MQL

An MQL (marketing qualified lead) is a lead that, based on your marketing team's criteria, fits your target audience well and shows enough interest to be nurtured further or handed over to sales. The MQL is the first qualification stage between a simple contact and a real sales conversation.

Typical criteria

Every company defines for itself which leads count as MQLs. Usually two kinds of signals are combined:

• Profile (fit): industry, company size, job title, region, budget stated in the form.
• Behavior (interest): visiting the pricing page, several visits in a short time, attending a webinar, downloading a checklist.

These signals are often turned into points with lead scoring. Once a lead passes a set threshold, it becomes an MQL.

Example

An agency promotes a free strategy call. The form asks for monthly ad budget and industry. The rule: anyone with more than $3,000 in monthly ad spend from e-commerce or B2B is an MQL. Out of 80 leads per month, 28 meet these criteria – an MQL rate of 35%.

MQLs in performance marketing

For ad campaigns, the MQL is a useful intermediate stage: it is closer to revenue than a plain form submission, but it happens much faster than a closed deal. If your campaigns only optimize for leads, they often attract lots of contacts that never become MQLs.

With LeadMetrics you can capture intermediate stages like this as a custom metric – via webhook, Zapier, Make or a HubSpot workflow – and analyze it per campaign and ad. Through the Conversion API a custom metric can also be sent as an event to Meta, Google Ads, TikTok or LinkedIn, so the platform optimizes for qualified contacts instead of every form submission.

Common mistakes

• Vague definition: If marketing and sales use different criteria, MQL numbers are worthless.
• Treating MQLs as the end goal: An MQL is not revenue yet. Regularly check how many MQLs actually turn into SQLs and customers.
• Never adjusting the criteria: If hardly any MQLs buy, your criteria are too loose.