MQLs in Modern Marketing: Where Do They Fit?

MQLs have lost their edge. Marketing teams often have to choose between quality and quantity, compromising both. But what if they didn’t have to?

A healthy pipeline means a consistent flow of quality leads. But businesses have been facing an acute lack.

In 2024, 17% of SDRs reported a critical lack of high-quality leads. This was their tipping point.

The reality is that only a handful of MQLs actually convert into opportunities, posing a puzzling challenge for marketing and sales. Most marketers believe the solution to this is adding more qualifiers to an already long and complex journey.

But it only ends up deterring the prospects, resulting in high drop-off rates.

To actively prevent this, modern marketing has taken a distinct step forward. Marketers have observed that the disjuncture could be present within their own knowledge – do they entirely gauge who MQLs are and their significance?

Accurately identifying MQLs is paramount, but its only one portion of the process. Nurturing these leads and handing them off to sales is another story. This is where the drawbacks kick in.

The kernel of this problem is that every MQL is unique – they have distinct pain points and come from multiple channels. So, a generic approach isn’t the way to nurture them anymore.

Rather than opting for only a single perspective, marketers must rethink.

They must take a multidimensional approach— a broadened view to get a clear picture of what’s happening, and an incisive perspective empowering them to act on it.

The same logic applies to identifying and nurturing MQLs.

So, to understand where marketing and sales are facing an objection, we undertake a simple approach by first defining an MQL.

What is a Marketing Qualified Lead?

According to Gartner’s glossary, an MQL:

“A marketing-qualified lead (MQL) is a potential customer that has been reviewed by the marketing team and satisfies the criteria necessary to be passed along to the sales team.”

Gartner’s definition of an MQL might be correct, but it actually spotlights a complexity.

Honestly, there’s a critical lack of a single and consistent definition of MQL. Whether it’s organization-wide or cross-departmental, the meaning continues to vary.

Marketing and sales lack consensus on a singular definition of an MQL. Where does this confusion stem from?

In B2B, marketers hold a sweeping view of who MQLs are. They often misconstrue the underlying logic or have limited knowledge. This is why much of the content we come across states that MQLs are dead.

Whether it’s true is another concern, but the confusion begins with the definition.

Most marketers believe leads who download a whitepaper after filling out a form are MQLs. It’s a limited viewpoint. Half of these don’t even convert into opportunities.

In the case of modern marketing, MQLs have come to embody something else.

Because today, savvy marketers have to remain focused and spearhead. When buyer patterns are minutely evolving in the blink of an eye, the perspective has to shift, too.

Prospects who download your whitepapers and case studies but never revert – are they really interested? These so-called prospects might never even engage with your brand again. But if your marketing thinks of them as such, they hand off the account to sales.

And what exactly do these ‘MQLs’ turn out to be? False positives.

Think about this: a market researcher is browsing through your assets and downloading your whitepaper. They do so to gather research material, not because they might be prospective buyers. This lead may never contact or engage with your assets again.

So, is it right to consider mere window shoppers as MQLs?

For your SDRs, this means a total waste of time and resources. They wouldn’t engage and communicate with ill-fitting leads who don’t add any value to your pipeline.

The underlying logic behind these leads not being considered marketing-qualified leads is that they lack one crucial component- intent.

Multiple Signals and Propensity to Buy: Why Is Qualifying Leads Crucial?

Make no errors- intent isn’t synonymous with early interest. But most marketers get trapped in this confusion.

They fail to spotlight the propensity to buy, which doesn’t just mean downloading a whitepaper. Propensity could work as a measuring metric: how inclined is the lead to make a purchase? This is crucial to pick out leads that actually matter.

However, there’s another error that B2B marketers often make.

Each understands that B2B buying is complex, long, and intricate. 80% of the time, these decisions are made by committees of at least three people rather than by an individual. The more significant a deal, the larger the group involved.

Every buying group has individual decision-makers with different levels of intent and roles. But most lead qualifying criteria only consider the buyer as an individual, not a group. And this is why most marketers believe MQLs to be a waste of time for sales.

Modern marketers must understand that these buying decisions are made by individuals with distinct personas and interests. Their outdatedness is why sales face a severe lack of high-quality leads.

Most scoring models are based on the profile and behavior of a single individual. It’s true that even the engagement signals of one active profile can indicate interest. But it doesn’t necessarily point towards a true propensity to buy.

If, in B2B, scoring is based on a single individual, does it really carry any significance? Not much.

In the multi-formatted and multi-channel marketing landscape, purchase intent is a single resource in estimating what buyers want. But it’s not mere whitepaper downloads. Customer decision-making is highly complex, and most have made up their minds even before they talk to an SDR.

There’s so much bias and nuance involved in decision-making.

Every research and data gathered amid other explicit factors skew the buyer’s perception. Think about this: there’s bias present in data gathering as well. Most decision-makers are so self-aware that they are inclined towards data that supports existing narratives.

Thus, marketers’ goal should be to make them deliberate and question their biases. Even though they’re looking for easy solutions to their pain points, potential buyers always present with one question: how is your brand different from your competitors?

