MQL (marketing qualified lead)
An MQL, or marketing qualified lead, is a contact who has shown enough interest by marketing's criteria to be passed to the sales team.
What it looks like
A person reacts to an ad, reads a page, leaves a phone number or replies to a broadcast. Marketing looks at these signals and decides the person is interested enough. At that point the contact becomes an MQL and goes to sales.
The criteria vary. One company counts any form submission. Another requires a reply in the messenger plus a question about price. What matters is that the rule is written down and the same for every source.
Why it matters
MQL is the handover point between two teams. Marketing is usually paid for volume, sales for revenue. Without a shared definition, marketing delivers many contacts, sales complains that they are useless, and the owner hears two stories with no way to check either.
A clear MQL rule lets you measure what share of marketing leads sales actually accepts and what share later pays. That is a far better measure of marketing quality than the raw lead count.
Typical mistake
Setting the bar too low to make the numbers look good. Every click becomes an MQL, sales stops trusting the flow and starts ignoring new leads, including the good ones.
The opposite problem is a bar so high that warm people wait days before anyone talks to them. In messengers, interest cools quickly.
What to do
Define MQL together with sales, not for them. Track how many MQLs become SQLs and then paying clients, by source. Revisit the definition when those ratios change sharply, and make sure every MQL gets a fast first contact.
More in Signals
- Facebook Messenger CRM: what a sales leader should settle before choosingBefore choosing a Facebook Messenger CRM, a sales leader settles four things: who owns the company Page and who its admins are, where clients come from — Messenger, comments, lead forms, Marketplace — who replies while the response window is still open, and whether reps write as the Page or from personal profiles. Legality and data storage are worked out separately — against platform rules, your country’s law and with a lawyer.
- Which broadcast brought in money: measure results, not messages sentTo tell which broadcast brought money, look at people rather than messages sent: who replied, who bought, how much they paid. The company needs an honest answer: what to credit to the broadcast and what would have happened anyway, how one run differed from another, and what it cost once complaints and lost numbers are counted.