The MQL Is a Fiction and Everyone in the Room Knows It

The marketing qualified lead is a unit of account. It exists so that marketing can count something as done before sales has agreed that anything started. It is the accounting entry that lets two teams report success in the same quarter that revenue stayed flat. This is an argument for retiring it.

What an MQL measures

An MQL is a lead that has crossed a score. The score is points for a job title, points for a company size, points for downloading something, points for visiting the pricing page twice. A lead crosses the line and marketing's number goes up. What the score measures is that a person did some things on a website. What it does not measure is whether that person will take a meeting, whether the meeting will be with someone who can buy, or whether it will turn into an opportunity.

Sales knows this, which is why sales does not work MQLs. Most marketing generated leads are never contacted by a salesperson at all; the figure has sat near 79 percent in industry roundups for a decade. The uncontacted leads are not a failure of the MQL. They are the MQL working as designed: marketing counted them, and counting was the job.

The MQL is the receipt marketing hands over so nobody can say the lead was not delivered.

Why both teams keep it

Marketing keeps the MQL because it is the only number marketing can hit on its own. Sales keeps it because a disputed handoff is useful; when the quarter misses, lead quality is the explanation that does not name anyone. The MQL survives because it protects both sides from the number in the middle.

The number in the middle is the held, qualified meeting. It requires marketing to produce a person worth talking to and sales to actually talk to them. It cannot be hit by one team alone, which is precisely why nobody wants to own it and precisely why it is the only number that predicts revenue.

What to count instead

Count held, qualified meetings. Define qualified in writing, before the program starts: the role, the company type, and a stated need, confirmed in advance and delivered with a brief. A meeting that no shows does not count. A meeting with the wrong person does not count. That definition goes in the agreement beside the monthly number, and ours is public.

Then make one team accountable for it end to end. Not marketing for the lead and sales for the close, with a scored handoff in between, but one boundary that owns the site, the content, the ads, the outreach, and the follow up through to the held conversation. Inside that boundary the MQL has no job. Nobody needs a receipt when the same people are accountable for the outcome.

This is the operating logic behind every Kinetic engagement we run: a monthly meeting number in writing, a definition of a meeting that sales has agreed to before month one, and no lead scoring model anywhere in the system. Meetings held and pipeline created are the report. Opens, clicks, and scores are not.

The limit

At very high inbound volume, a scoring model is a legitimate operational tool and this argument is only about what gets reported, not what gets built. In product led businesses where the product itself qualifies the buyer, the meeting is not the right unit either, and the number in the middle is activation. Everywhere else in B2B, and especially in any company where a salesperson has to take a call for revenue to happen, the MQL is a fiction both teams agreed to. The ten question audit asks whether you have a written meeting definition. Most companies do not. Start there.