Death of the MQL.
Individual lead scoring is blind to 13-person committees. Qualified Buying Groups convert 20–50% better.
The MQL was designed for a world where one person bought software. That world is gone. Scoring individuals in isolation discards the signal that actually matters: how much of the buying group is engaged, in what roles, on which themes.
Four symptoms we see, almost every time.
- 01
High MQL-to-SQL drop-off with no clear reason
- 02
Sales ignores marketing-sourced leads
- 03
No view of 'account temperature' across contacts
- 04
Routing is round-robin, not role-aware
Conversion lift moving from MQL to Qualified Buying Group (Forrester)
Of MQLs become closed-won revenue in most B2B orgs
Three moves — in this order, every time.
- 01
Group scoring
Score accounts on group coverage, role mix and signal density — not individual lead scores.
- 02
Role-aware routing
Route based on who is engaging and what role they play in the committee.
- 03
Shared definitions
Rewrite SLAs between marketing and sales around the QBG, not the MQL.
What this gap actually costs.
The MQL assumes a single buyer with a linear journey. Enterprise technology has neither. When a security architect downloads a technical brief and a procurement lead checks pricing in the same week, the meaningful signal is that an account has moved — not that two individuals crossed a score threshold separately.
Individual scoring also punishes the accounts most worth pursuing. Large committees spread engagement thinly across many people, so no single contact ever scores highly enough to trigger follow-up, and the best-fit accounts sit unworked while a single enthusiastic researcher gets chased.
The organisational cost is trust. Sales learns that marketing-sourced leads rarely convert, stops working them, and marketing's numbers stop meaning anything. Group-level qualification is as much a credibility fix as a conversion one.
The version that works.
- 01
A written Qualified Buying Group definition: which roles must be present, what depth of engagement counts, and over what window.
- 02
Scoring that weighs role mix and coverage rather than raw activity, so breadth across a committee outranks repeated visits from one person.
- 03
Role-aware routing, where an economic buyer's engagement reaches a different owner than a technical evaluator's.
- 04
A marketing-to-sales agreement written in group terms, with acceptance criteria both sides recognise as fair.
Four ways good teams get this wrong.
Volume targets on a broken unit
Committing to an MQL number guarantees the number will be met and the pipeline will not. The metric becomes the goal.
Activity as intent
Scoring email opens and page views measures curiosity, availability and newsletters. It does not measure buying.
Round-robin routing
Distributing leads evenly ignores the one thing that matters: who engaged and what role they play in the decision.
No shared definition
When marketing and sales use different words for a qualified opportunity, every handover becomes a negotiation instead of a process.
- 01
Measure MQL-to-closed-won end to end, then measure the same cohort at account level. The difference makes the case on its own.
- 02
Identify the role combinations present in your last 20 wins — that pattern becomes the first draft of the QBG definition.
- 03
Rebuild scoring and routing around coverage, then run the old and new models in parallel for a quarter.
- 01Qualified Buying Group definition and scoring model
- 02CRM/MAP rework for group-level signals
- 03New marketing-to-sales SLA
Sales gets fewer, better, group-validated handoffs — and marketing stops being measured on a metric that no longer correlates to revenue.
Book the diagnosticFrequently asked.
- Do we have to throw away lead scoring entirely?
- No. Individual signals still feed the model; they simply stop being the trigger. The trigger becomes group coverage, which those individual signals help establish.
- Will this reduce the number of leads sales receives?
- Usually yes, and that is the point. Volume falls, quality and acceptance rise, and the time sales spends on unqualified follow-up drops.
- What systems does this require?
- In most cases, the CRM and automation platform you already run. The work is in definitions, scoring logic and routing rules rather than new software.
- How do we handle accounts where only one person ever engages?
- They stay in nurture with a play designed to widen the committee, rather than being passed to sales as though they were a live opportunity.