Beyond the Vanity Metrics

This week’s newsletter is a deep dive into one of our episodes from the GTM Hot Takes series, "No More MQLs". We explored why the most common metric in marketing history might actually be the very thing preventing your business from scaling.

We sat down with three industry leaders to challenge one of the most ingrained metrics in B2B marketing Tiffany Gonzalez, GTM Expert and Investor, Adam Jay, Co-Founder and CEO of Revenue Reimagined and Kristen Habacht, CEO of Elly. Together, they pulled back the curtain on the "Lead Generation Industrial Complex."

The Core Conflict: Curiosity vs. Intent

The traditional Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) model is built on a fundamental misunderstanding of human behavior: the idea that engagement equals intent. Engagement like eBook downloads or webinar attendance may reflect interest, but it rarely translates into a readiness to buy (Tiffany Gonzalez).

An MQL is ultimately whatever a specific company decides to make it, and definitions vary wildly across the industry (Kristen Habacht).

The problem is that these actions often signal nothing more than curiosity. A person may want to learn about a topic without having any immediate plan to buy a solution. When marketing teams are incentivized solely on the volume of these "leads," they are forced to lower the scoring criteria to keep the numbers green. They celebrate hitting a target of 500 MQLs, but because those leads lack real buying intent, the sales team finds them useless. This creates a "vanity metric" trap where marketing looks successful on paper while the revenue needle refuses to move. (Adam Jay)

The Modern Reality of the Buying Committee

The B2B buying process has moved far beyond the individual. High-growth companies are realizing that selling to a single person is a relic of the past. Today, decisions are made by buying groups consisting of 5 to 10 stakeholders (Adam Jay). This committee often includes:

→Budget Owners: Concerned with ROI and bottom-line impact.
→Technical Evaluators: Focused on implementation and security.
→Day-to-Day Users: Looking for ease of use and efficiency.
→Procurement and Legal: Focused on risk and contract compliance.

Tracking a single MQL from one person misses the context of the entire account. A person might download an eBook, but if three of their colleagues are simultaneously visiting the pricing page and checking security documentation, that is a high-intent account, not just an individual lead. The shift must move from individual tracking to account-based group dynamics (Tiffany Gonzalez).

The Evolution, not the death of the Metric

There is a strong argument that MQLs aren't strictly "dead," but they have definitely "grown up". The value is no longer in the label itself but in the transparency and alignment between departments. An MQL should never be defined by Marketing in a silo. It must be a shared definition agreed upon with Sales (Adam Jay).

If Sales doesn't trust the leads they are receiving, the system is broken. High-performing teams are evolving their scoring to focus on "Moments that Matter". These are specific, high-intent behaviors like visiting a pricing page four times or performing a specific action within a free trial (Product-Qualified Leads) that statistically correlate with a high conversion rate (Kristen Habacht).

The Danger of Cultural Unreadiness

One of the most significant warnings from the session was the danger of "reckless" changes. You cannot simply wake up and decide to stop tracking MQLs if your organization isn't culturally ready to replace them with something better (Tiffany Gonzalez).

Executives, especially those with finance or engineering backgrounds, will always want to see a clear correlation between a dollar spent and a result achieved. If you kill the MQL without a sophisticated replacement like integrated revenue metrics or buying group intent data then you leave a vacuum that leads to confusion and departmental finger-pointing. You must have the data infrastructure in place to stitch together the customer journey from first touch to revenue before you abandon the legacy system (Kristen Habacht).

Continuous Nurturing vs. The "Hand-off" Mentality

Finally, the "hand-off" itself is often where revenue goes to die. Many marketing teams treat an MQL as the end of their job; they "throw it over the fence" to Sales and stop caring. In reality, an MQL is just one point in a long, non-linear journey. Marketing must continue to nurture and support that lead through the entire sales cycle (Kristen Habacht).

If a deal is lost because of "bad timing," that lead shouldn't just be dumped into a generic email list; it should be returned to a specific nurture path based on why the deal stalled (Adam Jay).

Audit Your CRM "Lost" Codes

Open your CRM and look at the "Closed-Lost" reasons for the last 90 days. If "Ghosted" is your most frequent tag, it is a definitive sign that you are moving too fast. You are treating curiosity as intent and pushing your sales team to call people who simply aren't ready to buy.

Schedule a 30-minute meeting with your Sales and Marketing leads. Ask them to identify the top three behaviors (not just form fills) that occurred in your last five closed-won deals. Use those behaviors to rewrite your definition of a "qualified" account.