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Social marketing

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)

A marketing qualified lead is a lead that has demonstrated enough engagement with marketing material — content downloads, form submissions, repeat visits — to be considered worth handing to sales for further qualification.

MQLs are an internal alignment construct. Marketing needs a definition of 'we did our job, sales now takes over'; sales needs a definition of 'we are not going to chase every random form fill'. The MQL is the contract between the two functions.

A useful MQL definition is specific: title, company size, behavior, source. Vague definitions (e.g. 'anyone who downloaded an ebook') generate noise that sales eventually ignores, breaking the contract.

The MQL → SQL conversion rate (typically 15–35% in B2B) is the most important diagnostic. A conversion rate above 50% suggests the MQL bar is set too high (you are passing only obvious wins); below 15% suggests the bar is too low (sales is wasting time on unqualified leads).

Related terms

  • Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)

    A sales qualified lead is a marketing-passed lead that has been further validated by the sales team — usually through a discovery call — as having budget, authority, need, and timeline to potentially purchase.

  • Attribution

    Attribution is the methodology used to assign credit for a conversion to the marketing touchpoints (ads, emails, organic visits, referrals) that contributed to it.

  • Marketing Funnel

    A marketing funnel is a model of the customer journey from initial awareness through to purchase and beyond, used to align marketing activities and metrics to specific journey stages.

← Marketing FunnelReach →

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