Is there a Future for MQLs?

The MQL is dead. Self-service buying has killed it, or perhaps ABM has made it obsolete. It depends on who you speak to. Buyer behaviour is changing, which requires a drastic change in internal go-to-market practices. Revenue Process Transformation is a strategic imperative that solves the increasingly common challenge of getting buyers to engage with sales. At least, that's the diagnosis from leading analysts such as Forrester.

The issues highlighted in the death of the MQL narrative are very real. Both B2B sales and B2B marketing are evolving rapidly. The sudden transition to digital selling during the pandemic disrupted the entire funnel, and sales teams are still trying to adapt. That has a downstream impact on marketing, which needs to make sure that leads are sales ready. Yet surprisingly few sales teams seem to recognise that the definition of a sales ready lead has changed dramatically in recent years.

Sales Challenges

Much of the end-of-MQLs talk has become a rehash of the age old sales complaints about lead quality. The basic pitch is that MQLs are inherently low quality, so let's not bother generating leads at all. That can work brilliantly for niche services to fixed verticals, where every prospect account already has a defined sales owner. Otherwise, you are simply reclassifying MQLs as an early stage opportunity, without doing anything to fix the underlying problem of declining lead conversion rates.

As any telemarketer will tell you, it's much harder to get in touch with decision makers than it used to be. Response rates to outbound calls plummeted during the pandemic, and response rates to outbound email and LinkedIn messages were never high to begin with. As such, one of the major problems with MQLs is that they're frequently unreachable, and that's even before the question of readiness to buy is considered.

Qualification Transformation

What constitutes an MQL has changed, as does the point at which they're created. Marketing does need to move beyond new logo acquisition, to cover upsell and cross-sell. Many product businesses have never distinguished between these different sales motions, at least not on the marketing side anyway. For subscription or service businesses, integrating customer lifecycle marketing into the mix is more complicated, often requiring a separate funnel and separate KPIs. Yet, MQLs still have an important place in an upsell strategy. They're the handover checkpoint for a marketing-generated sales cycle.

The key difference is that MQLs can no longer stand alone. They have to be part of a broader account relationship with a defined product focus. It's not enough to simply collect hand raisers and chuck them over the fence. Both buyers and sales teams expect marketing to ensure that deals really are ready to begin a bottom-of-funnel sales process when handed over to sales. Marketing has a responsibility to pre-qualify leads to avoid duplicating existing opportunities, as well as to verify buyer intent and profile fit. The good news is that all these checks can be automated within the tech stack, allowing sales to focus on closing deals.

Customer First

Much of the narrative around MQLs focuses too much on internal processes and not enough on the customer experience. It doesn't matter whether marketing are working on lead records, account records or opportunity records with sales. Buyers expect sales and marketing to be aligned and for every interaction with both teams to be personalised. Historically that has not been the case, and data silos mean that it still isn't possible within many organisations. A fully aligned buyer journey is essential, which requires both sales and marketing to have the same view of every account with the same list of buying group members.

That presents a real opportunity for marketing to take control of additional touch points in the buyer's journey. The dark funnel is expanding, which means that demand generation and content marketing are becoming more important than ever. That has its downsides too. With sales pushed further down the funnel, it is becoming harder to find sales-ready leads. There are quite simply fewer of them, because of the additional qualification steps required before passing over a lead. The nature of marketing qualification has been fundamentally transformed.