A sales-qualified lead (SQL) is a lead that sales has reviewed and accepted as worth actively pursuing. It has cleared two bars: it fits your ideal customer profile (the right kind of company and person), and it has shown enough intent or need that a salesperson agrees it’s worth their time. The key word is accepted — an SQL is defined by sales saying yes, not by marketing saying so.
That distinction is the whole reason the term exists, and the whole reason it causes arguments.
SQL vs MQL — the difference in one line
A marketing-qualified lead (MQL) is a lead marketing thinks is ready, usually based on a score. A sales-qualified lead is a lead sales has agreed is ready, after a human look. The MQL is a nomination; the SQL is an acceptance.
The gap between the two is one of the most revealing numbers in B2B SaaS. If marketing generates 100 MQLs and sales accepts 30 as SQLs, your MQL→SQL acceptance rate is 30% — and the 70% that were rejected are telling you something important about whether your two teams share a definition.
What makes a lead “sales-qualified”
Most teams use a framework to keep this consistent. Two common ones:
- BANT — Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline. Older, blunter, still useful for transactional deals.
- MEDDIC / MEDDPICC — Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify pain, Champion (plus Paperwork and Competition). Better for complex, higher-value B2B SaaS deals.
But the framework matters less than the agreement. An SQL definition works when marketing and sales have written it down together and both would sort the same list of leads the same way. If they wouldn’t, you don’t have a definition — you have two definitions wearing the same label.
A worked example
Imagine a lead: a VP of Operations at a 200-person SaaS company books a demo after reading three articles and visiting the pricing page.
- ICP fit? Yes — right company size, right buyer seniority.
- Intent? Strong — pricing-page visit plus a booked demo is high-intent behaviour.
- Accepted by sales? A rep reviews it, agrees it fits, and takes the meeting.
That’s a clean SQL. Now change one detail: same behaviour, but the person is an intern doing research. ICP fit fails on seniority, sales declines, and it stays an MQL — correctly. The score looked identical; the human check caught what the score couldn’t. That’s exactly why the SQL stage exists.
Why the SQL definition leaks pipeline
When marketing and sales disagree on what “sales-qualified” means, one of two things happens. Either sales rejects good leads because they don’t trust the marketing definition — and pipeline dies on the floor. Or sales accepts weak leads to keep the peace, then quietly ignores them — and pipeline dies more slowly, disguised as activity.
Both are leaks. Both come from the same root cause: a definition that was never genuinely agreed. Fixing it is less a systems problem than a conversation problem — the two teams sitting down, sorting real leads together, and writing the rule they’d both defend.
The short version
A sales-qualified lead is a lead sales has actively accepted as worth pursuing — ICP fit plus enough intent, confirmed by a human, not just a score. Get the definition genuinely shared between marketing and sales, and your MQL→SQL handoff stops being the place good leads quietly disappear.
If you suspect that handoff is leaking, the Pipeline Leak Audit measures exactly where and how much. More on lifecycle definitions over on Insights.
Related reading
If this was useful, see the pipeline stages and the lead handoff process.