If you sit in a meeting where three people use the word ‘lead’ to mean three different things, you are watching a very expensive misunderstanding in progress. Below is a short glossary of the terms marketing and sales people throw around — in the language you would use to explain them to your co-founder over dinner.
Lead
A ‘lead’ is anyone who has shown enough interest in your business that it’s worth spending time on them. That could be a form submission, a downloaded PDF, a company that visited your pricing page, or a person you met at a trade show. The word ‘lead’ alone tells you almost nothing about quality. Always ask: what kind of lead?
MQL — Marketing Qualified Lead
A lead that marketing thinks is worth passing to sales. In practice: someone who did enough on your website or in your emails (downloaded a specific guide, attended a webinar, visited three specific pages) to trigger a rule you agreed on. It is not a promise of business. It is a signal loud enough to justify a five-minute human check.
SQL — Sales Qualified Lead
Same person, one step later, after sales looked and said ‘yes, this is real’. That confirmation often happens after a first call. From here, the deal is officially in the pipeline. Everything before this stage is ‘maybe’; everything after is ‘working on it’.
Intent
A short word for ‘evidence that they are actually looking to buy something like what you sell'. Intent can be first-party (they visited your pricing page — you can see this) or third-party (they read reviews of your category on another site — you can’t see this unless you buy an intent-data product). Real intent almost always shows up as a change in behaviour, not a single click.
Funnel
A metaphor. Imagine a kitchen funnel: wide at the top, narrow at the bottom. Lots of anonymous visitors go in at the top, fewer engaged leads in the middle, and only a small number of paying customers come out. The point of the metaphor is not exactness — it’s to remind you that every stage loses people, and that’s normal.
ICP — Ideal Customer Profile
A written description of the kind of customer you serve best. Not a wish list. It’s based on your existing best customers: their size, industry, country, urgency, budget. A good ICP fits on a napkin. If yours needs a slide deck, it’s not helping.
Buying committee
The group of people at a company who together decide on a purchase. Even for €5k software, it’s often 2–3 people. For €50k software, 5–7. The person who first visits your website is rarely the person who signs the invoice. Behaving like they are is the fastest way to lose the deal.
CAC — Customer Acquisition Cost
How much you spend, all-in, to land one paying customer. Divide your total sales-and-marketing spend for a period by the number of new customers won in that period. Compare to the value of a customer to know if the business breathes.
LTV — Lifetime Value
How much a customer is worth to you over the full time they stay. Not just the first invoice — every renewal, every expansion. LTV divided by CAC is a rough health check. Ratios below 3 are worrying for most SaaS; above 4 is healthy.
| Term | In one line |
|---|---|
| Lead | Someone interesting enough to look at |
| MQL | Marketing thinks worth calling |
| SQL | Sales confirms it's real |
| Intent | Evidence they're actually buying |
| Funnel | Wide at the top, narrow at the bottom |
| ICP | The kind of customer you serve best |
| Buying committee | The group that decides together |
| CAC | Cost to win one customer |
| LTV | Value of one customer over time |
Why this matters
When two people mean different things by the same word, meetings run in circles. A shared glossary is the cheapest productivity upgrade a small B2B team can make.
- Related: [Your ideal customer profile in practice](/blog/ideal-customer-profile-in-practice-prioritising-identified-companies)
- Related: [The anatomy of a buying committee](/blog/anatomy-of-a-buying-committee-five-people-one-company)
- Related: [Recognising B2B buying signals in your traffic](/blog/recognizing-b2b-buying-signals-in-website-traffic)
Published by
lead.box Team
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