Software Growth

MQL (Marketing qualified lead)

An MQL is a lead that marketing judges more likely to buy than the average contact, based on fit and engagement, and ready to hand to sales.

A marketing qualified lead is a contact who has shown enough interest, and matches your target customer closely enough, that marketing thinks sales should look at them. They are not ready to buy yet. They downloaded a guide, attended a webinar, or came back to your site several times, and they look like someone you can actually serve.

The label exists so that two teams can agree on when a lead changes hands. Without it, marketing sends everything, sales ignores most of it, and each side blames the other. If you are a solo founder doing both jobs, you still benefit from writing the definition down, because it tells you which leads deserve a personal email and which ones belong in a nurture sequence.

How an MQL is defined

There is no universal standard. Each company picks its own criteria, usually a mix of two things:

  • Fit. Does the person or company match your ideal customer profile? Job title, company size, industry and tools used are typical inputs.
  • Engagement. Have they done things that signal interest, such as visiting the pricing page, opening several emails or attending a webinar?

Most teams combine both into a number using lead scoring, then set a threshold. HubSpot's lead scoring guide gives sample values such as 20 points for a demo request and 15 for a pricing page visit, with fewer points for a content download. Treat those as a starting point, not a standard. Your own closed-won data should set the weights.

How to calculate MQL-to-SQL conversion

The number that tells you whether your MQL definition is any good is the share of MQLs that sales accepts as a sales qualified lead.

Say you generate 400 MQLs in a month and sales accepts 60 of them. That is 60 / 400 = 15%. If 20% of those SQLs become customers, you win 12 deals, so about 3 customers per 100 MQLs. Now you can work backward: to add 24 customers a month, you need roughly 800 MQLs at the same rates.

HubSpot's MQL versus SQL guide says a healthy MQL-to-SQL rate usually falls between 10% and 20%, and that B2B SaaS averages around 13%. Those are HubSpot's figures, drawn from their own customer base, so compare them with your history before you chase them.

Common mistakes

  • Counting volume as success. A team paid on MQL count will lower the bar. Measure MQLs by how many become pipeline and revenue, not how many exist.
  • Scoring on engagement alone. A student who reads every blog post scores high and never buys. Fit has to carry weight.
  • Never revisiting the threshold. Review it every quarter against what closed.
  • Ignoring product usage. If people can sign up for a free trial, someone who used your product is usually a better lead than someone who read an ebook. That is the idea behind a product qualified lead.

When MQLs matter for a small SaaS

If your product is self-serve with a low price, you probably do not need MQLs at all. Visitors sign up, try the product and pay, and the trial conversion rate is the metric that counts. MQLs earn their place when you sell to companies, price high enough to justify a sales conversation, and have a demo or sales call in the funnel. Rob Walling makes the same point about touch levels: how you sell has to fit what your price can support (see his episode on high-touch and low-touch selling). At a few thousand dollars per year and up, a clear MQL rule is cheap insurance against wasting your calendar.

Sources

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