The Marketing Metric That Misleads Founder-Led Companies

There is a marketing metric that almost every founder-led B2B company adopts within six months of hiring a head of marketing, and it is one of the few decisions I would now actively try to talk them out of. The MQL — the marketing-qualified lead — is a comfortable number to report, an easy number to forecast against, and an actively misleading number to manage.

The data on this is now hard to argue with. Cross-industry, B2B MQL-to-SQL conversion averages just 13 to 18 percent, and the MQL-to-SQL transition is reliably the steepest drop-off in the entire funnel. Eight out of ten “qualified” leads die at the first handoff. That is not a sales execution problem. It is a metric design problem. The thing being counted as qualified is not actually qualified in any meaningful sense.

Founders adopt MQL targets because the dashboard requires a number. They keep the metric because nobody senior has yet flagged that the number is teaching the team the wrong job.

What MQL actually counts

In most B2B companies, an MQL is some combination of: someone downloaded a gated asset, attended a webinar, hit a behavioral score threshold, filled in a contact form, or matched a firmographic profile. It is, almost by definition, a measure of marketing activity that touched a person — not a measure of buying intent.

That distinction matters because it is exactly the kind of metric that can be made to go up without the underlying business getting any healthier. If pipeline is soft, marketing can lower the score threshold and produce more MQLs. If a campaign isn’t producing real conversations, marketing can gate a popular asset and produce more MQLs. If the sales team complains the leads are weak, marketing can run a “MQL quality” project that mostly just moves the goalposts. None of these changes do anything for pipeline. All of them improve the MQL number.

This is the worst quality a metric can have: the team can move it without affecting the outcome it was supposed to predict. Once a metric can be hit without the underlying business moving, it stops being a measurement and becomes a piece of internal political furniture.

If your marketing team can hit its MQL target without sales hitting pipeline, the metric is not measuring marketing — it is hiding it.

— Jennifer Neenan

Why the metric persists anyway

If MQLs are this misleading, why has the industry kept them? Three reasons explain almost all of the persistence.

The first is historical. The original SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall, published in the early 2000s, was an extraordinary intellectual artifact for its time. It gave B2B teams the first credible language for tracking demand. The MQL was a stage in that model. Forrester (which acquired SiriusDecisions) substantially revised the waterfall in 2021 to an opportunity-centric, buying-group model — explicitly because the lead-centric version had stopped reflecting how B2B buying actually works. But most B2B companies are still operating on a vocabulary they inherited from the original model, two decades after it was published, and a half-decade after its own authors stopped recommending it.

The second is reporting convenience. MQLs are easy to count, easy to chart, and easy to present to a board. Opportunities, pipeline-influenced revenue, and buying-group engagement are messier numbers. They require judgment. They require a sales partnership. They require honesty about which deals are real. Boards reward the chart that goes up consistently, so the chart that goes up consistently is the one the team produces.

The third is that nobody wants to break the contract. The marketing team has been hired with an MQL target. Sales has been compensated against MQL volume. Operations has built a reporting infrastructure around MQLs. Changing the metric requires renegotiating those agreements simultaneously, which is uncomfortable. The discomfort keeps the metric alive even after everyone in the room privately admits it is misleading.

What founder-led companies should track instead

The metric design I recommend to most founder-led B2B companies is deliberately less elegant than the MQL waterfall. It is closer to the way an honest sales leader actually thinks about pipeline.

Pipeline-influenced conversations per quarter. Not MQLs. Not opportunities. Conversations — real, sales-recorded conversations with someone in the target segment, where the company’s marketing material was either the reason the meeting was booked or was actively cited in the conversation. This number is harder to inflate. It tracks an actual market behavior, not a form fill.

Source attribution to the conversation, not the lead. When the conversation happens, what specifically prompted it? An inbound landing page? A webinar? A founder LinkedIn post? A referral? An outbound sequence? The team should be able to answer this for every meaningful meeting, even if the answer is qualitative. Over a quarter, the pattern becomes obvious. The MQL number cannot tell you what is actually working. The conversation-source pattern can.

Sales-cycle behavior change. This is the metric that founders most often skip and most need. Is the average deal closing faster than it was last quarter? Are deals arriving with the pre-handled objections marketing has been working on? Are sales reps citing marketing material in deal reviews? These are leading indicators of whether marketing is making sales easier. None of them appear in a standard MQL dashboard.

One contestable demand metric. Something like net-new pipeline created from named-target accounts. Something the team has to defend the meaning of, that cannot be moved without producing the actual outcome. The number should be uncomfortable. If everyone in the room is satisfied with how easy the metric is to hit, the metric is probably the wrong one.

These four numbers are messier than the MQL chart. They are also significantly harder to fake. That is the point.

What changes when the metric changes

The biggest shift is not numerical. It is cultural. When a founder-led company moves away from MQLs as the marketing metric of record, the marketing team’s job description changes in a way that surprises everyone.

The team stops producing assets purely for gated lead generation. The webinar that exists to drive form-fills gets replaced by the webinar designed to be sent by sales reps to specific accounts. The downloadable guide that nobody reads after the form-fill gets replaced by a piece of content sales actually quotes in conversations. The content calendar shifts from “what will hit the MQL number” to “what will produce or accelerate a sales conversation.”

The sales team starts trusting marketing again, often within a quarter. The reason is mechanical: marketing is now optimizing against the same thing sales is optimizing against. The two functions stop having parallel weekly reporting and start having one shared pipeline conversation.

The founder gets a clearer picture of what is actually working. Instead of an MQL chart that has been quietly engineered to look good, the founder gets a list of conversations the company had this quarter, where they came from, and which ones produced deals. The picture is uncomfortable at first because it is less flattering. It is also dramatically more useful for making the next set of decisions.

Activity dashboards measure motion. Conversation dashboards measure traction. Founder-led companies need traction more than they need motion.

— Jennifer Neenan

The honest first step

The first move I recommend to founders who are stuck managing against an MQL number is small and almost embarrassingly tactical. Pull the last two quarters of MQL data. Now pull the last two quarters of closed-won deals. For each closed-won deal, find out what the first marketing touch actually was. In most companies, fewer than half of the closed-won deals can be cleanly traced back to a counted MQL.

That gap — between what was counted as qualified and what actually became revenue — is the case for changing the metric. It is also a quiet diagnostic of how much marketing work has been spent on the wrong target.

The fix is not to scrap the MQL overnight. It is to add the conversation-based metrics to the same dashboard, watch them for two quarters, and then have the harder conversation with the team about which one is actually predicting pipeline. By the end of that observation period, the answer is almost always obvious. The MQL number quietly gets retired, and the company moves to a measurement system that reflects how it actually grows.

The number on the dashboard is the company’s most-watched cultural signal. Founders should put a useful number there, not a comfortable one.