For decades, the Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) has been a staple KPI in B2B marketing. It promised to bridge the gap between marketing activity and revenue contribution—yet today, it’s one of the most misunderstood, misaligned, and misleading metrics in the modern B2B funnel.
Ask most CMOs privately, and they’ll tell you what many already suspect: the MQL was a well-intended idea that no longer serves its purpose. But walking away from it isn’t easy—especially when executive dashboards, attribution software, and legacy KPIs have been built around it.
So what now?
If MQLs are no longer useful, what should marketing teams focus on instead? In this article, we’ll explore why the MQL is broken, what the best B2B marketers are replacing it with, and how smarter measurement is helping restore trust with finance, sales, and the C-suite.
The Problem With MQLs
On paper, MQLs make sense. Marketing creates content, drives engagement, and passes along “qualified” leads to sales once someone hits a score threshold—downloads a whitepaper, opens an email, maybe fills out a form.
But in today’s buying environment, that logic collapses fast.
“If you over-index on MQLs, sales is going to be ticked. The only metrics that really matters is pipeline, because that’s what we’re all working toward.” – Johan Abadie, VP Demand Generation and Revenue Strategy, SalesIntel.io
The MQL suffers from three big flaws:
- It’s overly focused on individual activity, not account readiness.
- It reinforces the handoff myth—that marketing’s job ends when leads are passed to sales.
- It incentivizes quantity over quality, often leading to bloated top-of-funnel numbers that don’t move the needle.
In complex B2B sales cycles, where buying decisions are made by committees over months, tracking individual form-fills and scoring them is dangerously disconnected from actual business outcomes.
Why Finance and Sales Have Stopped Trusting It
Marketers aren’t the only ones questioning the MQL. CFOs and CROs are growing skeptical too—especially in tight planning cycles.
“”The biggest, the most important aspect for trust is having agreed-upon data. Without the data that everybody trusts and agrees to, you really can’t have success.” – Karen Henke, Founder, Nimble Press
In many companies, finance sees the MQL as a soft metric—easy to inflate, hard to tie to revenue, and often used to justify spend that lacks rigor. In other words, it’s not a trusted data point.
When budgets tighten, the MQL becomes a liability:
- It doesn’t reflect true buyer intent
- It doesn’t account for sales team follow-up bandwidth
- It can’t forecast revenue impact if the conversion rate is poor or variable
Which leads to the real problem: the MQL doesn’t help with planning. And in today’s environment, B2B leaders need planning tools more than they need attribution tools.
What Modern CMOs Are Doing Instead
Forward-looking marketing leaders are pivoting from MQLs to Pipeline. They’re shifting the conversation from “sourcing credit” to “total pipeline support.”
Here’s how:
1. Sharing Pipeline Ownership
The most progressive B2B companies no longer split the funnel into “marketing’s job” and “sales’ job.” They share a single pipeline target—and when gaps appear, they solve them together.
Rather than arguing over which team sourced the opportunity, they ask:
- “Where is the bottleneck?”
- “Do we need more leads—or better conversion from the ones we already have?”
- “Is the problem awareness, follow-up, or offer?”
This shared accountability is only possible when marketing is measured based on true impact—not individual lead handoffs.
And instead of relying on flawed attribution to assign credit, leading teams use media mix modeling and scenario simulation to understand how changes in budget drive long-term pipeline creation.
“The biggest win from our new planning model is trust. Our CFO doesn’t see marketing as the best budget to cut anymore. That’s the metric.” — Align BI customer
2. Using Early Intent Signals for Confidence
Sometimes pipeline lags—especially in long sales cycles. But that doesn’t mean marketing isn’t working.
Early indicators like:
- Branded search trends
- Target account engagement
- Share of Voice trends
…can give both marketing and sales confidence that momentum is building—even if deals haven’t landed yet. And they are better indication of future purchase than MQLs.
These signals don’t replace pipeline, but they help answer a crucial question:
“Are we on the right track?”
3. Planning Through Scenario Modeling
Instead of forecasting pipeline with static assumptions or attribution-based credit, top marketers are building simulation-driven plans:
- “What happens if we shift 20% of spend to paid social?”
- “If we slow hiring in sales, what marketing mix would make up for it?”
- “What’s the tradeoff between brand investment and short-term demand?”
These aren’t just hypotheticals—they’re simulations backed by real data science. And they create joint decision-making between marketing, sales, and finance.
A View From the Analysts
Gartner’s 2024 report, “Beyond MQLs: Lead the Shift to Outcome-Based Demand Gen Metrics,” makes this crystal clear:
“CMOs must move from pass/fail metrics like MQLs toward outcome-based metrics like pipeline contribution, average deal size, and buyer enablement progress. Marketing should be accountable for moving revenue outcomes, not just activity metrics.”
What to Do Next
You don’t have to scrap every dashboard tomorrow. But here’s where to start:
✅ Step 1: Set a Shared Pipeline Goal
Ditch the MQL count—and the sourcing debate. Give marketing and sales one number. If it’s missed, fix it together.
✅ Step 2: Track Confidence Indicators
Branded search, account activity, and early-stage interactions help keep teams aligned—even if pipeline lags for a quarter.
✅ Step 3: Plan With Scenarios
Use simulations to understand which budget decisions will most likely close the gap. Don’t just justify spend—optimize it.
How Align BI Can Help
At Align BI, we help B2B marketing leaders move beyond the MQL—not just philosophically, but operationally. Our Media Mix Modeling solution gives you a revenue planning engine built for modern B2B.
It shows how marketing and sales investments work together to drive pipeline—and helps you build confidence with the CFO and CRO. Because when you stop chasing leads and start modeling outcomes, you don’t just defend your budget—you grow it.
Final Thought
The MQL isn’t just outdated—it’s holding back your ability to plan, prioritize, and prove your value. B2B marketers deserve better metrics. The good news? Those metrics already exist—and you don’t have to wait for next year’s budget cycle to start using them.