The Unspoken and Utterly Destructive Power of MQLs

In the B2B marketing world, Marketing Qualified Leads are blood sport. Sales teams loathe them, marketers obsess about them, and operations teams do their best to survive them. How did the MQL ever come to be at the center of the great divide that separates B2B sales and marketing??The dysfunctional story of the MQL is one I have seen play out many times with many clients over the years as a consultant at Digital Pi.?MQLs star in this story worth telling because they reveal some important truths about B2B sales and marketing we all need to hear.?

First, what is an MQL? If you ask a bunch of B2B sales and marketing professionals you’re likely to get a lot of different answers from “a waste of a time” to “our best leads.” ?Here is a simple, practical definition of MQLs I use with clients to try and get everyone on the same page:

A prospect or customer is declared marketing qualified when technology determines he/she fits a definition of buyer-readiness to engage in a sales conversation.

There is a lot in that straight-forward definition to unpack:

• Prospect or customer. Either can be MQLs. They may require different definitions for what constitutes buyer-readiness, but if your customers can renew or buy more – wouldn’t you want to know when a customer is exhibiting buying signals?
• Technology determined. ?Most B2B companies think of MQLs as machine-driven, meaning one or more rules-based technologies such as Marketo are programmed to recognize the moment when a person is buyer-ready. I’m intentionally excluding outbound cold prospecting to lists here, focusing only on technology that sees, monitors, and responds to buyer intent signals.
• Fits a definition of buyer-readiness. These are the technology tools and rules dialed to tell you when someone is ready to engage in a sales conversation.?How well an MQL definition accurately declares a person is ready to engage in a sales conversation is measured by how many go on to buy something.
• Engage in a sales conversation. A sales conversation means the MQL might be open to a back-and-forth dialog with a sales person via email or phone to decide on whether to buy.

The trouble with MQLs is rooted in mismatched or undefined expectations.?MQLs are intended to be a mechanism that minimizes the time to get back to the potential buyers most likely to engage in a sales conversation. The quicker you follow-up, the greater the chances they’ll engage. MQLs are supposed to bring efficiencies to follow-up by helping sort the wheat from the chaff when it comes to deciding who to reach out to.

That all sounds pretty good in theory, and it would be if it worked that way in the real world. The road to MQL-hell is paved with good intentions, but good intentions won’t save you when the flames of discontent are scorching your tail.?

Welcome to MQL-heaven

Before I take you down into the bowels of MQL-hell, it’s useful to consider what MQL-heaven would be like.?I say “would be” because there is no such state of MQL bliss, nor has there ever been. If there were an MQL-heaven, your marketing team would always produce exactly the right number of MQLs required to achieve its revenue target.?Imagine you had MQLs so dialed, so predictable that sales could place an MQL order with marketing before a fiscal period begins for how many MQLs it needs to hit a revenue target at the end of the period.

In MQL-heaven marketing is the hero, able to manufacture MQLs on demand. In MQL-heaven MQLs cost nothing to produce, and they always turn into revenue. Buyers are eternally grateful that your sales team had the good sense to call them (“Thank God you saw my download a few minutes ago!”) and marketing gets all the credit for generating revenue. In MQL-heaven, MQLs are the equivalent of signed purchase orders.

The Decent into MQL-hell

That description of MQL-heaven??Conceptually, it’s not that far-removed from how some people think about MQLs at B2B companies.?But the reality is quite different.?MQL-hell is a place where politics, power, friction, and waste can cause damage that’s almost impossible to undo.

My experience working with clients in MQL-hell has taught me much about what makes MQL-hell so hellish. Here are the top twenty signs your company is probably burning in MQL-hell. Count how many sound familiar to you at your company:

