Also called: SQL
A sales qualified lead (SQL) is a prospect a sales rep has vetted and accepted as worth actively pursuing, the stage after a marketing qualified lead, where a record moves from a handoff queue into a rep's working pipeline.
An SQL follows an MQL, sometimes through an intermediate sales-accepted-lead step, and marks the point where a rep has done enough of their own vetting to treat the record as a real opportunity rather than a queue item. Unlike an MQL, which is scored mostly by marketing's rules, an SQL reflects a human judgment call by whoever is about to work the deal.
GTM Engineering vs Marketing Ops vs RevOps names the same shared-definition problem for SQL that it names for MQL: RevOps owns the funnel-stage definitions that decide "what actually counts as an MQL, an SQL, a closed-won," precisely because, left ungoverned, "every department quietly runs its own version of 'qualified' and the forecast becomes fiction." If the bar for calling something an SQL isn't agreed on ahead of time, the same lead profile can become an SQL under one rep and get rejected by another, and the resulting SQL count stops meaning anything comparable across a team.
SQL-to-opportunity conversion rate is a cleaner sales-side health check than raw SQL count, since it tests whether "sales qualified" reliably predicts a workable deal rather than just counting how many records got a rep's stamp.
SQL and opportunity get used interchangeably, but they're not the same event. A lead can be sales-qualified and still have no active opportunity created if the rep accepted it but hasn't yet gotten a real conversation to confirm it's worth building a deal record around.
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