How to report on MQLs in the HubSpot Salesforce integration
Marketing Qualified Leads: turning intent into revenue with HubSpot–Salesforce.
A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a prospect who has engaged meaningfully with your business and shows potential to become a customer.
Unlike a general follower, an MQL takes actions that indicate intent - such as visiting key pages, downloading materials, or attending events.
Marketing teams define MQLs and pass them to sales when they’re ready for direct engagement. This handoff gives sales reps the time and context to prepare.
But for this model to work, your marketing and sales teams need clear, shared definitions of what an MQL is.
Why trust this article? RevBlack lives and breathes HubSpot-Salesforce integrations.
What makes someone an MQL?
The specific criteria vary by company, but typically include:
- Content engagement (e.g., downloading a guide, registering for a webinar).
- Demographics such as age, role, or location.
- Firmographics like company size or industry.
- Actions on your website, such as visiting a pricing page versus a blog.
- Challenges or pain points revealed through forms or surveys.
A good starting point is to analyze your existing customers’ behaviors.
Metrics like email engagement or completed forms often highlight patterns worth tracking.
Attribution reports can also surface which actions tend to precede a sale.
Defining MQLs isn’t a one-time exercise. The criteria should be revisited as company goals and market conditions evolve.
The difference between MQLs and SQLs
It’s easy to confuse these terms.
- An MQL is identified by marketing as ready for sales outreach, based on their engagement and fit.
- A Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) is then vetted by sales as a strong fit and a near-term buying opportunity.
Why bother with this distinction? Because sales reps don’t need to chase everyone. By focusing on qualified, higher-intent leads, they spend their time where conversion potential is highest.
This is where lead scoring and qualification workflows become critical.
Strong alignment between marketing and sales starts with tracking the lead journey from MQL to SQL so both teams work from the same playbook.
How MQLs work in the HubSpot–Salesforce integration
Most CRMs, including Salesforce, rely on the Lead object to mark new opportunities, even if they come from existing customers.
The Contact object stores people linked to Accounts, while a Lead signals a new expression of interest.
See a detailed breakdown of a Contact vs a Lead in Salesforce.
HubSpot takes a different approach. Rather than creating new Leads, HubSpot keeps all data tied to a single Contact record.
Progress is tracked using the Lifecycle Stage property. This way, one record holds the entire history, including post-purchase activity, customer support, and repeat engagements.
This difference trips up many teams. In Salesforce, reps may be used to spinning up a new Lead every time someone re-engages. In HubSpot, you don’t. Instead, you rely on fields like Original Source and Latest Source to track where a Contact came from and how they most recently engaged.
Reporting on MQLs in HubSpot
You can qualify someone as an MQL in HubSpot either by:
- Manually updating their Lifecycle Stage field, or
- Using a Contact-based workflow triggered by conditions like:
- Hitting a lead score threshold
- Updating a property
- Submitting a form
- Or a combination of these factors
Once contacts are tagged, you can report on them directly. To build a report:
- Go to Reports > Create Report > Customer Journey Reports.
- Select Lead, Marketing Qualified Lead, and Sales Qualified Lead from the Lifecycle Stage list.
- Run or refresh the report, then click Save Report in the top right.
- Add it to a dashboard or create a new one for visibility.
This reporting gives you a clearer view of what drives successful customers, where your marketing should focus, and how sales can prioritize.
Reporting on MQLs when using Salesforce Leads and Contacts
Here’s where it gets tricky.
In Salesforce, the Lead object was originally designed as a temporary placeholder until a prospect had enough information to become a Contact. But in practice, Leads often accumulate without clear handoff, creating confusion.
To make matters worse:
- Salesforce allows multiple Leads with the same email address.
- HubSpot does not allow multiple Contacts with the same email.
That mismatch causes headaches. Each time a Salesforce Lead converts into a Contact, HubSpot overwrites data - erasing the ability to track how many times the same person has re-qualified as an MQL.
That impacts everything from workflows to timely communication.
Because of this, many teams are moving away from the Lead object and adopting Opportunity-based inquiry management instead.
This approach gives you cleaner, more consistent reporting across both platforms.
Need more assistance?
The HubSpot–Salesforce integration is powerful, but only when it’s managed with clear definitions and reporting practices. MQLs are at the heart of that - done right, they sharpen alignment between marketing and sales and drive stronger revenue outcomes.
Our Knowledge Bank has more guides on the HubSpot–Salesforce integration, packed with the details you’ll want before making big changes.
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