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Social marketing

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.

The most-cited qualification framework is BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline). More modern frameworks (MEDDIC, GPCTBA/CI) add discovery around metrics, decision criteria, and economic buyers. Each is essentially a checklist for 'is this an opportunity worth working'.

The SQL stage is where pipeline-revenue forecasting starts becoming reliable. Below SQL, the volume is interesting but the predictive accuracy is low. Above SQL, win-rate analysis becomes meaningful for sales-cycle planning.

SQL → close conversion rates typically run 15–30% in B2B SaaS, with significant variation by deal size and industry. Tracking this rate over time and segmenting by source (which marketing channels produce the highest-converting SQLs) is one of the highest-leverage reports in a marketing-sales operation.

Related terms

  • 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.

  • 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.

← ReachUser-Generated Content (UGC) →

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