MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead)
An MQL is a lead that marketing has judged more likely to become a customer than an average visitor, based on actions they've taken, like downloading a guide, attending a webinar, or revisiting the pricing page, rather than a conversation with sales.
What Is an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead)?
MQL sits partway down the funnel: visitor, then lead (you have their email), then MQL (they've shown enough intent to be worth sales' time), then SQL (sales has actually vetted them and agrees they're worth pursuing). The MQL step exists to stop salespeople from chasing every signup with the same effort.
How the bar gets set: marketing and sales agree on a threshold, usually via lead scoring, that separates casual signups from people showing real buying intent. A common starting point is a small set of actions worth watching: repeated pricing page visits, a demo request, completing onboarding, opening several emails in a row.
When this matters and when it doesn't: at a two-person startup, the founder is marketing and sales, so labeling someone an MQL before talking to them adds a step without adding value. MQL becomes useful once lead volume is high enough that someone has to triage before every lead gets a human reply, and you need a shared definition of who gets that reply first.
Common mistake: setting the bar so low that most signups qualify as MQLs. That doesn't prioritize anything, it just relabels your whole list and gives sales a pile of leads no more likely to buy than before.
Examples
A no-code tool gets 500 signups a month. Marketing tags anyone who completes onboarding and visits the pricing page twice as an MQL, about 60 people. Sales follows up with those 60 first instead of working through all 500 in signup order.