A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is an enquiry or contact that marketing judges ready to pass to sales, because it fits the kind of customer you want and has shown enough interest to justify a conversation. What counts as an MQL is a definition each business sets for itself; there is no universal standard.
How an MQL works
Most definitions combine two tests. Fit asks whether the contact looks like a good customer: their industry, company size, location, role or budget. Engagement asks whether they have done something that signals intent, such as requesting a quote, downloading a pricing guide, attending a webinar or returning to the pricing page.
Many teams combine the two with lead scoring, giving points for fit and for behaviour, with a threshold that tips a contact into MQL status. Others use simple rules. A London commercial cleaning company might define an MQL as any enquiry from a business inside the M25 with an office above a set size, however it arrived.
Once a lead becomes an MQL it is handed to sales. If sales agree it is worth pursuing, it becomes a sales qualified lead (SQL), and later an opportunity with a value in the pipeline. The stages are usually tracked in a CRM so that marketing can see what happened to every lead it sent.
Why it matters
Counting raw leads rewards the wrong things. A campaign that fills the inbox with students, job seekers and suppliers trying to sell to you looks excellent on a leads report and wastes hours of sales time. An agreed MQL definition shifts attention from volume to leads worth calling.
It matters for paid advertising too. If you report every form submission to Google Ads or Meta as a conversion, their bidding learns to find more people who fill in forms, not more people who buy. Sending MQL status back to the platforms, for example through offline conversion imports, teaches the bidding to look for quality. Your cost per lead only means something when a lead is defined the same way every month.
Common mistakes
- Marketing setting the definition without sales, so sales quietly ignore the leads they are sent.
- Counting every newsletter sign-up or guide download as an MQL, which inflates the numbers and erodes trust.
- Never revisiting the threshold, even after sales report that half the MQLs are not worth a call.
- Reporting MQL volume without the rate at which MQLs become SQLs and then customers.
- Asking for more personal data in forms than you need to qualify a lead, which adds friction and creates UK GDPR obligations for little benefit.
How to act on it
Sit down with whoever handles sales and agree, in writing, what a lead worth their time looks like. Use your recent customers as evidence: what did they have in common when they first got in touch? Turn the answer into a short set of rules or a simple score.
Agree a response time as well. An MQL left for three days before anyone calls has often spoken to a competitor in the meantime, so decide who follows up, how quickly, and check it in the CRM.
Then record each stage in your CRM and review the conversion rate between stages every month. If few MQLs become SQLs, tighten the definition or the targeting; if most do but there are too few, loosen it a little. Building lead tracking that feeds back into campaigns is central to the performance marketing work I do.