The MQL crushed four different questions into one number built for 2006. Here is why it fails, and what replaces it.
The MQL, the marketing-qualified lead, was the standard way marketing told sales a lead was ready. It was introduced with the SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall in 2006 and was a good idea for its moment.
It collapsed four different questions, fit (should we sell to them?), relevance (are we talking to the right person?), engagement (have they touched our marketing?) and buying readiness (is something happening now?), into one number, and handed them all to sales the same way. Its deepest error was treating brand awareness and buying readiness as the same thing.
Built for 2006 constraints, thin data, slow enrichment, no account-level signals, the MQL crushed those four realities flat. One number lies, and reps learn to ignore liars: marketing ships qualified leads, sales rejects them correctly, and RevOps gets blamed for the model.
Stop using a single score the moment your team argues about lead quality, or when sales ignores marketing's queue. That argument is the symptom the MQL was built to cause.
An account reads three guides but will never buy (aware, not ready). Another is in-market but has never heard of you (ready, not aware). The MQL gives both a number like 87 and treats them identically. Both are mislabeled.
The replacement is the Demand Compass: split the one number into two axes, Brand Awareness and Readiness to Buy, and run one play per quadrant. See the full comparison in MQL vs the Demand Compass.
From The Demand Compass: The Signal-Based GTM Framework for B2B Marketing Leaders in Complex Sales, by David Moreira and Marcos Stubrin (automate rev.ops.).
ISBN 979-8-9969092-1-6 (paperback). Get the book →