Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL).

The chain of terms starts with a simple contact: someone has left their details, nothing more. An MQL is the next stage: the contact meets the conditions agreed in advance for a handover. Next comes the sales qualified lead (SQL): sales has checked the contact and accepted it as genuinely workable. The value of these stages lies not in the terminology but in the agreement behind it. Without a jointly agreed definition, MQL means 'promising' in marketing and 'useless again' in sales, and both sides are right.

Useful criteria have two axes. Fit describes whether the contact belongs to the offer at all: industry, company size, region, the person's role, the stated time frame. Interest describes observed behaviour: which pages were visited, whether the pricing or service page was among them, whether a follow-up question was asked. The two axes together are more meaningful than either on its own: high interest without fit creates a lot of activity and few orders, high fit without visible interest is cold calling under another name. It is also important to keep the criteria short: define fifteen conditions and in the end you check none of them.

An example from everyday Swiss B2B practice: a provider of software solutions defines an MQL as a contact from a business with at least twenty employees in German-speaking Switzerland who has filled in a form with a company email address and previously viewed a service page. Everything below that stays with marketing and continues to receive content. The agreement also states that sales contacts every MQL within two working days and may reject it with a reason. This feedback channel is the most important part; without it, the definition never corrects itself.

Not every company needs this separation. With few enquiries a month, short sales cycles or a business where the same people handle marketing and sales, the MQL stage is pure administrative overhead: it is quicker to look at every enquiry. The definition only becomes useful when more enquiries come in than can be handled calmly, or when two separate teams argue about quality. Then MQL is not a technical term but an arbitration rule, and it only works if both sides have signed up to it.