Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) have become a contentious metric in the realm of customer engagement and sales readiness. Originally established to distinguish between marketing and sales activities in a digital context, MQLs are now perceived as misleading. The metric’s creation was driven by a need for quantifiable data on customer readiness, a necessity that arose due to the increasing complexity of digital interactions. However, elevated expectations surrounding MQLs have rendered them problematic, creating friction between marketing and sales teams, often resulting in a disconnect that undermines efficiency and effectiveness in lead generation and conversion processes.
Executives crave an easy, unequivocal measurement of a customer's readiness to buy. But this metric is worse than fiction; it's disinformation.
The MQL was born a couple of decades ago when sales management realized customers increasingly use digital media to make buying decisions.
The MQL became the marker defining the edge where marketing supposedly stopped its work and threw (hopefully) qualified leads over the silo wall.
Consultants invented a linear, staged process that bridged the divide while maintaining traditional organizational power centers.
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