The MQL Era Is Over. What Comes Next?

Back in the day, Hubspot and Marketo were scrappy upstarts determined to disrupt how marketers made and measured their impact. Today, they are titans whose influence has reshaped the discipline. Next year, they both turn 20. 

This means that all but the mature marketers in the business have forged their careers during the era of marketing automation and the marketing qualified lead. The MQL quickly became the gold standard for proving marketing’s effectiveness. For a while, it served a valuable purpose, connecting marketing and sales activities and helping marketers quantify and amplify their influence on revenue. 

From metric to mindset

The advent of MQLs gave marketing new legitimacy. Somewhere along the line, they went from a valuable metric to a counterproductive mindset. 

In a LinkedIn post by Marketo cofounder Jon Miller pointed out that MQLs arose at a time when marketers sought ways to make marketing measurable and fight for a seat at the revenue table. Frameworks such as the SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall lent additional rigor to demand generation, situating MQLs within a lead lifecycle that defined, quantified, and qualified leads at multiple stages of the journey.

But in our eagerness to measure, we went too far. “MQLs became more than a metric—they became a mindset,” to quote Miller. And that’s when the trouble started.

The “Q” is for “questionable” 

With so much riding on a single number, marketers started looking for ways to juice it. Maybe the next QBR loomed. Maybe sales demanded more leads. Whatever the reason, we widened the criteria, lowered the scoring threshold, or pushed out yet another email to make our quota. 

This kind of short-term thinking may have solved the immediate crisis, but it eroded our effectiveness and credibility as marketers. Our leadership and other stakeholders no longer trust our analytics because we’ve sliced, diced, reformulated, and adjusted them so frequently. McKinsey survey data reveals that CEOs believe marketing metrics connect to business impact less than 60% of the time. And why should CEOs believe it when their CMOs don’t? Forrester data shows nearly two-thirds (64%) of marketers don’t trust their measurement, and 61% don’t believe it’s well aligned with organizational objectives or strategies for growth.

Replace metrics with meaning

There is no shortage of things to measure in marketing. Clicks, likes, opens, CPL, CPA, CLV, CTR, SALs, SQLs, AQLs, TALs, SGLs, MQAs—the list is endless. 

But swapping out one type of metric for another, or slicing and dicing them into more and more precise units is not the answer to the problem. DemandLab has evangelized the dangers of disconnected data points since 2017, when we published Change Agents: The Radical Role of Tomorrow’s CMO. Much has changed since then, but the fundamentals are still remarkably relevant. Stay close to revenue. Prioritize the customer experience. Leverage data for insight, not justification. The result is a framework for change and a mechanism for delivering meaningful experiences at every step of the customer journey. 

Here are the elements most critical to marketing’s much-needed course correction. 

Authentic storytelling. If we continue to launch campaigns for the sake of shaking a few leads loose, we will exhaust and alienate our audience. We need to redouble our commitment to engaging people with meaningful, original, relevant content. 

[For a closer look at the importance of storytelling and how you can improve the emotional resonance of your campaigns, read this post.]

Data as insight. The tyranny of the MQL has led many marketers to think about data as a means of proving their impact rather than amplifying it. We need to rediscover the power of data as inspiration versus justification, which means using historical data to inform decision-making instead of justifying it after the fact. 

For examples of five reports that are helping marketers bridge the gap between detailed metrics (MQLs included) and performance optimization, check out The Fulcrum 5 ebook.

Judicious use of AI. AI is and will continue to be a transformative force in marketing. But it can be a force for good—or mediocrity. As computational scientist Stephen Wolfram puts it, ChatGPT is “just adding one word at a time”—predicting the most likely word to come after the word in front of it. This kind of content is okay when applied to less critical areas of your practice, but it will degrade them when applied to areas where you outperform competitors—or areas where you need to. 

[For a deeper dive into the capabilities and caveats of AI in marketing, read this post.]

Make meaning, not quotas

Marketers fought long and hard to integrate the technologies and measurement systems that enable them to prove their worth, and the MQL was the jewel in the crown. But as the technology matures and our markets grow more sophisticated, it’s time to replace this two-dimensional metric with more nuanced, contextual, actionable analytics. 

MQLs got us a seat at the revenue table. What comes next will give us the means to own the revenue narrative. 

If you need to bring your marketing metrics into closer alignment with revenue goals and market needs, talk to us.