Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)

A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is an individual person who has interacted with your marketing enough — downloading something, visiting key pages, opening emails — that they're judged ready to be passed to a salesperson.

Most teams set an MQL "threshold": once a lead's score crosses a certain number of points, they automatically become an MQL and the handoff to sales fires. It's a lead-level, behavior-based idea, which is exactly why it's different from account scoring: an MQL tells you a person raised their hand, while an account score tells you which companies are worth pursuing in the first place, often before anyone has raised a hand at all.