A demand generation director at a procurement technology provider presents MQLs to the board every month. The chart is up and the board is pleased. The director smiles too, while doubting it shows which accounts are moving towards a purchase.

Nobody questions it. Many senior marketers stopped believing in the MQL some time ago, yet it survives because the organisation depends on it. Finance funds and forecasts with it. Sales gets names, marketing a number it can defend and leadership a simple weekly signal.

Remove the MQL without replacing what each function relied on it for, and the business brings it back.

Lead metrics still suit fast, low-cost purchases. This argument concerns complex enterprise decisions.

The Lead Is a Settlement Between Departments

The procurement technology provider funds its marketing on cost per lead, and each department has built its work around that choice.

Finance divides the budget by cost per lead and applies past conversion rates to forecast revenue it can commit to in advance. Sales sees the lead as a handover of responsibility, where marketing’s work ends and its own begins. For marketing, lead volume is a number it can control, and controllable numbers are easy to defend. Leadership gets a figure that moves every week, something enterprise deals close too rarely to provide.

The settlement is most visible in attribution. Credit for sourcing a deal tends to shape next year’s budget, which means disputes over attribution are often budget negotiations in disguise. A lead settles that question cleanly, with a single form filled in by one person on a known date. A buying group spreads the credit across several people and channels over months. Forrester argues that marketing sourcing rests on arbitrary assumptions about who created a deal, and that by undermining alignment with sales, it puts the CMO at risk.

Four Leads Become One Opportunity

The strength of that settlement shows when a company tries to leave it. If the director acts on those doubts, the provider starts treating its priority accounts as buying groups.

In one account, the CPO, a category manager, the finance controller and the ERP owner all engage. The old model recorded four leads. The new one records one opportunity. Interest has not fallen, only the count.

Forrester notes that several leads usually contribute to a single opportunity, so grouping them cuts the volume handed to sales. Finance’s forecast runs on that volume. With fewer leads for the same spend, cost per lead rises and projected revenue falls, while the conversion rates the model relies on no longer describe the unit being counted. The shift looks like a collapse in pipeline, and results are slow to correct that impression. Research conducted by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for the LinkedIn B2B Institute estimates that 95% of potential buyers are out of the market at any given time, so much of marketing’s effect surfaces months after the budget is spent.

Sales loses the count it used to judge what marketing hands over, and marketing loses the number it showed the board, with nothing yet to replace it.

The Teams That Moved Changed the Agreement

Teams that do move on from the lead tend to replace what it provided before removing it.

Marketing keeps reporting MQLs to finance for a period while the new opportunity measures build a track record alongside them. That gives finance a history to compare, showing whether the new measure tracks real deals better.

Without the lead, sales and marketing lose their handover point, so they agree in writing what progress in an account looks like, sometimes drawing on Forrester’s B2B Revenue Waterfall, which tracks opportunities instead of leads. Both teams sign the definition and are measured on it together, and because both are counting the same thing, some of the heat goes out of attribution disputes.

Finally, marketing replaces the weekly lead count with a measure that runs on enterprise time. Each quarter, it reports to leadership how many priority accounts have advanced against the definition agreed with sales, and how much pipeline comes from accounts where several members of the buying group are engaged. The figure moves more slowly than a lead count, but sales has already signed up to it, and it tracks the purchase itself.

None of this guarantees the change holds. It depends on finance accepting some uncomfortable quarters, which is partly why only a minority of teams work this way.

Next month, the director will present the same slide to the same approving board, and it will stay there until leaders change the agreement that defines what marketing is accountable for.