For about twenty years, the Marketing Qualified Lead was the Bible of B2B marketing. Every team tracked them, reported on them, fought over them. And for a while, they made sense.
But here's the uncomfortable truth: the MQL was built for a world that no longer exists.
Gartner puts the average buying committee at six to ten people today. Yet the entire MQL framework was designed around one person — someone who downloaded a whitepaper, got nurtured through a sequence, and eventually bought. That was never the full picture, and now it's barely even a piece of it.
So what happens when your team chases MQLs in a buying-committee world? Sales ends up with individual contacts and zero account context. That director who grabbed your ebook? Probably not the economic buyer. And the economic buyer? They never filled out a single form. The real signal — that an account is in active buying mode — drowns in individual lead scores that don't add up to anything.
This is why more companies are shifting to Marketing Qualified Accounts. The question stops being "is this lead qualified?" and becomes "is this account showing buying intent across multiple signals, from multiple people?"
The signals look different too — a spike in website visits from one company, three stakeholders from the same firm attending your webinar, repeated searches for category terms. None of these are MQLs in the traditional sense. But together, they mean something real.
Are MQLs completely dead? No. For high-velocity, lower ACV products with a single buyer, the MQL still works. But for considered B2B purchases above roughly $25K ACV, the framework is cracking.
The pushback from marketing teams is understandable. MQLs are clean — easy to count, easy to put in a board deck, easy to defend. Account-based measurement is messier. It forces sales and marketing to agree on what a "qualified account" even means, and that conversation has a way of surfacing years of unresolved tension between the two teams.
But maybe that's the point. The MQL was quietly covering for that misalignment. Remove it, and you're forced into the conversation that should have happened long ago: who sits on our buying committee, and how do we know when they're ready to move?
Uncomfortable question. Right question.