What are marketing qualified leads?

Allan and Lauren sit down with Jon Taylor, Director of Marketing at Klipfolio, to dig into one of the most debated metrics in B2B marketing: the marketing qualified lead (MQL).

Is the MQL dead? How do you define one? Where does it fit into the customer lifecycle, and who should — or shouldn't — be tracking it? Jon shares his perspective on all of this and more.

What is an MQL?

A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a prospect who has shown enough interest in your product or service to be considered more likely to become a customer than other leads — but who isn't yet ready to talk to sales.

The definition sounds straightforward. In practice, it's anything but. Jon walks through how MQL definitions vary widely across organizations, why that variability creates friction between marketing and sales teams, and what you can do to bring more consistency to the metric.

Is the MQL dead?

This question has circulated in marketing circles for years, and Jon addresses it directly. His take: the MQL isn't dead, but the way many teams use it is broken.

The problem isn't the metric itself — it's the lack of shared definition and the tendency to treat MQL volume as a proxy for pipeline quality. When marketing and sales aren't aligned on what qualifies a lead, the number loses its meaning fast. Understanding MQL attribution is one way to bring more rigor to how you measure and communicate lead quality across teams.

MQLs, SQLs, and PQLs: how they fit together

Jon also covers how MQLs relate to other lead qualification metrics:

• Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs): Leads that meet marketing's criteria for readiness to engage with sales

• Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs): Leads that sales has vetted and accepted as worth pursuing

• Product Qualified Leads (PQLs): Leads that have demonstrated intent through product usage — increasingly common in SaaS

Understanding where each metric sits in the customer lifecycle helps you build a more coherent, data-driven pipeline. Jon explains the nuances of each and where teams tend to go wrong.

Who should track MQLs?

Not every organization benefits from tracking MQLs the same way. Jon outlines the contexts where MQLs add the most value — and the situations where a different metric might serve you better.

If you're running a product-led growth motion, for example, PQLs may be a stronger signal than MQLs. If your sales cycle is short and transactional, you might skip MQL tracking altogether and focus further down the funnel. It's also worth thinking carefully about how to choose the right metrics for your specific growth model before committing to any single framework.

Net Promoter Score and the broader picture

The conversation also touches on Net Promoter Score as a complementary signal — one that captures customer sentiment after the sale and can inform how you think about lead quality upstream.

If you want to go deeper on any of the metrics discussed in this episode, MetricHQ is Klipfolio's library of metric and KPI definitions, with clear explanations and context for each.