For the last two decades, marketing teams have relied on a key metric that has become widely accepted as the leading indicator to opportunity creation: the MQL, or Marketing Qualified Lead.

The reasons were simple. The MQL worked. MQLs (and down-funnel SQLs, or Sales Qualified Leads) help demand marketing teams build and operationalize sales funnels. Without them, it’s nearly impossible to predict future pipeline or have any real visibility into how sales opportunities were sourced.

Demand generation teams could track “interesting moments” that contacts produced within their digital experience. Then, using either native or aftermarket software, they could build a firmographic and behavioral scoring threshold. Once the MQL crosses this threshold, the marketing team will know a lead might be ready to talk to your sales team about your product.

Marketers check for each MQL’s “fit.” A firmographic fit—data like company size, industry, title, etc.—includes publicly-available information. A behavioral fit—engagement data within the digital experience, like registering for a webinar—was proprietary. Combining the two has historically highly effective.

MQL is a metric that’s served us well, building an entire ecosystem of software companies like Infer, MadKudu, and others. I can’t think of any single metric that, once invented, led to the creation of so many companies.

But B2B marketing teams also know the dark secret of MQLs. They’re one of the easiest metrics to manipulate. The result? MQLs are too often a vanity metric, losing their ability to predict reliable revenue for the business.

My prediction - we are in the last days of the MQL (as we know it) being used in marketing teams. Let’s break down why.

1.
MQLs Are Built on Outdated Assumptions

The architecture of an incoming MQL relies on a familiar tactic. The form fill. A potential lead fills out a form to access your webinar, for example. The complication? It’s led to us gating everything behind a form. And sheesh—did we gate everything.

Apply this logic to our personal lives, and you’ll see why it’s outdated. Can you imagine not being able to watch a movie on Disney+ until you fill out your job position and company name? Or entering your personal contact information so Disney can reach out with new movie-watching opportunities? How interruptive would that be?

It’s just as high-friction when it’s a webinar. Too often, form fills get in the way of good content—and potentially turn away MQLs rather than measuring them.

2.
MQLs Don’t Account for the Dark Funnel

Customers trigger intent signals in rented channels. Think social media, online review sites, and third-party content networks. And you won’t find those signals in the MQL process.

Marketers have even dubbed this cohort of intent “the dark funnel.” Kind of like how astrophysicists use “dark energy” to describe something they don’t yet understand.

That’s the problem with most rented channels: they don’t provide us with valuable engagement data. We can only triangulate intent, at best. And matters complicate further because your brand’s engagement often occurs on rented channels.

In short, there’s a lot of data out there you don’t know. That inherently limits what the MQL metric can tell you.

3.
MQLs Are Too Subjective

Let’s say your MQL targets are trending in the wrong direction near the end of the quarter. No problem, you say. Let’s pump our paid media spend in PPC, content syndication, and other expensive channels to drive quantity. MQL quality falls by the wayside. If that doesn’t work, you broaden your MQL definition within your lead scoring model, and next thing you know, you’re in the green.

Admit it: if you haven’t done this yourself, you’ve at least thought about it. It’s hard for other teams to notice the technicalities of what’s going on. And with so many marketing teams paid based on MQLs, the temptation is built right in.

(By the way, I’m saying this is a problem, not a solution. Do not read this as encouragement to cook your books).

What Metric Succeeds the
MQL?

Given these shortcomings, you might expect I think MQLs are entirely worthless. Not so. But we need a new metric for owned media to build on the aspects of the MQL model that worked. Here are some of the positive attributes of the MQL that’s worth salvaging:

Audience Engagement Data

What is the MQL’s solution to measuring your audience engagement? A “behavioral score.” But today, we need to better leverage this data. We need to:

• Understand which content programs are working for which cohorts of our audience

• Tie engagement data to business outcomes (like pipeline or direct impact on revenue)

• Personalize experience at scale to drive more engagement and higher conversion

Consider what TikTok has done with its “interest graph.” These graphs plot out what the engagement data says about an individual’s passions, not just attributes from their LinkedIn profile or email signature.

There’s a huge opportunity here for B2B marketers to do the same with their audiences—if they can use engagement data to their advantage.

Gate Membership (Rather Than Most Content)

The email address is still the top currency in owned media. That’s because email remains the #1 channel for driving engagement. And while every MQL is first a form conversion that yields an email address, marketers got drunk on this power. As a result, we took content-gating way too far.

A more intuitive approach? Gate subscription rather than individual content. Build a primary form capture as a subscription rather than an opt-in. Entire media companies build themselves on this foundation. You can do it, too.

This strategy still requires giving your audience a powerful reason to subscribe. That’s where exclusive content comes in—programs, experiences, and offers only subscribers can access. But once you’re behind that gateway, customers should never have to fill out another form to download an eBook or access a webinar.

Looking Beyond the
MQL

Even if you believe that the reports of the death of MQLs have been greatly exaggerated, we likely agree that marketing needs clearly defined metrics, especially when building pipeline. Sure, there are many influencers online with many followers who will tell you not to try to measure everything.

But be careful who you learn from online. Those folks likely haven’t sat across the table from their CFO and had to justify a marketing budget based on ROI.

Building a rock-solid pipeline is especially important during market downturns like the one we’re experiencing now. To get ahead of this, you must realize that marketing is always a data game. You can either prove the impact of your work or risk losing the funding that makes that work possible.

The MQL has served us well for decades. Whatever metric comes next may have its problems, sure. But if we do it right, we could unlock the true value of marketing that goes well beyond just pipeline creation – but impacting every outcome on the funnel.

Anthony Kennada | About the Author

Founder and CEO, AudiencePlus

Prior to founding AudiencePlus, Anthony served as the CMO of incredible companies like Hopin and Front. He was the founding CMO of Gainsight where he and his team are credited with creating the Customer Success category -- a novel business imperative, profession and software category that helps subscription companies grow sustainably by becoming customer obsessed. By focusing on human first community building, content marketing, live events and creative activations, they developed a new playbook for B2B marketing that built the Gainsight brand and fueled the company’s growth from $0 to $100M+ ARR, and eventual acquisition by Vista Equity at a $1.1B valuation. You can follow him here.