What is Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)?

A marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a lead who indicated interest in what a brand has to offer based on selling efforts or is different wise more likely to become a customer than other leads. Typically an MQL is a lead who is deliberately engaged together with your brand by performing actions like voluntarily submitting contact data, opting into a program, adding e-commerce items to a shopping cart, downloading materials, or repeatedly visiting a web site.

Examples of MQL actions:

According to Tableau, here are a few examples of MQL actions:

  • Downloading trial software or free ebook
  • Using software demos
  • Filling out online forms
  • Submitting an email address for a newsletter or mailing list
  • Adding items to the shopping cart
  • Clicking on an ad to find your site
  • Contacting you to request more information

Marketing Qualified Lead vs. Sales Qualified Lead

MQL refers to a lead that is more likely to become your customer compared to other leads based on lead intelligence.  SQL means that the sales team has qualified this lead as a potential customer. So, the SQL is part of buying a cycle, while the MQL is not ready for that buying stage.

Learn more on how to attract customers.



Qualified Leads

Picture 1. The difference between MQL & SQL

MQLs and Lead Scoring

Some companies are deciding to look toward lead scoring to see if marketing qualified lead is ready to be passed on to the sales team.

UnboundB2B, a Lead Generation company, defined this term perfectly: „Lead scoring is a method used by marketing and sales teams to determine how worthy a lead is by pegging a value (assigning points) on their engagement, behavior or interest towards a product across the sales funnel. Lead scoring is usually part and parcel of marketing automation software.“

Some of the factors of lead scoring would be engagements with demo requests or web content. And sometimes even interaction on social media channels.

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MQL was last modified: June 18th, 2019 by Mirjana