Marketing qualified leads (MQL) Sales-marketing qualified leads (SQL) • Contacts that fit our lead definition criteria. • Contacts that fit our lead definition criteria and show signals of being ready to buy. • Identified as potential future customers. • Identified as those leads ready to convert. What does this have to do with scoring and grading in Pardot? Consider lead scoring and grading a way of quickly seeing those The grading and scoring systems then simply automate the process contacts that fall into the ‘marketing-qualified’ and ‘sales-qualified’ of checking how many leads are in your database and how many lead buckets. are ready to be contacted by sales. To set up grading and scoring models that work for your business, You can have a lead qualification process without grading and you must first have defined what qualifies a lead. scoring but you can’t have scoring and grading without first having your lead qualification criteria down pat. 6 marcloudconsulting.com