Glossary
What is MQL vs SQL (Marketing- vs Sales-Qualified Lead)?
A Marketing-Qualified Lead (MQL) has shown enough engagement (a content download, a webinar signup) to indicate interest but hasn't been vetted for fit or intent to buy; a Sales-Qualified Lead (SQL) has been vetted against defined criteria — budget, authority, need, timeline — and is ready for direct sales contact.
The distinction exists to prevent a sales team from spending time on every marketing-generated contact equally. An MQL might be someone who downloaded a whitepaper out of general curiosity; an SQL is someone a defined qualification process (often a lead-scoring model, sometimes a manual review) has confirmed actually fits the target customer profile and shows real buying intent.
Where the two thresholds get set is a business-specific decision, usually made jointly between marketing and sales rather than by marketing alone — a lead-scoring model that marketing considers "qualified" but sales considers noise produces exactly the friction the MQL/SQL split was meant to prevent.
In a CRM-connected funnel, this distinction is also what makes cost-per-lead numbers honest: a channel producing cheap MQLs that rarely become SQLs is not actually a cheap channel once the real qualification rate is counted, which is why reconciling ad performance against CRM pipeline stage — not just a platform's own "lead" conversion event — is a core stage of the Signal-to-Revenue Framework.