MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead)

What it actually means

An MQL is a prospect who has crossed a threshold your marketing and sales teams agreed on in advance: something specific enough that a rep can reasonably reach out without wasting their time or the prospect's. Classic examples are downloading a pricing guide, requesting a demo, attending a webinar and asking a question, or filling out a form with a company email and a real use case.

The word that matters is "qualified." Not "aware." Not "engaged." Qualified. The bar exists so sales doesn't drown in noise.

Why it matters if you sell

MQL is the handoff point. It's where marketing says "this person is worth your time" and sales either agrees or doesn't. If the bar is set too low, sales stops trusting the label and starts ignoring the queue. If it's set too high, real buyers slip through because nobody followed up fast enough. Either way, the number stops meaning anything, and reps start qualifying leads from scratch anyway, which defeats the point of having the category at all.

The LinkedIn-era mistake

Since engagement got easy to track, a lot of teams have quietly redefined MQL down to "anyone who liked, commented, or viewed a profile." That is not qualification. A like costs nothing and signals nothing about budget, timing, or authority. A comment might mean someone found your post funny, not that they're evaluating your category. A profile view could be a recruiter, a competitor, or someone who clicked the wrong link.

Treating social engagement as equivalent to a demo request or pricing download inflates the top of the funnel with people who have no intent to buy. It makes marketing's numbers look great and makes sales' quota look impossible, because the leads they're handed don't convert. That gap is usually a definitions problem, not a sales execution problem.

How it should actually be measured

A real MQL definition ties to an action with cost or commitment attached: giving up contact info for something specific, spending real time on high-intent content, or directly asking about the product. Engagement metrics can inform scoring, but they should be inputs to a threshold, not the threshold itself. If your MQL count went up because your LinkedIn post did numbers, check whether your pipeline went up too. If it didn't, you were measuring attention, not intent.