Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
A prospect whose profile and behaviour suggest enough interest to justify sales follow-up, but who has not yet been vetted by sales.
Also known as: MQL, Marketing-qualified lead
Category: Business & Economics
Tags: businesses, marketing, sales, metrics, lead-generation
Explanation
A marketing qualified lead is a contact that marketing believes is worth a salesperson's time. Qualification combines fit, meaning the contact resembles your ideal customer profile in industry, size, and role, with engagement, meaning they have taken actions that correlate with buying such as requesting a demo, attending a webinar, or repeatedly visiting pricing pages. The MQL exists to create a defined handoff between marketing and sales, and most of its value comes from that definition being agreed rather than from the label itself. Where the two teams do not share a definition, marketing optimises for MQL volume, sales rejects most of them, and both report success while revenue stagnates. The metric is also easy to game: anyone who downloads a checklist can be counted. Healthier practice ties marketing's target to accepted leads or to pipeline contribution rather than raw MQL count, and revisits the qualification criteria whenever the conversion rate from MQL to opportunity drifts.
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