What is Marketing Qualified Leads?
Leads judged likely to become customers based on engagement or fit.
How to calculate it
Calculate Marketing Qualified Leads as: Count of leads meeting MQL criteria. Pull the inputs from your connected data and track the trend over time in your dashboard.
Examples
Example 1
1,200 visitors download a pricing guide and pass your lead score -> 1,200 MQLs. Watch how many sales actually accepts.
Example 2
A content campaign produces 1,500 MQLs, but sales accepts only 280 of them -> the scoring model is too loose and needs recalibration.
Why it matters
Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) are leads judged likely to become customers based on fit or engagement, bridging top-of-funnel activity and sales-ready demand. They give marketing a measurable output and help size the pipeline that sales will receive. The metric is only meaningful if the scoring criteria are tight enough that sales actually accepts the leads.
Benchmark context
Focus on the downstream MQL-to-SQL conversion rate rather than raw MQL volume; a high count with low acceptance signals inflated scoring.
Common pitfalls
Loose scoring inflates MQLs that sales rejects.
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