Marketing qualified lead (MQL)

A marketing qualified lead is a prospect that has shown enough interest and fit, through actions such as downloading content, attending a webinar, or repeated site visits, to be considered ready for sales attention, based on criteria marketing and sales agree on in advance. The threshold is usually operationalized through lead scoring, where specific behaviors and firmographic attributes add up to a qualifying score.

MQL sits at a specific stage in the journey: it comes after basic interest but before a product-qualified lead, which is typically reserved for prospects who have engaged directly with a product, such as a free-trial user, rather than with marketing content. Sales then further qualifies MQLs into sales-accepted and sales-qualified leads, a handoff chain that varies by organization.

The MQL definition matters because it is the contract point between marketing and sales, and a poorly calibrated one causes friction: too loose, and sales is flooded with unready contacts and ignores the pipeline; too strict, and marketing under-reports its contribution. Because "MQL" has no single industry-standard definition, comparing MQL volume or conversion rate across companies, or even across a company's own quarters if the criteria changed, is a common source of misleading benchmarks.