The definition of MQL needs an overhaul.

Why? Because your highest-quality leads are likely coming from demand generation rather than outright lead generation, as the market has changed and buyers are behaving differently.

Leaving the question to ask right now being, “what number does your GTM team actually trust right now?”

Because if you’re honest with yourself. Most revenue leaders I speak to stopped believing in the MQL a while ago.

They still report it, because the board pack has a slot for it and the CRM still counts it. But ask them over a coffee, and they’ll tell you it doesn't measure what they need.

Sales worked this out first. Finance got there shortly after. Now marketing has quietly admitted it too.

The trouble is, nobody replaced it properly. So every month the same three teams walk into the same meeting carrying three different versions of the truth.

How the definition of MQL lost the room

The MQL was built for a world where a download meant interest.

Someone swapped their email for a whitepaper, picked up a few points for opening a newsletter, crossed a threshold and landed on a sales rep’s list.

Sales picked up the phone. Most of those people couldn’t remember downloading anything. So sales stopped calling, and marketing kept generating them anyway, because that’s what marketing was targeted on.

The number went up, and the pipeline didn’t.

That’s the illusion of lead generation. It looks like a funnel filling up, but it’s really a list of people who were curious for about forty seconds.

Finance watched spend rise against a number that never turned into cash at a rate anyone could forecast.

Once finance stops trusting a number, it’s dead, no matter what the dashboard says.

Your CRM didn’t get the memo

Your CMO stopped believing in MQLs eighteen months ago.

Your CRM didn’t get the memo or the update on the MQL criteria.

The lifecycle stages are still there, and so are the lead scores and the routing rules. Plenty of businesses have given up on the metric without taking out the plumbing behind it. So the old logic still decides who sales calls and what gets reported, even though nobody in the room would defend it.

That’s an exposed place to be.

With no agreed number, every team marks its own homework. Marketing reports engagement. Sales reports the pipeline it built itself. Finance reports what landed in the bank.

Nobody can join the dots between them, and the forecast becomes a negotiation.

The scoring model was never the problem

This is the bit most people miss.

Teams spent years tweaking lead scoring. They added extra points for a pricing page visit, decay for inactivity and negative scores for students and competitors. None of it saved the MQL, because the model was never the real problem.

The MQL failed because marketing built it on its own and then asked everyone else to believe in it.

A number only becomes credible when the people who have to act on it and the people who have to pay for it agree on what it means before anyone starts counting. Sales never agreed that a webinar sign-up was worth a call, and finance never agreed it was worth a budget line.

So swapping the MQL for an MQA, an intent score, or whatever acronym comes next won’t fix anything if you build it the same way. You’ll get a year or so of goodwill, and then you’ll be back in the same meeting.

What sales and finance will actually trust

Sales trusts a conversation. Finance trusts a conversion rate. Build the measure around both.

Start with the moment a buyer agrees there’s a problem worth talking about. A download or a click doesn’t count. What counts is a real conversation where someone who fits your ICP has said, yes, this matters to us, and we’d like to explore it.

Call it a qualified conversation or call it something else. The name doesn’t matter. What matters is that you write down exactly what has to be true for it to count, and that sales and finance sign that definition off alongside marketing.

Then track what happens next: how many of those conversations become opportunities, how many of those opportunities close, and how long it takes. After a couple of quarters, you have something finance can model. You get a predictable conversion rate that marketing can influence and sales can verify.

And marketing’s job gets more interesting. Instead of filling a bucket with names, it’s building buyability. That means making sure the right accounts know who you are, understand the problem you solve and are warm enough that a conversation feels natural rather than forced.

You can measure that too. Look at how much of your ICP is actively engaging with you, how much dormant pipeline you’re bringing back to life and how many people reply when you reach out. Those are leading indicators that sit in front of the number everyone trusts, not a replacement for it.

Fix the plumbing before the dashboard

If you’re the person who has to sort this out, the work is less glamorous than buying a new attribution tool.

Get the heads of sales, marketing and finance in one room and agree on a single definition of a qualified conversation. Define it properly and agree the KPIs around it.

For me, the MQL should be defined as “intent shown, and that the prospect has engaged”. Ideally, a meeting rather than just a download.

Report the new number weekly to all three teams, in the same format. Review the definition together every quarter, because your market will move and the definition should move with it.

None of this is technically hard. The hard part is the alignment and change your joined-up GTM team needs to make, and the reporting changes that follow.

Let’s wrap this up

Marketing was right to kill the MQL. It was measuring the wrong thing, and everyone knew it.

But killing a metric doesn’t do the job the metric was meant to do. Until sales, marketing and finance agree on one number that tracks real buyer intent through to revenue, you don’t have a go-to-market engine. You have three departments and three spreadsheets.

So who in your business owns the definition of demand?

If the answer is nobody, start there. Agree the number together, then build the engine around it.