1. Marketing is on the hook to “create pipeline” – everyone thinks MQLs equate to pipeline generation.
2. Sales tells everyone your MQLs suck, or there aren’t enough of them.
3. The average age of an MQL waiting to be followed up is more than a few days (months is really not good).
4. Marketing and sales never objectively analyze or discuss MQLs together to improve them.
5. Sales has their MQL reports – marketing has theirs (guess which version management uses).
6. Systems report that the majority of MQLs are being actioned by Business Development Reps (BDRs) – but there is no possible way your BDRs could be working that many MQLs.
7. Management wants to benchmark your MQL performance against “industry standards.”
8. Management wants you to calculate how many MQLs it will take to hit a pipeline or revenue goal.
9. Everyone keeps asking you how MQLs work.
10. Nobody asks you how MQLs work.
11. Your demand-gen team is compensated based on volume or conversion of MQLs – so you game the system to make your numbers.
12. Everyone believes one MQL = one opportunity.
13. You are forced to implement an automated process to change MQLs back to a non-MQL status after they sit un-actioned for too long.
14. People want to know the MQL source.?Some MQLs may have a source (contact sales forms), others may be the result of multiple marketing touch points.
15. You’re told to undo some number of MQLs (make it as though they never happened) because someone said they shouldn’t count.
16. You have a manual method to declare anyone an MQL just because someone feels they should be MQLs.
17. BDRs send all your MQLs back to marketing nurture in bulk as soon as they get them.
18. There are no BDRs, so MQLs go straight to account reps.
19. Sales tells you what “kind” of MQLs they will accept.
20. One “bad” MQL gets rejected and subsequently becomes the single most referenced punchline to denigrate the entire concept of MQLs (and the systems/people responsible for them).

If you counted even a few of those occurring at your company, you're probably feeling the heat of MQL dysfunction. That last one happens more than you might think. It doesn’t matter if you crank out a slew of quality MQLs, one “bad” MQL can be the singular event that sparks an ongoing negative narrative about marketing.

If MQLs are so maligned that they cause more harm than good, you may want to pull out a blank page and rethink/redefine MQLs for your business.

I am not exaggerating when I say MQLs have that kind of power to wreak havoc in B2B companies. It requires a lot of hard work and careful planning to remake MQLs once they’ve got a bad reputation. And if you succeed, you’ll need to stay vigilant to keep from being pulled back down to MQL-hell. Here are a few tips to help you get out of MQL-hell, and stay out:

• Have a clear definition for MQLs that everyone understands and buys into. Make sure it sticks all the time.
• Regularly meet to discuss MQLs with the people slated to follow-up on them.?Pull a few MQLs to analyze together every week, try to learn from them. For each MQL ask: yes or no – should we contact them? If the answer is no, decide if you should adjust your MQL rules. Go the extra mile: ask if you can watch and learn how they go at it everyday. Gaining insight into how they spend their valuable time can tell you a lot about MQLs and your marketing.
• Test your MQL processes on a regular basis. Follow a test plan that includes ensuring everyone touched by the MQL process is on board. Cover all the points of potential failure, and close the loop to address whatever needs adjusting after each test. One of the big benefits from doing this is it lets people know that you recognize things can break that disrupt MQLs – notifications, lead routing, outlier use-cases and more.?By staying on top of it, you reduce or eliminate the possibility something breaks that silently festers and creates bad blood.
• If MQLs are so maligned that they cause more harm than good, you may want to pull out a blank page and rethink/redefine MQLs for your business. You might even consider shelving them for a while.
• All MQLs are not created equal. Depending how your systems declare an MQL, you may want to have different processes according to what makes them an MQL. Consider the difference between someone who fills out a form requesting to be contacted by sales compared with someone who downloaded a white paper and visited your website ten days later.?The former asked to be contacted, the latter did not. The lead management process for each should be matched to the use-case.?You probably want to track and count these separately too. The idea of building processes on MQL types is worth considering, as long as you don’t create complexity that undermines the benefit.

The Bottom Line

Keep this top of mind: there’s a lot more to marketing than creating MQLs. B2B marketing performs at its peak when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Be sure to talk about marketing with stakeholders in terms that cover all the tactics and strategies that bring in new names and engage your audiences. Talking about marketing performance in the aggregate is all well and good, but the power to persuade comes from getting specific about a campaign or two.?Communicate what you learned and how you will put that learning to work from campaigns that performed well and not-so-well.

Rest assured every B2B company on the planet experiences some level of MQL pain.

Last word on this: you're not alone. Rest assured every B2B company on the planet experiences some level of MQL pain. If they're not feeling some MQL pain, it's because they're either too busy solving other problems, or the experience has made them numb to the unspoken and utterly destructive power of MQLs.

If someone you know is struggling with MQL dysfunction, please share this article with them and let them know they're not alone!

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Tom Grubb is Chief Strategy Officer for?Digital Pi, a leading full-service marketing technology consultancy joined with?Merkle B2B?helping companies get the most value from their investment in marketing technology. Tom has over 20 years of marketing executive leadership including VP Product Marketing at Marketo. He has held marketing leadership positions at start-ups, mid-size and enterprise companies including Intuit, CA Technologies, ThreatMetrix (acquired by RELX), and co-founder of Bluecurve (acquired by Red Hat).?