You’re invited to the MQL’s funeral

The problem isn’t that MQLs suddenly stopped working. The problem is that they were never designed for the world we’re in now. And that misalignment is costing organisations not just efficiency, but revenue growth.

Why the MQL was always a proxy, not a predictor

The concept of the MQL was born in an era when marketing needed a way to justify its contribution to the business. It offered a bridge between observable activity; someone filled out a form or downloaded a report, and thus the assumption of intent. That interaction was treated as a signal of readiness to buy and qualification for progression through the sales pipeline. However, that proxy has become increasingly disconnected from real customer acquisition outcomes.
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A recent report by 6sense illustrates how buyers often complete a significant portion of their evaluation before ever engaging a supplier, reshaping how customer acquisition strategy should be structured. Many form shortlists early and assess multiple vendors independently before contact is made. In that environment, a single interaction captured in a marketing automation platform is a weak signal of purchase readiness. It reflects engagement, not commercial alignment.
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In other words, we built a metric that satisfied marketing’s need for measurement, but it never truly reflected how buyers actually progress toward a decision.

The buyer has outgrown the funnel

Modern B2B buying is complex, nonlinear, and consensus driven. 6Sense reports that the average buying group now involves around ten stakeholders, and that in most buyer journeys, key decisions are made before suppliers are ever contacted. In that context, decisions are rarely made by a single individual filling out a form.
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Those stakeholders explore solutions independently, at their own pace, across fragmented digital touchpoints long before marketing systems register engagement.
This evolution has undermined the assumptions that MQLs were built on. Many so-called MQLs represent early curiosity, not commercial progression toward a chosen vendor, yet their engagement is treated as equivalent to intent.
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It’s no longer sufficient to score someone based on form fills and downloads alone. The modern buyer self-educates, loops in colleagues, evaluates vendors anonymously and enters the sales process late, if they ever formally enter it at all.

The disconnect between leads and revenue

What makes the traditional MQL increasingly fragile is not just conversion performance. It is the reality of how modern B2B buying works.
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Gartner’s research shows that buyers spend only 17% of their total journey meeting potential vendors, and that time is split across multiple providers. By the time a prospect completes a form, much of the evaluation has already happened elsewhere.

Forrester’s work on the evolving B2B funnel reinforces this shift. Buying journeys are non linear and self directed. Stakeholders enter and exit the process at different stages. Criteria changes. Consensus takes time. A static MQL score cannot capture that complexity.
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This structural shift in buyer behaviour is changing how marketing performance is evaluated. This is why revenue leaders are shifting their focus from lead volume to deal confidence, opportunity progression and pipeline quality. Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey shows that marketing budgets have stalled at 7.7% of company revenue, increasing pressure on CMOs to demonstrate measurable value from constrained investment. Activity alone is no longer sufficient to justify investment.

The further marketing optimises for volume, the further it drifts from revenue certainty.

What becomes clear is that measurement alone is not the issue; structure is. As buying journeys fragment and decision-making becomes distributed across stakeholders and channels, organisations need operating models that connect strategy, activation and measurement into a unified system. Commercial alignment, account-level visibility and shared revenue objectives must replace isolated campaign metrics, supported by systems that surface intent signals across the buying group and reveal progression across the full journey.

Attribution needs to evolve too

Part of the frustration with MQLs is tied to attribution and the way marketers assign credit for revenue influence. Traditional multi-touch attribution counts interactions. It rarely measures momentum. But these models are limited; they measure touchpoints rather than momentum, often counting clicks and downloads without discerning whether those interactions genuinely influenced the eventual decision.

This can leave teams optimising towards what is easily measurable, short-term engagement and away from what is commercially meaningful, revenue influence. In this context, it is no surprise that MQL targets have begun to look like a comfortable target to hit, rather than a true measure of business impact.

