Lead vs prospect.
aka MQL vs SQL, qualified vs unqualified, contact vs opportunity
A lead is a name. A prospect is a name that replied.
What it actually means
A lead is anyone who has shown some interest or fits your target profile: a form fill, a download, a name on a list. A prospect is a lead that has been qualified: you have confirmed they have a real need, the budget, the authority and a timeline. Prospects go in the pipeline; leads wait to earn it.
The handover between the two is where marketing and sales argue. Marketing generates leads and scores them; when a lead crosses a threshold it becomes an MQL (marketing-qualified lead). Sales talks to it; if it is real, it becomes an SQL (sales-qualified lead) or prospect, and a deal is opened.
The classic qualification checklist is BANT: Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline. A student who downloaded your pricing guide is a lead. A head of operations with a budget approved for Q2 who asked for a demo is a prospect. Treating the first like the second wastes a rep’s week; treating the second like the first loses the deal.
Where you'll hear it
Converted the Meridian lead to a prospect. Spoke to their ops director, they have budget this quarter, and they’re replacing their current tool by June. Opening an opportunity at $48K.
Translation: the name became a deal because someone picked up the phone and asked the four questions.
Also in marketing dashboards (“we generated 1,200 leads”), in the eternal lead-quality argument between departments, and in every CRM, which has separate objects for leads, contacts and opportunities precisely because the distinction matters.
The pop-culture version
You have 5,000 followers. They are leads: they showed up once, they might care, you have no idea which ones. You message 50 of them about the thing you are selling. Three reply with questions. Those are prospects.
The mistake is counting followers as customers. The other mistake is ignoring the three who replied because you are busy chasing the 4,997 who did not.
Sales runs on the same split. The lead list is the follower count: big, flattering, mostly noise. The prospects are the replies. The job is to get more replies, and to treat each one like the rare thing it is.
This is why “we have 10,000 leads” impresses nobody in sales. The question is always how many of them are qualified, and what the conversion rate from lead to prospect to customer actually is.
Say it like you mean it
“We had 300 MQLs this month, 45 converted to prospects, and 12 are now open opportunities.”
The funnel in three numbers, with the conversion visible.“We have 300 prospects in the pipeline.”
If they have not been qualified, they are leads, and the pipeline just got 300 lines of fiction.Learn your company’s exact definitions on day one. Every sales team draws the lead/prospect line somewhere slightly different, and the CRM reflects that line whether you know it or not.
How leads get scored and qualified in practice, and how AI models rank them by signals that predict a deal.
Decoded next
Decoded by the Kurums editorial team. Kurums Decoded translates the language of business for people who are new to it. Definitions are kept short on purpose; the serious version above goes deep. Nothing here is financial, legal or career advice.
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