Are We Seeing the Death of the MQL?

For a lot of B2B companies, marketing qualified leads (MQLs) set the direction for their marketing efforts. For many, the MQL has been—and still is—the lifeblood of lead generation. Marketers like MQLs because they aim to measure the level of interest a prospect has shown in a company’s marketing campaigns and how likely they are to turn into a potential new customer. While this sounds simple enough, the results on the ground point to a more complex and disappointing experience for many.

A key goal of MQLs is to align sales and marketing around pipeline opportunities.  By presenting an objective measurement of how engaged a prospect is, a sales team can use MQLs to focus their efforts on those prospects most likely to convert into a new sale. However, for many companies the gap between MQLs and actual sales is huge – in fact only a fraction ever make it to a sale. According to Forrester, less than 1% of MQLs convert into a successful sale. It’s no surprise then that a lot of B2B sales teams increasingly look upon MQLs with suspicion. In some cases, it has widened rather than narrowed the gap between sales and marketing, creating a sense of mistrust and tension between both teams. So, what’s going on?

One of the main drawbacks with MQLs is that they are prone to bias and subjective interpretations. And while it’s true scoring models can be refined over time, the reality is MQLs can draw an incomplete picture of how qualified a prospect actually is. The marketing behaviors that underly the basis of MQL scoring often miss the mark in understanding true buyer intent.

Today, the B2B customer journey is increasingly complex, long and fragmented involving multiple individuals with different aspirations and needs. For a lot of companies, the focus of a sale no longer rests on one individual lead. Yes, leads still have a role to play but marketing and sales teams instead need to understand and engage with buying committees that consist of multiple leads. In the same article referenced above, Forrester reports that 74% of B2B companies participate in purchasing decisions as part of an overall committee of two to nine people rather than having just one specific decision-maker.

A typical B2B customer journey involves multiple stages with different combinations of individuals and roles deciding how the process moves from one stage to the next. Sales and marketing teams need to work together to successfully orchestrate a path through these stages. A good starting point is to adopt shared metrics at each stage of the journey that focus on buying committees and that measure engagement and intent. This shifts the emphasis from marketing qualified leads to marketing qualified accounts (MQAs). Rather than focusing on individual lead scores, account-based scores offer a more accurate understanding of buying readiness across a typical B2B journey. By understanding where individuals in the same committee stand holistically in the buying cycle, sales and marketing can create and deliver personalised messaging to each individual taking into account their unique position, helping push the entire committee to a successful sale.

So, does this mean the end of the MQL in B2B marketing?  Rather than discarding MQLs entirely, they can be reframed within the wider context of buying committees. MQLs when stripped of their standalone significance, can still play a valuable role.  Crucially, they can generate signals of intent within a wider buyer committee helping put new prospects on the radar of sales and marketing teams that they may not have necessarily identified already.

At PredictiveB2B, we work with companies to help deliver go-to-market strategies that leverage today’s latest AI and predictive analytic tools. By helping companies shift from marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to marketing qualified accounts (MQAs), we enable clients understand and engage with entire buying committees rather focusing on individual leads.