MQLs — So Yesterday
It is the year 2025, nearly 10 years after writing this blog , about why marketers, advertisers, Google, Amazon, and search got it so wrong. And still, STILL, our marketing and advertising engines are all but broken. In fact, I would say a lot of it has gotten worse as targeting isn’t any better and marketeers still don’t know what we customers really want.
In 2016, I also wrote that companies want sales — they don’t want leads. We are so focused on the wrong thing. We manipulate and cajole at the top of the funnel, mid-funnel, down the funnel, and we don’t help buyers buy and we don’t help sellers sell.
People want to buy what they need. Companies want to sell what they have. If we just focused on that simple thesis — especially in B2B where time is money and noise is an expensive distraction we’d think inside-out and do so much better. Imagine what marketing would look like if we found great matches for what we offer and imagine how great it would be if we helped buyers find real solutions.
It was refreshing last week to hear a tech-CMO refer to MQLs being so yesterday and MGB’s being so in. What’s an MGB you ask? A marketing generated booking. Whoa! Now we are talking. This CMO and her team are measured on what they do for the actual performance of the top line. They are not measured on MQLs.
We had a laugh over shared belief that anyone hired into marketing ideally does a 6-month stint in sales before taking the job. Nothing like a dose of reality on the front line to keep a marketer’s marketing real. And nothing better than an MGB to stoke the metrics of success. Let’s say goodbye to the MQL as a key metric. More isn’t more.