Ask a company for its MQL definition and you will usually be told a number: a lead becomes a marketing qualified lead when it scores above fifty. The score adds points for opening an email, visiting the pricing page and holding a certain job title. It is neat, and it is nearly always the cause of an argument.
Marketing says it delivered a hundred and twenty MQLs this month. Sales says most of them were not worth a call. Both statements are true. The score measures how much a contact has done, and sales cares about whether the contact is someone they should talk to. Those are different questions, and a threshold does not settle which one governs.
We think the fix is to stop treating the MQL as a score and write it as a contract.
A score is a trigger. It says when marketing's system should tell sales that something has happened. It cannot say what sales owes in return, what happens when sales disagrees, or what the two teams will change when the numbers drift. Those are agreements between people, and an agreement that exists only as a threshold in a configuration screen is one that nobody has made.
The result is familiar. Marketing is judged on MQL volume and raises volume by lowering the bar. Sales is judged on pipeline and learns to ignore the queue. The metric both sides watch goes up, and the thing both sides need, qualified pipeline, does not. This is part of why the number the CFO wants is so hard to produce, which we described in the report that hides the number.
Fit. Facts about the company and the person that make them worth a conversation regardless of what they have done: size, industry, role, region. Fit comes from the record, not from behavior, and it decides whether a hand-raiser is someone you can serve.
Evidence. What the contact has done that shows intent: asked for a demo, requested pricing, returned three times in a week. Evidence is behavior, and it decides whether now is the moment.
An MQL needs both. A perfect-fit company that has never engaged is an account to nurture, and an enthusiastic person at the wrong kind of company is a courteous no.
Response time. What sales commits to once the lead arrives: a first touch within a stated number of working hours, by a named role. The contract binds both sides. Marketing promises leads that meet the definition, and sales promises to act on them in time. A definition that only binds marketing is a demand.
A coded return path. When sales rejects a lead, it records why, from a short list: wrong size, wrong role, no valid contact, not ready, already a customer, duplicate. A rejection with no reason is a complaint. A rejection with a reason is data that changes the definition.
Three figures tell both teams whether the definition is doing its job.
Acceptance rate: the share of MQLs that sales accepts. A rate that is persistently low means the definition is loose. A rate near one hundred percent means either the definition is exact or sales is not looking, and the next measure tells you which.
Time to first touch: from the lead's arrival to the first real attempt. This is sales' half of the contract and it should be visible to both.
Qualified opportunity rate: the share of accepted leads that become qualified opportunities. This links the handoff to the number in the attribution table, where spend is set against qualified opportunities by channel. We set out that table in the one attribution table the CFO will trust.
Imagine a company that delivers 120 MQLs a month under a score threshold. Sales accepts thirty, a quarter, and rejects ninety without comment. Marketing believes the volume is the achievement and sales believes the queue is noise.
Now add the return path. For a month, each rejection gets one of six reasons. The count: fifty wrong size, twenty-five no valid contact details, fifteen not ready. The definition has been missing a fit test. The company serves businesses of fifty to five hundred people, and a third of the leads come from companies of ten.
The change is small. An employee-range field becomes part of the fit requirement, a valid email or phone is required before handoff, and "not ready" leads stay in marketing's nurture track until they show evidence. The next month marketing delivers seventy MQLs and sales accepts thirty-five, half. The accepted number has risen from thirty to thirty-five, the rejected one has dropped from ninety to thirty-five, and the conversation has changed from whether marketing is doing its job to which field to tune next.
The response time is the part most definitions leave out, and it is the part that changes behavior fastest. A lead that waits two days for a first touch is a lead that has gone cold, whatever its score said. Once the clock is on the page and visible to both teams, a late response stops being a private failing and becomes a shared number that either side can raise in the monthly review.
It also settles an old argument. When acceptance is low and time to first touch is long, the problem may not be lead quality at all. Sales cannot reject what it has not looked at, and a lead that was never worked is counted against marketing. Measuring the clock separates the two causes, so each team fixes the one that is theirs.
One page is enough. It names the fit criteria, the evidence that triggers a handoff, the response time and who owns it, the list of rejection reasons and the review date. Both the head of marketing and the head of sales sign it, and it lives where both can read it. Review it monthly for the first quarter and quarterly after that, and change it only with both signatures.
The reasons for rejection are the most valuable part of the page. They are the one place where sales' judgment becomes a structured field that marketing can act on.
In a small company the same person may market and sell. The contract still helps, as a way to be honest with yourself. Write down what a lead must look like to deserve a call, and record why you drop the ones you drop. Within a quarter the reasons will have told you what to stop paying for.
Pull last month's MQLs and, for each rejected one, add a reason, even if you have to guess from the record. Group the reasons and count them. The largest group is the first change to the definition, and the exercise takes an afternoon.
We start with a no-risk discovery: we read your last quarter of leads, add the missing reasons, draft the contract and show what it would have changed, and you pay for the discovery only if you go on. A build comes with a guaranteed estimate, so if we estimate low, we absorb the difference. After go-live, Managed Technical Operations keeps the fields, the response clock and the return path working in the CRM.
A definition both sides signed is one both sides can improve.
Watch the 6-minute guided demo, then book a walkthrough: we read your CRM, ad accounts and content and show what a governed system would do differently. You pay only if you proceed. Or see how we approach it.
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