The MQL Is a Useful Fiction. Treat It Like One.
The Marketing Qualified Lead was invented around 2002 by SiriusDecisions to settle a recurring argument: which of the names marketing handed over should sales actually call. It was a process artifact, never a real thing about a real customer. Twenty-four years later it still does that job, and we have collectively forgotten its origin.
The cost of forgetting is that we report on it as if it measures intent. It does not.
What an MQL actually measures
An MQL is a record in a CRM that has crossed a threshold of marketing-attributed activity, usually a combination of demographic fit and engagement scoring. The threshold is set by an internal committee. The scoring rules are set by another committee. Both are revised quarterly to make the numbers come out closer to whatever the team is trying to defend at QBR.
This means MQL volume can rise 40% in a quarter because the buyer journey changed, or because someone moved the threshold from 70 points to 60 points and forgot to mention it. Both look identical in the dashboard.
The two failure modes
Marketing optimizes for the number, sales ignores them. Volume goes up, conversion to opportunity goes down. Marketing celebrates a record quarter. Sales says “the leads are garbage.” Both are right, given how the system is set up. The MQL became a checkpoint instead of a signal.
Sales co-opts the definition, volume collapses. Sales gets a vote in the scoring rules and raises every threshold until only buying-ready leads count. MQL volume falls 70%. Pipeline doesn’t improve because the same buying-ready leads were going to convert regardless of how marketing scored them. Marketing’s headcount is now hard to justify.
The system is most useful in the middle, where both teams half-trust the definition and half-ignore it.
What to do instead
Two things in combination.
Stop reporting MQL as a primary number. Move it to a tier-2 operational metric. The tier-1 numbers are pipeline created and pipeline closed-won. Everything else is in service of those two.
Measure handoff quality, not handoff volume. What percentage of MQLs are touched within 24 hours? What percentage get a meeting? What percentage of meetings produce an opportunity? Those rates tell you whether the system is working, regardless of volume.
The bonus: when handoff quality is the metric, marketing and sales stop fighting about lead scoring rules and start collaborating on the handoff itself. The conversation shifts from “are these good leads” to “how do we close the loop faster.”
The role of intent data
Third-party intent data (the “company X has been researching keyword Y” signals from providers like 6sense, Bombora, ZoomInfo) is mostly useful for one thing: prioritizing accounts that are already in the pipeline. As a top-of-funnel discovery tool it is mediocre to bad, because the signal is noisy and most accounts that “show intent” never convert.
This is fine. Intent data does not need to be a discovery tool to be valuable. Used as a tiebreaker for which of two equally-engaged accounts to call first, it pays for itself.
A workable framing
Marketing’s job is not to produce MQLs. It is to create conditions under which the right buyers can find the company quickly, learn what they need to learn, and reach the sales team prepared to have a useful conversation. The MQL is one piece of plumbing in that system, not the output.
When the team stops mistaking the plumbing for the product, the conversations get a lot easier.