The death of MQLs: What sales leaders are saying

Sales leaders are moving on from MQLs. Here’s why volume-based lead metrics fail, what’s replacing them, and how companies like Slack and Zoom are proving the model obsolete.

“We need better leads.”

In our latest survey, 21% of sales leaders repeated the same frustration: ‘We need better leads’. Not more leads, but better leads.

The deeper truth of this pain is that the Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), once the staple handoff metric between marketing and sales, no longer works in today’s market. Analysts like Forrester now label MQLs a vanity metric: a number that looks good on dashboards but fails to predict revenue.

So if MQLs aren’t converting to sales, what is?

1. Challenging the traditional MQL model

The MQL was designed in the early 2000s, when form fills and gated PDFs were the best signals available. In that era, even a webinar registration seemed like proof of interest. But the SaaS market has changed. With free trials and freemium models, the product itself is now the best signal of intent.

MQLs no longer measure intent, they measure curiosity. That’s why conversion rates are so dismal: fewer than 1% of MQLs ever become customers, and only 13 of every 100 handed to Sales advance to SQLs. Sales leaders feel the gap immediately, which is why trust in MQL-driven marketing output continues to breakdown.

2. Why volume-based thinking is failing

The deeper issue isn’t just the MQL itself, but the volume-first mindset it has ingrained across go-to-market teams. Marketing is measured on MQL quotas whereas Sales is measured on closed revenue. That misalignment fuels what many leaders now call the “feedback loop of doom”:

1. Marketing celebrates hitting MQL targets.
2. SDRs burn cycles chasing low-intent leads.
3. AEs waste meetings with prospects who aren’t ready to buy.
4. Customer Success inherits poor-fit clients who churn early.
5. To compensate, Marketing pushes for even more MQL volume.

A lead volume problem is not having enough names in the funnel. A lead quality problem is when the names you do have rarely convert. MQLs have proven to be the latter.

3. New ways to measure and qualify leads

The answer isn’t to eliminate the idea of qualification, it’s to evolve it into a multi-signal, revenue-centric model. Leading SaaS companies are already doing this by blending:

• PQLs (Product-Qualified Leads): Users who’ve experienced value inside the product, e.g., a free trial team hitting a key usage milestone.
• MQAs (Marketing-Qualified Accounts): Account-level qualification that looks at engagement across the buying committee, not just one individual. (See our blog on multi-threading)
• Intent Data: First-party signals like pricing page visits and chatbot engagement, combined with third-party research activity captured across review sites and industry publications.

Together, these signals form a qualification stack that predicts revenue more accurately, shortens sales cycles, and aligns Marketing and Sales around the same definition of quality.

4. Who’s moving beyond MQLs?

The fastest-growing SaaS companies prove this shift isn’t theoretical, it’s happening now.

• Slack put a heavy focus on PQLs, using the “2,000 messages sent” milestone as a precise conversion predictor. Teams that crossed it almost always upgraded, making this usage metric far more reliable than any webinar sign-up.
• Zoom's strategy famously bypassed MQLs by leveraging its product as the main engine for growth. Instead of tracking marketing content downloads, the company's sales team focused on strong product adoption signals from the free tier, creating Product Qualified Leads (PQLs)

These examples show that abandoning MQLs isn’t risky, it’s the proven playbook of category leaders.

What sales leaders can do this week

Moving beyond MQLs doesn’t require a total system rebuild. Here are five steps any sales leader can take immediately:

1. Redefine “quality” together. Agree on your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and disqualifiers with Marketing. Document them.
2. Adopt multi-signal scoring. Layer ICP fit, engagement, and intent. Use negative scoring and time decay to keep your funnel clean.
3. Use frameworks as guides. Apply BANT, MEDDIC, or CHAMP after intent is proven, to deepen conversations. Check out this page to see how Hive Perform automatically compares your actions against proven frameworks.
4. Close the loop. Align Sales, Marketing, and CS (or even consider creating a cross-functional ‘GTM function’) with shared KPIs tied to pipeline and revenue, not activity volume.
   
   

Final word: From vanity to revenue alignment

Using MQLs isn't just outdated, it’s misleading. It rewards activity over outcomes, volume over value, and silos over alignment. No wonder both sales leaders and analysts agree: it’s time to move on.

But this isn’t the end of qualification. It’s the start of something better: a revenue-centric model built on signals that reflect how buyers actually buy. The companies that have made this shift, such as Slack and Zoom, are already outpacing their peers.

Your sales leaders are right. You don’t need more leads. You need better leads. And that starts with leaving the MQL behind.

Of course, even the best-qualified leads don’t guarantee revenue unless they’re managed effectively through to close. That’s where many organizations hit their next bottleneck: fragmented sales tech stacks that create blind spots after a lead becomes an SQL.

Forward-looking CROs are addressing this by turning to Sales Operating Systems (SOS). By connecting the dots from SQL to close, they ensure quality leads translate into predictable revenue.

👉 Read more about this here: From sales tech chaos to clarity: Why CROs are betting on Sales Operating Systems