From lead volume to lead value

If the MQL has become more noise than signal, what should replace it? The answers emerging from trusted research are broadly aligned around behavioural intent, deal readiness and quality over quantity.
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Forward-thinking organisations are investing in intent analytics to move beyond traditional qualification models and understand where potential buyers are in their decision journey. Forrester’s research on intent data highlights that many organisations struggle to fully leverage intent signals across the B2B revenue waterfall, but when applied strategically these signals help teams identify where prospects are in their evaluation process and tailor outreach more effectively.
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Rather than relying on generic engagement proxies, modern qualification frameworks increasingly prioritise signals that indicate active evaluation and alignment with buying criteria, enabling more accurate prioritisation of opportunities that matter. Forrester also evaluates intent data providers in the market and emphasises the importance of selecting sources with depth, breadth and accuracy, reinforcing that intent signals are now a strategic asset when used to inform pipeline decisions.
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Others are rethinking the handoff between marketing and sales, defining the transition point not by a static score but by observable actions that show readiness for direct engagement. This ensures that what sales receive is supported by demonstrable behavioural evidence of momentum in the decision process.

Critically, these approaches shift emphasis from early signals of interest to later indicators of actionable intent, and that is what ultimately drives revenue impact rather than counting activity captured in a marketing database.

Reframing marketing’s role in growth

This is not a call to abandon measurement. It is a call to rethink which metrics matter. MQLs were a transitional tool, useful when martech was less mature, and buyers were more predictable. But we now live in an era defined by:

• self-directed research journeys,
• complex buying groups,
• extended sales cycles,
• and heightened commercial scrutiny.
  

Marketing’s role must evolve from simply generating leads to demonstrating influence on revenue outcomes. That means investing in customer expansion strategies, brand identity strength, aligned pipeline strategy, and customer intelligence that informs both marketing and sales.

When marketing is accountable to revenue contribution, teams stop celebrating raw volume and start celebrating pipeline quality and velocity, metrics that senior leaders actually care about.

The MQL isn’t dead, it’s evolving

Declaring the death of the MQL makes for a compelling headline, but the real story is more nuanced. The MQL was a transitional metric, useful in a period when marketing technology was less mature, buying journeys were more linear and commercial accountability was distributed differently. It was never designed to carry the weight of modern revenue accountability. What organisations need now isn’t a metric that marketers can hit toward targets; it’s a metric that correlates with commercial outcomes.

The future lies in qualification frameworks rooted in behaviour, intent, context and revenue impact, not arbitrary engagement scores. Organisations that shift toward models that align marketing and sales around shared commercial outcomes, such as opportunity progression, qualified meetings, deal confidence and pipeline contribution will lead in the next era of B2B growth.
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This evolution requires more than redefining a score; it requires rethinking the operating model around it. It means mapping buying journeys as they actually occur, aligning commercial objectives across teams, orchestrating engagement across the full lifecycle, and tracking progression at the account level rather than through isolated interactions. It demands a connected system capable of surfacing meaningful buying intent and signalling the right moment for sales engagement.

This is the thinking behind OrkestIQ, Gilroy’s connected buying experience operating model, designed to reflect how B2B buying actually happens today: self-directed, complex and digitally driven.
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OrkestIQ enables organisations to move toward a systems-based, AI-enabled growth model that unifies planning, activation and reporting into a single connected growth engine, creating visibility across the full buying journey and surfacing account-level intent at the moments that matter most.
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In this model, qualification is grounded in observable behavioural signals and account-level momentum. Marketing performance becomes defined by the quality, velocity and confidence of pipeline created instead of the quantity of leads captured.

In a market defined by scrutiny, attention alone is no longer a sufficient indicator of growth; what matters is demonstrable intent and its connection to revenue outcomes.
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For organisations questioning whether their current qualification model reflects how buyers actually buy, Gilroy offers a collaborative OrkestIQ Innovation Session.

In this working session, we’ll:

• Map your current buyer journeys
• Identify friction and misalignment
• Align your programmes to a connected buying framework
• Define a prioritised roadmap to improve pipeline quality and conversion

Book Your OrkestIQ Innovation Session