Is the MQL dead?

Marketing closed Q2 at 1,140 MQLs against a target of 1,000. Pipeline landed at 71 percent of plan. The CRO wanted to know how both numbers could be true in the same quarter, and nobody in the room had an answer ready that survived a follow up question. That gap is the entire case against lead targets, and some version of it shows up at nearly every SaaS company still paying a marketing team to hit a volume number.

Is the MQL dead, or is the target dead?

The data point is fine. The target is what breaks things. A marketing qualified lead tells you how many people crossed a scoring threshold this month and where they came from, which is worth knowing. The moment it becomes the number a VP gets paid against, it stops describing reality and starts manufacturing it.

Forrester moved on years ago. The SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall, which is where most of the MQL vocabulary sitting in your CRM originally came from, was replaced by the B2B Revenue Waterfall in 2021, and the central change was a shift from individual leads to buying groups. The firm that gave the industry the MQL stopped recommending it as the organising unit half a decade back. Dashboards did not get the message.

So the honest answer is narrower than either camp wants it to be. Keep counting MQLs. Stop paying anyone to grow them.

Marketing hit its number and sales missed. Here is the arithmetic

A lead target is met by lowering the bar, because that is the cheapest available lever. The mechanism is boring and it happens the same way every time: a gated report, a webinar with a prize draw, a list buy dressed up as a co-marketing partnership, a scoring threshold quietly dropped from 60 points to 45.

Take a team running 1,000 MQLs a month at a blended $190 per lead, converting 13 percent to created opportunities, winning 22 percent of those at a $24,000 ACV. That is 130 opportunities and roughly 28 closed deals a month. Now the target goes up 30 percent and the team finds 300 extra leads at $95 each from cheap gated content. Those 300 convert at about 1.5 percent, because people who download a trends report are not in market.

Row two looks survivable. Four extra opportunities for $28,500 is a bad trade but not a catastrophe. Row three is what actually happens, and it is the row nobody models.

Here is why. An SDR working 300 additional records a month at a 1.5 percent hit rate learns, within about three weeks, that the queue is mostly junk. The response is rational: work it faster, call once instead of three times, skip the research step. That behaviour applies to the whole queue, not only the bad part, so the original 1,000 leads slip from 13 percent to 11.5 percent. Same leads, worse handling. The result is fewer opportunities than baseline on 15 percent more spend.

That third row is also the quarter where sales stops trusting marketing, which costs more than the money.

Why two points of conversion beat a 30 percent volume win

Move MQL to opportunity conversion by two points in either direction and the same 1,000 leads produce either 110 or 150 opportunities. At a 22 percent win rate and $24,000 ACV, that 40 opportunity spread is about $211,000 in bookings. No volume target in the company is worth that much, and yet conversion rate almost never appears as a goal on a marketing scorecard.

Conversion rate is also the number that tells you whether the definition is holding. When it drifts down for two months running, somebody has loosened something: a form, a score, a source, a routing rule. Watch it weekly and segment it by source. A blended 11 percent that hides paid social at 2 percent and demo requests at 41 percent is not a metric, it’s an average with a job.

The pipeline velocity equation is the cleanest way to see this. Opportunity count, average deal size, win rate and cycle length all multiply together. Lead count appears nowhere in it.

Replacement one: sourced pipeline and cost per opportunity

The default replacement for most B2B SaaS teams is a pair: marketing sourced pipeline as the revenue number, cost per opportunity as the efficiency number. Sourced means the first recorded touch on the account belongs to marketing, and yes, that definition is imperfect at the edges. Argue about the edges for one afternoon, write the rule down, then stop arguing.

Cost per opportunity is the metric that stops the gaming. You cannot hit it by buying volume, because the denominator only moves when the lead is good enough to become an opportunity. It also gives finance something they already understand, which matters when you’re defending budget in October.

Two guardrails make this work. First, cap the lookback window for sourcing at something defensible, usually 90 days for mid-market and 180 for enterprise, and apply it consistently. Second, report influenced pipeline next to it as context but never as the accountable number. Influenced typically covers 70 to 90 percent of deals at any company doing real marketing, which makes it a comfort blanket rather than a target.

If you need a model that projects the whole chain forward, the marketing pipeline forecast calculator works backwards from a bookings goal through win rate, deal size and cycle length to the opportunity count you need each month. That is the number your plan should carry, not a lead count derived from it.

Replacement two: buying group engagement for account based teams

If your average deal involves five or more people and a security review, individual leads are the wrong unit entirely. A single director downloading a guide is not a buying signal. Four people from the same account touching pricing, integrations and the security page inside a fortnight is.

Account engagement models score at the account level: how many distinct people, from how many functions, doing how many things, inside a rolling window. 6sense and Demandbase both sell this as a product with third party intent bolted on, and both are expensive enough that you should not buy one until your target account list is stable and your CRM data is clean. Under about $15M ARR, a scoring rule in HubSpot or a Salesforce report that counts distinct contacts per account per 30 days gets you most of the way.

