The definition
An MQL is a marketing qualified lead. Marketing has seen enough interest to pass the person to sales. Interest has to be an action, not a guess. A demo request, a pricing request, a webinar signup followed by a reply. An SQL is a sales qualified lead. A salesperson has checked the person properly and confirmed they are worth working. The same human being is both, at two different moments in the same week.
The line between the two is ownership, not enthusiasm. Before the line, marketing owns the follow up. After the line, sales owns it. That is the only definition that survives contact with a real team. Scoring models, letter grades and intent tiers all sit on top of that one boundary. If your two teams cannot say who owns a given lead today, the acronyms are decoration on a process that does not exist yet.
Why it matters
Take a team that receives 300 new leads a month. Marketing passes 120 of them as MQLs. Sales accepts 40 of those as SQLs. Ten become customers. Read the funnel as three gates and you get three rates. Lead to MQL is 40 percent. MQL to SQL is 33 percent. SQL to won is 25 percent. Now you can fix one gate at a time and see the effect.
Without the two labels you have 300 in and 10 out. That tells you nothing about where the loss happens. It also leaves the oldest argument in the building unresolved. Marketing says the leads are good. Sales says they are junk. The MQL to SQL rate settles it with a number both sides agreed to in advance. Pair it with lead attribution and you learn which sources produce leads sales actually accepts, not just leads that arrive.
How to set it up in Pipedrive
Map the two labels onto the two objects Pipedrive already gives you. Everything before the sales gate lives in the Leads Inbox. Everything after it lives as a deal. A lead becomes a deal the moment a salesperson accepts it. The system records that conversion, so nobody has to claim it later. The full inbox setup, including sources and filters, is in the lead inbox guide.
Add one single option field on the lead called Qualification, with the values New, MQL and Returned. Marketing sets it to MQL. Sales either converts the lead to a deal or sets Returned and picks a reason from a second field. Automate the arrival so nothing is typed twice. A web form creates the lead and fills the source. Ownership then follows the rules in the lead routing playbook. Build the source and reason fields properly first, using custom fields, because a free text box here destroys the report. Then report it in Insights as leads created per month against leads converted to deals, split by source.
Where teams get it wrong
The first failure is scoring theatre. A forty point model with weights nobody can explain produces MQLs nobody trusts. Start with three plain rules, written in one sentence each, and let the conversion rate tell you whether they work. The second failure is a missing return path. Sales must be able to send a lead back with a reason. Without that, rejected leads simply vanish and marketing never learns which sources waste everyone's time.
The third failure is making MQL volume a target. Reward volume and the bar drops within a quarter, because that is the fastest way to hit the number. Measure the MQL to SQL rate instead, which only improves when quality improves. The fourth failure is silence after the handover. An accepted lead with no first call for six days is a lost lead, whatever it is labelled. Put a response clock on it using SLA design, and review the two gates together every month.
Questions
Is an MQL a lead or a deal in Pipedrive?
A lead. Keep everything before the sales handover in the Leads Inbox, and create a deal only when a salesperson accepts the lead. That way the system records the MQL to SQL rate itself. No spreadsheet, no claim, just the conversion count from the two objects you already use.
Who decides when a lead becomes an SQL?
Sales does, and only sales. Marketing sets the MQL bar and hands the lead over. The salesperson who picks it up either accepts it or returns it with a reason. If marketing can promote a lead to SQL on its own, the second gate measures nothing.
What conversion rate from MQL to SQL should we expect?
In the teams we work with the rate usually lands between 20 and 40 percent. Below 20 percent the MQL bar is too low and sales stops trusting the queue. Above 60 percent the bar is so high that marketing is doing qualification calls, which is sales work.
Do we need both labels with a small team?
Often not. Below roughly 50 new leads a month, two gates create admin without insight, because the sample is too small to read. Run one qualification field on the lead, watch the volume, and split into MQL and SQL when the numbers stop fitting on one screen.