Sales Qualified Lead

Where marketing builds a list and sales works it, the two teams used the same word for different things. On the sending side, a lead was anyone who left contact details. On the receiving side, a lead was somebody worth picking up the phone for.

That made end-of-month reviews come out strangely. Marketing reported handing over 320 records. Sales reported connecting on 40 calls and booking six meetings. Both teams could truthfully say they hit their target, and closed deals had not moved.

The cause was not quality but the fact that there was only one label. When the sending team's judgment and the receiving team's judgment share a name, growth in records handed over becomes indistinguishable from growth in people worth meeting.

So the label was split in two. What marketing promotes because it looks promising is a marketing qualified lead (MQL). What sales accepts after checking it, and takes on as its own work, is a sales qualified lead (SQL). Which team made the judgment is the only difference between the two names.

Sales checks each lead marketing hands over against criteria both teams agreed on in advance, and only the ones that pass become SQLs.

Three things have to be written down for this to function.

1. What gets handed over. Something like: signed up with a company email domain, at an organization of 30 people or more, and has viewed the pricing page. These are the minimum conditions for a handoff.
2. How fast contact happens. A common agreement is a first outreach attempt within one business day. After three days that person is looking at something else.
3. What passing and rejecting mean. If sales checks and decides no, they write the reason and send it back to marketing. Accumulated rejection reasons become the evidence for changing item 1.

What sales checks is usually four things: whether there is money to spend, whether the person talking is someone who can decide, whether the problem they are trying to solve is the one this product solves, and roughly when they intend to buy. Three of the four confirmed is enough to promote. If only the timing is far out, it goes back and resurfaces in a few months.

Ordering the queue and deciding promotions stay separate jobs. Lead scoring assigns points per behavior to produce a call order for today — ten points for a pricing page visit, twenty for a company email domain. Crossing the score threshold does not by itself make something an SQL; the confirmation happens on a call, with a person.

In numbers the drop at each stage is steep. Nine hundred leads a month become 320 MQLs, 74 survive the sales check as SQLs, 31 get registered as an opportunity, and nine close. Which step loses the most is what points at the month's actual problem.

The funnel report at a company selling to other businesses is the first place. Put counts and conversion rates side by side and the bottleneck reads in one line. An MQL-to-SQL rate that fell from the low twenties to 8 percent means the conditions for building the list got looser.

It also shows up in how the two teams' targets are set. Point marketing's target at MQL count and the easy-to-count number grows. Point it at SQL count and marketing has to produce something sales will accept.

Channel evaluation needs to reach this stage too. If channel A costs $30 per MQL and channel B costs $45, A looks cheaper. But if the SQL conversion rate is 8 percent for A and 34 percent for B, then cost per SQL is $375 for A and about $135 for B. Choosing channels on MQL cost picks the expensive one.

Where a company lets people use the product before buying, product qualified leads (PQL) enter here as well. Someone who created 50 documents and invited eight teammates on the free plan is easier to confirm than someone who downloaded a white paper, so the working order promotes that group first.

"We hit the MQL number but SQLs didn't even reach 40. Let's revisit the criteria."

The count handed over and the count accepted have come apart.

"I'm sending this one back. We're only talking to an individual contributor, and the timeline is next year."

Two of the four checks did not clear.

"That channel is cheap on MQLs but they don't convert to SQL. Let's move the budget."

Dropping the channel evaluation criterion one stage lower.

At Pagedeck, Ravi and Sofia rewrite the handoff conditions every quarter. Last quarter they agreed to stop passing organizations under 10 people. After that condition went in, handoffs fell from 320 to 210 while SQLs rose from 74 to 81.

They read the rejection log alongside it. Gathering the reasons Sofia sent leads back, about half said the timeline was too far out, so Ravi moved those people onto a list that receives useful material every few weeks. Grace set marketing's quarterly target on SQL count rather than MQL count.

The most common error is reading this as a grade above MQL. It comes later in the sequence, so it sounds better. But what separates the two names is who judged, not how good the lead is. The same person becomes an MQL on Tuesday morning and an SQL that afternoon, every day. Read as a grade, MQL starts getting treated as low quality, and the work of staying in touch with somebody whose timing has not arrived stops happening. Business buyers run on budget cycles, so a person with no interest today buying four months later is ordinary.

The second error is treating SQL count as the goal. It is an appealing number to target, and there is a way to raise it: loosen the confirmation criteria and it climbs the same day. But turning 74 into 150 while closed deals stay at nine only makes sales busier. What has to be read alongside it is the conversion from SQL to opportunity and from opportunity to close. A month producing 31 and nine out of 74 versus a month producing 33 and nine out of 150 is the same result with twice the waste.