marketing qualified lead

Definition

A prospect who's shown enough interest to warrant sales attention but hasn't quite committed, occupying that precious limbo between 'downloaded a whitepaper' and 'actually wants to talk to someone.' The marketing team's way of saying 'we've done our part, now it's your turn' to sales.

Example Usage

We generated 500 marketing qualified leads this month, though sales insists half of them are just bots and competitors doing reconnaissance.

Origin

Emerged from enterprise software marketing in the 2000s to bridge marketing and sales alignment

Fun Fact

The eternal debate over what constitutes a 'qualified' lead has sparked more interdepartmental wars than any other metric.

Source: B2B marketing and sales operations

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viewthrough conversion

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publicity

The art of getting people to pay attention to something through media coverage, press releases, and strategic information drops, ideally without having to pay for advertising. It's what happens when your brand does something newsworthy enough that journalists actually care to write about it. Unlike advertising, publicity is theoretically "earned," though publicists would argue they work pretty hard to make it look effortless.

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