Sales Qualified Account (SQA)

What it actually means

In account-based motions, you're not chasing one contact who filled out a form. You're targeting a company: its buying committee, its budget cycle, its trigger events. An SQA is the label applied when that whole account clears a bar of fit and intent signals strong enough to justify sales spending real time on it. That might mean multiple stakeholders engaging with content, a champion surfacing internally, or firmographic and intent data lining up with your ideal customer profile.

Why it matters

ABM lives or dies on where reps spend their hours. If your pipeline is a list of individual leads, a rep can work down it person by person. If your pipeline is a list of target accounts, that logic breaks. A single warm lead inside a cold account tells you almost nothing about whether the account is winnable. The SQA designation exists to stop reps from treating one enthusiastic mid-level manager as a green light to run a full outbound sequence into a company where nobody else has shown a pulse.

The misconception

The common mistake is bolting lead-scoring logic onto account-based pipelines. Teams build an SQA definition that's really just an SQL definition with a company name attached: one person opened five emails, so the account gets marked qualified. As the Iris.ai definition of an SQL puts it, an SQL is "a prospect confirmed by sales development as ready for account." That's a person-level judgment about readiness for a sales conversation. An SQA needs a different kind of evidence: engagement spread across multiple people in the account, not depth from one.

How it's really measured

A usable SQA definition sets thresholds at the account level: number of distinct contacts engaged, seniority of those contacts, whether a buying trigger has been confirmed, and whether the account fits ICP criteria on firmographics. Sales and marketing agree on these thresholds together, the same way they'd agree on SQL criteria for individual leads, because an SQA that sales doesn't trust gets ignored, and an SQA that's too loose burns rep time on accounts that were never really in play.