I'm going to say something that will get me in trouble with some demand gen purists: the MQL was always a compromise, not a strategy.
It was a compromise between marketing, which needed to show it was producing something, and sales, which needed a reason to make calls. It was never actually a reliable indicator of buying intent. We all knew this. We just kept using it because it was measurable and it made the dashboard look good.
What the MQL actually measures
A marketing qualified lead — in most organizations — is someone who hit a score threshold based on a combination of demographic fit and behavioral signals. They downloaded something. They attended a webinar. They visited the pricing page twice.
That's not buying intent. That's digital activity. The problem is that digital activity looks identical whether someone is a serious buyer doing research, a competitor doing competitive intelligence, or a student writing a paper. We're scoring all of them the same way and calling it qualified.
The metric that actually predicts revenue
The metric that most consistently correlates with closed revenue isn't MQL volume. It's account engagement depth.
Not individual lead scores — account-level engagement. The aggregated signal from everyone at a target account who has interacted with your brand, combined with intent data showing what they're researching outside your owned channels.
An account where three stakeholders have engaged with your content over 90 days, where the company is showing elevated intent around your solution category, and where a sales touch has happened in the last 30 days — that's a signal worth acting on. One person downloading an ebook is not.
What to replace it with
The metrics I care about: Pipeline velocity — how fast are opportunities moving through the funnel? Influenced pipeline — what percentage of your open and closed pipeline had a marketing touch before the opportunity was created? Account engagement score — how many stakeholders at your priority accounts are engaging, across what channels, and how recently? Win rate on marketing-influenced deals — if your content is building trust, your win rate on influenced deals should be measurably higher than on cold deals.
The conversation worth having
None of this works if sales and marketing are still optimizing for different things. The conversation worth having with your CRO is this: what does a good lead actually look like in practice? What are the signals that tell you an account is ready to have a serious conversation? Build your demand gen program around producing those signals. Not form fills.
The MQL had a good run. But the way B2B buyers buy has changed, the tools we have to understand them have changed, and the expectations on marketing to drive real revenue have changed. The measurement needs to catch up.
— Erik R. Miller