The traditional Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) has become a bit of fool’s gold for funnel-minded marketers who have historically obsessed over this misleading metric. When marketing teams celebrate this barometer, it usually leads to sales teams increasingly rejecting what marketing delivers as clear-cut revenue opportunity.
The uncomfortable truth? The entire concept of MQLs is fundamentally flawed, and it’s time to revisit this metric.
Why MQLs Don’t Work Anymore
The traditional MQL model assumes that prospects will raise their hands at the exact moment that they are ready to engage with a sales team. This ignores how modern buyers actually behave. Today’s buyers conduct their purchase research independently, before they ever speak with a vendor. They may be in market for months before they fill out a single web form, and when they do engage, it’s rarely with purchase intent – it’s with learning intent.
So, consider a typical MQL scenario: someone downloads a whitepaper, gets scored as “marketing qualified,” and gets passed to sales within 24 hours. That person was likely just doing early research, has no budget allocated, no defined timeline, and possibly isn’t even the decision maker. Sales rejects the lead, marketing gets defensive about lead quality, and the cycle of dysfunction may continue. The fundamental flaw is treating engagement as intent and missing other stakeholders that may be part of that same buying decision.
A recent article from Loren Shumate, a contributing author in Martech.org’s September newsletter supports this notion. Shumate concludes that the outcome around MQLs is predictable: marketing looks busy but is disconnected from revenue – a position no CMO wants to defend when budgets are in scrutiny.
The Hidden Costs of the MQL Obsession
The MQL-centric approach ultimately creates skewed incentives across the marketing team. Optimizing volume over quality may create increasingly aggressive next best actions that potentially repel serious buyers. This approach also creates a skewed perspective on marketing contribution – high MQL numbers might contradict an organization’s stagnant revenue and pipeline forecast. The result is an eroded sense of trust between marketing and other functional stakeholder groups across the business.
Perhaps the most damaging issue is that the MQL “lead model” encourages marketing to abdicate responsibility for the customer lifecycle. Once someone becomes an MQL, they become a sales problem, and the marketing effort ends there. Buyers don’t recognize these internal handoffs – they expect a seamless experience throughout their journey.
Progressive Marketers Are More Outcome Oriented
The most sophisticated marketing organizations are abandoning MQLs in favor of more nuanced approaches that align with revenue, conversion, and how buyers actually behave such as:
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- Intent-based qualification: Value and measure buying intent signals versus activity volume with the goal to distinguish between those prospects “learning” versus “buying.”
- Account-based orchestration: Orchestrate experiences at the account level factoring for different stakeholders that may be part of the same decision-making unit rather than isolated contacts. This requires aligning disparate activities into coherent account narratives.
- Go-to-Market operational integration: Break down the functional silos between marketing, sales, and customer success by managing integrated operations across the entire customer lifecycle. This means shared service line agreements, joint accountability for pipeline, and integrated technology stacks that provide 360-degree customer visibility.
- Lifecycle Optimization: Optimize marketing for the entire buyer lifecycle versus simple lead capture and focus on creating value-first content strategies, implementing progressive profiling, and building self-service evaluation tools (i.e., demos, ROI calculators) that help buyers make better decisions.
To move beyond MQLs, marketing leaders need to implement a more sophisticated qualification framework built around core principles – including developing clear definitions of where prospects are in the actual customer lifecycle (problem identification vs. vendor evaluation vs. purchase decision, etc,) as this will dictate the type of content, engagement model, and criteria for managing conversion. The qualification framework also needs to account for buying across committees and stakeholder groups, influence levels, and decision criteria. Lastly, lead prioritization needs to account for ideal customer profiles, engagement intensity, competitive landscape, and external triggers so that go-to-market teams can focus on the highest-probability opportunities.
The Revenue Technology Imperative
This shift from MQL funnel management can’t happen with a marketing automation or sales platform designed around the MQL model. Modern revenue marketing requires technology stacks like Dynamics 365 Customer Insights and Sales that can correlate activities across stakeholders, identify intent signals that highlight buying behavior, and provide real-time intelligence that informs engagement strategies.
Leveraging your revenue technology stack against success metrics, beyond the MQL, also forces organizations to align more deliberately around measurements that impact the business, such as pipeline velocity, opportunity conversion, account engagement, and acquisition costs.
Transitioning away from MQLs isn’t just a tactical change – it’s a commercial transformation that requires cross-functional alignment, integrated technology and data platforms, and significant change management.
The Competitive Advantage
Organizations that successfully move beyond MQLs gain significant competitive advantages. They create better buyer experiences, generate higher-quality pipeline, achieve better sales and marketing alignment, and ultimately drive more predictable revenue growth. More importantly, they build marketing organizations that actually contribute to business outcomes rather than just activity metrics.
The MQL is dead. The organizations that make the shift will impact business imperatives and ensure trust across go-to-market teams and leadership stakeholders. The future belongs to marketers who understand that their job isn’t to generate leads—it’s to accelerate revenue. Everything else is just noise.
Jeff Mikula
Senior Vice President, Advisory Services
A seasoned marketer with over two decades of marketing experience, Jeff is responsible for ensuring that our advisory products and services solve client go-to-market challenges, optimize marketing performance levels, and generate value across the customer experience.
