Marketing qualified lead (MQL)

How a lead becomes an MQL

Each team writes its own definition, and the useful ones combine two tests.

• Fit: do the person and their company look like your customers? Industry, company size, region, title and seniority.
• Engagement: have they done something that suggests interest? A demo request, repeat visits to pricing, a webinar, a reply to an email.

Teams often turn the two tests into a lead score: points for each fit attribute and each action, points taken away for a student address or a competitor's domain, and a threshold that makes the lead an MQL. Others use plain rules, such as treating anyone at a target account who asks for a demo as an MQL at once.

In a CRM the MQL is usually a stage. HubSpot's default lifecycle stages, for example, put it after Lead and before Sales Qualified Lead and define it as a record marketing has judged ready for sales. HubSpot's automatic updates only ever move a record forward.1

In GetSales you score each row with an AI column you define, and it keeps its reasoning beside each answer with how sure it is. Signals shows website visits, posts and job changes from the people you write to. On a site switched to People, when someone you talk to opens a key page such as pricing, their open thread also gets a task to call them while they are still looking.

Examples of MQL criteria

• A demo request from a company in your target size band.
• Three visits to pricing in a week from a person whose title matches your buyer.
• A webinar attendee from a target account who also opened the follow-up email.
• A question by reply to a marketing email, from someone in the right role.

MQL vs SQL

Marketing decides an MQL from what it can see in the data: fit and activity. A lead becomes a sales qualified lead (SQL) only after someone in sales has talked or written with the person and confirmed a need, a buyer and a timeline worth pursuing.

The handoff between the two is a common place for leads to stall, so teams agree in writing on three things: what counts as an MQL, how fast sales follows up, and what happens to the leads sales turns down. A turned-down lead goes back to marketing with a reason, and the reasons show which part of the score to change.

Related

• Signals: plays for website visits, posts and job changes.
• Website visitor identification: which company you wrote to came back.
• Data enrichment: AI columns that score each lead, beside work emails and company data.
• Buying signals: what they are and how to respond to each one.

Sources

1. HubSpot Knowledge Base, Use contact and company lifecycle stages, last updated 20 October 2026. Read 28 October 2026.