The MQL-Industrial Complex has a stranglehold on modern B2B marketing and sales. It shackles marketers to obsolete goals and metrics that waste revenue team resources, alienate buyers, and stifle innovation.
Its consequences are dire:
- Entire organizations run on false assumptions about revenue generation.
- More effective strategies are smothered under legacy systems and metrics.
- Marketing teams waste millions on tactics that drive MQLs but not revenue. At the same time, marketing teams reduce focus on tactics that drive revenue because their results display poorly in MQL oriented marketing reporting.
- Marketers are unfairly blamed for poor performance, undermining their budgets, roles, and reputations.
- Sellers burn countless hours chasing perpetually curious non-buyers.
- Sales and marketing diverge into silos, each blaming the other for not providing enough MQLs or not closing the MQLs we give you, leading to a toxic culture.
- Customer relationships suffer from aggressive follow-up on casual content downloads.
- CMO tenures shrink as they fail to deliver meaningful business impact.
This must end.
The Path Forward
- Building genuine relationships with good-fit accounts before they’re in-market
- Understanding and engaging entire buying groups, not just individual “leads”, not just form-fills
- Creating experiences and content so valuable people would pay for it
- Measuring marketing’s impact on pipeline and revenue, not form-fills
- Measuring marketing’s impact across, not mainly within, quarters
- Aligning marketing and sales around shared revenue goals, not lead-based attribution
To express your support for the Anti-MQL Coalition, please copy and paste the manifesto into a posting for your LinkedIn Feed. Use #MQLIndustrialComplex in your post.
Founders:
The Vanguard:
John Common, Kathy Macchi, Mark Stouse , Kfir Pravda , Tim Hillison , Matt Heinz , Andrew Haussegger , Koen De Witte , Lisa Cole , Alan Hale , Evan Liang , Jay Famico, PMP , Charlie de Thibault , Michelle Killebrew , Achim Klor
