Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)

What it actually means

An SQL is not a lead who clicked something or filled out a form. It's a lead that a human on the sales side looked at, asked questions, and decided is worth a real sales cycle. The qualification usually maps to some version of BANT (budget, authority, need, timeline) or MEDDIC, and it happens through a conversation, not an algorithm.

The key difference from an MQL: an MQL is marketing's opinion that someone is interested. An SQL is sales's opinion that someone is buyable. Those are different judgments made by different people looking at different evidence.

Why it matters

Pipeline math falls apart when SQL and MQL get conflated. If your MQL-to-SQL conversion rate is bad, it usually means marketing and sales never agreed on what qualified means in the first place, or marketing is optimizing for volume of soft signals instead of volume of buyable ones. Comp plans, quota attainment, and forecast accuracy all depend on the SQL definition being tight and consistently applied. Loosen it to hit a number and you just move the problem downstream to win rate.

The misconception, especially on LinkedIn

Here's where LinkedIn sellers get it wrong constantly: engagement is not qualification. A comment, a profile view, a DM reply, a webinar registration from a post, none of that is an SQL signal. It's a self-reported expression of interest, and self-reported interest has no budget attached to it, no authority attached to it, and often no real timeline.

Someone liking your post about procurement software tells you they're thinking about procurement software, or that they liked your joke, or that they're a competitor doing research. It does not tell you they have money set aside or a mandate to buy. Treating a warm LinkedIn engager as an SQL because they "raised their hand" skips the entire vetting step that makes SQL a useful category at all. At best that engagement is a lead worth a discovery call. It becomes an SQL only after that call happens and someone qualifies it.

How it's really measured

SQL status gets assigned in the CRM after a qualifying conversation, usually by an SDR or AE, using a defined checklist agreed upon by sales and marketing leadership. If your org can't point to the specific criteria and the specific person who applies them, you don't have SQLs. You have leads someone decided to call SQLs.