The Death of the MQL: Why CMOs Are Abandoning Lead Handoff Models
For years, marketing teams have operated under the assumption that generating qualified leads was their primary job. Fill the funnel, score the leads, hand them over to sales, and call it success. But this siloed approach has created what many organisations now recognise as a broken system, where marketing celebrates lead volume. At the same time, sales struggle to convert those “qualified” prospects into actual revenue.
The traditional MQL handoff model assumes a linear customer journey that no longer exists. Today’s buyers don’t follow neat, predictable paths through your marketing funnel. Instead, they jump between touchpoints, engage across multiple channels, and make decisions in ways that traditional lead scoring systems can’t capture or predict.
Why The Old Playbook Is Failing
The cracks in the MQL system become apparent when you examine how customer behaviour has evolved. This shift lowers barriers to entry for new companies and dramatically increases competition for established vendors. According to Gargent, 53% of audiences say it’s less important to choose a well-known brand today than it was three years ago. This means the relationship-building and brand recognition that once drove purchasing decisions have diminished in importance, while buyers focus more on finding solutions that precisely meet their specific needs.
A lead who downloads multiple whitepapers might just be doing competitive research, while a decision-maker who quietly visits your pricing page could be ready to make a purchase. The engagement-based scoring that powers most MQL systems simply can’t distinguish between casual interest and genuine buying intent.
The fragmented customer journey compounds this challenge. Marketing teams have historically employed broad “spray-and-pray” approaches to campaigns, but these tactics aren’t sufficient to attract and retain customers who are inundated with messages everywhere they look. Today’s customer touchpoints span many scattered channels online and offline, and customers jump back and forth between stages as they engage with a brand.
What Smart CMOs Are Doing Instead
Progressive marketing leaders are abandoning the MQL handoff model in favour of integrated approaches that align marketing and sales around shared revenue objectives. Instead of celebrating when leads hit arbitrary scoring thresholds, these organisations focus on metrics that directly correlate with business growth.
The shift starts with establishing joint KPIs that both marketing and sales teams share responsibility for achieving. These include demand generation volume, lead-to-customer conversion rates, customer lifetime value (CLV), and revenue attribution. When both teams are measured on the same outcomes, the traditional finger-pointing between departments disappears, replaced by genuine collaboration toward common goals.
Data sharing becomes critical in this new model. Rather than marketing hoarding engagement data and sales keeping customer conversations private, successful organisations create transparency across both functions. Marketing teams share digital customer behaviour data at the account and contact level, as well as webpage visits, campaign engagement, and content consumption patterns. Sales teams contribute insights from customer conversations, revealing pain points and preferences that don’t appear in digital engagement metrics.
This collaborative approach enables both teams to leverage insights toward shared goals like higher acquisition and retention rates. When sales understands which marketing campaigns a prospect has engaged with, they can tailor their approach accordingly. When marketing knows what objections sales is hearing repeatedly, they can create content that addresses those concerns proactively.
Building Revenue-Focused Systems
The technology infrastructure must evolve to support this new approach. Instead of isolated marketing automation platforms that optimise for lead scoring, revenue-focused organisations invest in integrated systems that provide unified customer views.
Marketing teams train sales counterparts to use intent data platforms for persona segmentation, enabling sales to leverage buying signals from website browsing behaviour and keyword searches for outbound campaigns and account-based marketing initiatives. This shared intelligence helps both teams focus their efforts on accounts showing genuine buying interest rather than chasing vanity metrics.
Personalisation becomes possible at scale when marketing and sales work from the same customer intelligence platform. Teams can leverage data-driven insights to understand target audiences on deeper levels, tailoring brand experiences to specific interests and preferences. This ensures messages resonate at the individual contact level rather than relying on broad, generic communications.
Making the Transition
The move away from MQL-driven marketing requires more than just changing metrics; it demands a cultural shift toward shared accountability for revenue outcomes. CMOs leading this transition start by implementing regular communication cadences between marketing and sales leaders, centred on customer understanding rather than lead handoff.
During these sessions, marketing teams share digital customer behaviour insights while sales teams contribute qualitative feedback from customer interactions. This exchange builds trust between functions while creating a more complete picture of customer preferences and buying patterns.
The ultimate goal is creating what industry experts call a “single, comprehensive view of the customer” that both marketing and sales teams can act upon. This shared intelligence enables coordinated campaigns where marketing reinforces sales conversations and sales provides feedback that improves marketing targeting.
The Competitive Advantage
Organisations making this transition now gain significant advantages over competitors still stuck in MQL-driven approaches. When marketing and sales teams work toward shared revenue goals, customer experience improves dramatically because prospects receive coordinated, relevant touchpoints instead of disconnected messages from different departments. This consistency builds trust and accelerates buying decisions, ultimately contributing to shorter sales cycles and higher conversion rates.
The death of the MQL isn’t the end of marketing measurement; it’s the evolution toward metrics that actually matter for business growth. The question isn’t whether this shift will happen, but whether you, as the marketing leader, will lead the change for your organisation or get left behind by competitors who embrace revenue-focused marketing approaches.
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