact. In this way, we ensure that all leads are based on the latest contact information we have.
Any campaign-related information, such as the current status, number of contact attempts, etc., is stored on the lead object. Hereafter, we can use this campaign-related information to build further logic — e.g., adding the contact to a new campaign if they previously have been closed as a Success on another campaign.
Why import a contact without adding it to a campaign?
There are multiple scenarios where it's relevant to have a pool of contacts who aren't active on campaigns as leads. The use cases could be:
Using the contacts as a blacklist (perhaps existing customers, external do-not-call lists, etc.)
Having a list of backup contacts that can be used if a campaign runs out of leads before you expect it to.
Storing historical lead activity for a contact to use in automated flows.