The number marketing then carries is something like qualified accounts engaged against the target list, with pipeline created from that list as the outcome. It ties directly to your ABM tiering and target account lists, which is where the denominator comes from. Without a fixed list the metric is meaningless, because you can always find more accounts to call engaged.

One honest cost: buying group models are slower to read. A lead target gives you a weekly number. Account engagement gives you a monthly one at best, and the first two months after you switch will look like the programme died. Tell your CEO that before you switch, not after.

Replacement three: product qualified leads for self serve products

For anything with a free trial or free tier, the strongest predictor of revenue lives in product data, not marketing data. A product qualified lead is scored on what someone did inside the product: connected a data source, invited two teammates, created a second project, hit a usage ceiling.

The build is straightforward with Amplitude, Mixpanel, PostHog or plain warehouse queries piped through Segment into the CRM. The hard part is not instrumentation, it’s picking the right event. Do the analysis properly: take six months of closed won accounts and six months of churned or dormant ones, then find the in product actions that separate them. At most companies that turns out to be two or three events, and one of them is almost always about inviting a second person.

Slack’s early growth work made the pattern famous, and the shape holds across collaboration tools: teams that reach a real usage threshold in the first week convert and retain far better than teams that sign up and look around. Your threshold will differ. The method does not.

PQLs have a failure mode worth naming. They are excellent at spotting people who will buy and terrible at creating demand, so a team that goes all in on PQLs often finds new signups flat after two quarters because nothing upstream is filling the top. The PQL is a qualification model, not a demand model, and it needs a demand generation programme feeding it.

Which replacement fits your motion

My position: if you run one motion, pick the matching row and commit. If you run two motions, run two scorecards rather than one blended number that describes neither. Blending a PLG self serve funnel and an enterprise ABM motion into a single qualified lead count is how companies end up unable to explain their own CAC.

How to migrate reporting in one quarter without breaking comp plans

Do not change the metric and the money in the same month. The fastest way to lose your best demand gen manager is to move the goalposts mid quarter and then dock the payout.

Two practical notes. Give the first quarter on the new plan a payout floor at the prior period’s actual, because you’re asking people to absorb the risk of a measurement change they did not choose. And keep the old report running for two full quarters after the switch, because somebody will ask.

The demand generation plan template has the target derivation built into it if you want a starting structure rather than a blank spreadsheet.

What to keep from the MQL model

Throwing out everything is the other mistake. The MQL era produced four things worth keeping.

• A shared definition of qualified, agreed by both teams and written down rather than implied.
• A routing and follow up SLA with a stated response time, which is still the single most influential operational fix in most funnels.
• Stage conversion tracking, which is now your early warning system rather than your target.
• A scoring model, repurposed from a gate into a prioritisation order for the queue.

That last one matters more than people expect. Scores are genuinely useful for telling an SDR which 40 of today’s 120 records to call first. They’re useless as a threshold that decides who gets called at all.

Response time is worth one specific number. Across most inbound SaaS funnels, contacting a demo request inside five minutes rather than an hour changes connect rates by a multiple, not a few percentage points. Chili Piper and similar routing tools exist for exactly this, and the payback is faster than anything on your content calendar.

The definitions to agree with sales before you change anything

Most migrations fail on vocabulary rather than on maths. Get these six agreed, written down and stored somewhere both teams can find, before the first new number appears on a slide.

That last item is the one everyone skips. Name a person, usually the RevOps lead, and give them 48 hours to settle any dispute. Without it, every definitional edge case becomes a standing agenda item that eats an hour a month forever.

While you’re in there, it is worth running an attribution audit on the underlying data, because a migration built on broken UTM handling or duplicate account records will produce numbers you have to defend and cannot.

Where the lead metric still earns its place

Two situations genuinely call for a volume number. First, a brand new channel with no conversion history: you need raw response volume for the first six to eight weeks before you have enough opportunities to judge quality. Second, a top of funnel programme with a long lag, such as a webinar programme whose registrants convert over nine months rather than nine weeks.

In both cases, the lead count is a leading indicator you watch, not a goal you’re paid on. The distinction sounds pedantic until the first time someone hits a number by buying a list.

Beyond that, the fuller set of what to report and how often sits in the demand generation metrics guide. The short version is that a marketing dashboard should open on pipeline and cost per opportunity, show conversion rates and cycle length second, and put volume counts on page two where they belong.

What to do in the next two weeks

Pull your last four quarters and calculate two things: MQL count by quarter, and created opportunities by quarter. Plot them on the same chart. If the lines diverge, you have your business case and you should take that single chart to your CRO this week rather than building a deck.

Then book 45 minutes with the sales leader and agree the opportunity definition. Nothing else on this page works until that conversation happens, and it is the only step that cannot be delegated.