A lead that has shown enough genuine interest and fits your customer profile well enough that it's worth handing over to your sales team.
Not every enquiry is worth a salesperson's time. A marketing qualified lead, or MQL, is one that has crossed a threshold — they've done things that suggest real buying interest (downloaded a guide, requested a demo, opened several emails) and they look like the kind of customer you actually want (right industry, company size, or budget). It's marketing's way of saying, "This one's promising — sales should take a look."
The opposite is a lead who filled in a form out of idle curiosity and will never buy.
A B2B software firm gets 400 form-fills a month. Their team can't call all of them, so they define an MQL: the lead must be from a company with 50+ staff and must have requested a demo. Only 70 leads qualify — but those 70 close at 25%, producing about 17 new customers worth €5,000 each. The other 330 leads close at under 2%. By focusing sales on MQLs, the same team books roughly €85,000 of new business a month instead of drowning in dead ends.
Defining MQLs stops your sales team wasting hours on people who'll never buy and keeps them focused on real opportunities. The bigger win comes when you send the MQL signal back to your ad platforms. Instead of optimising for any old form-fill, they learn to find more people who become genuine MQLs — so your ad budget attracts better leads, not just more of them. It's the difference between a busy inbox and a growing pipeline.
Lead scoring · Cost per lead (CPL) · Conversion value · Customer lifetime value (LTV) · Offline conversions
How to score lead quality · The complete guide to value-based bidding
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