Instead of feeding into their notions, brand content should offer immersive customer experiences that study their behavior and fascinate them.

This is why multiple touchpoint analyses have become such a vital segue to gauge buying intent. Intent can only be fully gauged when marketing understands where the prospect is in their journey. Accordingly, campaigns can take two routes: either challenge or confirm their perception.

This approach filters the leads based on quality rather than quantity.

If the 50 MQL are receptive to your brand’s offerings as opposed to the 100 who don’t even know who you are- what’s the bottom line? The latter holds no value for sales.

On the flip side, with the 50 who are sales-ready, SDRs save time, and marketing knows which touchpoints to monitor better than others.

How Can We Approach Creating a Comprehensive Definition for MQLs?

At the heart of defining an MQL lies ‘active’ engagement signals. Downloading a whitepaper is underscored as engagement, but does it truly reflect purchasing intent?

Maybe, and maybe not.

It all depends on how proactive the lead is, not just early interest or initial intrigue. MQLs must maintain a balance of or remain at the crossroads of active marketing endeavors and a lead’s continuous engagement.

Marketing has one motto: no single rule that applies to all, and it’s experimental. So, who’s to say a single definition of an MQL will actually prove substantial? But given its vitality, marketing and sales must construct one that fits both perspectives.

First, talk to sales. Understand what MQLs are and aren’t from an SDR’s viewpoint. These particular components should flow fluidly between sales and marketing to create consistent momentum in the funnel.

A shared definition doesn’t mean marketing will qualify only those types of leads. But it’s better to get as close as possible to what SDRs think an SQL is and which leads are simple to contact and qualify.

Second, leverage buyer personas to begin. Brands want to curate strategies and content that resonates with their audience. But what if they don’t know who their buyers are? Buyer personas can help marketers as much as they do sales.

From demographic to behavioral data, the criteria to outline these personas can be used in an MQL’s definition. Even if it’s not a definition that’s set in stone, this will at least pinpoint the most basic requirements in labeling a lead as an MQL.

Third, fine-tune lead scoring. As exemplified before, there should be a bridge between the propensity to buy and sales readiness. Moreover, qualifying crucially depends on engagement signals, whether it’s an individual or a buying committee.

Which intent signals actually qualify, i.e., help explicate MQLs? This is why behavioral data, firmographics, and demographics – every bit of data point (from each channel) holds significance initially. It must account for individuals within a buying group, too.

And finally, it’s up to marketing and sales to decide which scoring criteria actually matter.

As every B2B marketer asserts, the priority is generating and qualifying promising and relevant leads. And they all have their eyes set on intent-driven strategies, especially in modern marketing, where engagement signals are too intertwined.

At the crossroads, marketers need to understand the intricacies that differentiate these leads. Again, this is where intent plays an intrinsic role. It’s fundamental to define MQLs, but also vital to highlight what sets them apart from SQLs.

MQLs aren’t SQLs. Why is it necessary to spotlight this?

An SQL is a potential customer ready to talk to sales with a high intention to make a purchase. Knowing how it inherently differs from MQLs can help us understand the nurturing processes they require.

The nurturing process for MQLs has to be distinct from that of SQLs. The latter is already ready to make a purchase, whereas MQLs aren’t. If the right nurturing isn’t executed, it can deter and make the leads drop off.

Because as much as customers wish for personalized content, irrelevant ones can irk them. How will content on “awareness” move an SQL already informed about the brand? It should fit where they are in their buyer journey.

While convincing a lead is taxing, any minute hindrance can undo the hard work. MQLs are still researching and browsing, so they require a lot of persuasion. This could easily be curiosity, not a real purchase intent.

By mapping who MQLs really are, marketing can curate the right nurturing tactics. And when they hand off these leads to sales, the latter doesn’t waste its time on those who have no purchasing intentions. SDRs should spend more time selling to the right people, those that marketing has gleaned as MQLs.

Accurately Defining MQLs and Qualifying Leads Go Hand-In-Hand.

It saves time and resources, increasing the likelihood of a purchase.

Your teams know who is buying, their pain points, and how they can tackle low-quality leads. Overall, understanding and categorizing the leads accurately illustrates how ready the lead is for conversion.

It’s a win-win situation for marketing and sales. Only through this synergy can SDRs have meaningful conversations with the right leads who illustrate maximum conversion potential. Thus, to encourage MQLs down the funnel, it’s necessary to monitor and regulate ‘how’ because they won’t move an inch unless the brand delivers on its promises.

This active deliberation is why so much focus is attributed to quality rather than quantity.

For MQLs to turn into SQLs, active engagement is paramount.

Digitization has highlighted the nuances of customer desires and decision-making. Buyers are continuously making decisions on their own, but when it comes to B2B buying, the complications remain.

Impulsive buying is not for the B2B landscape, but active decision-making is.

However, it still doesn’t make the buying process any straightforward.

The market is evolving and adapting at an alarming rate. While marketing and sales continue to catch up, they still hit specific snags. Their one significant challenge is understanding the prospect inside-out.

From emerging trends to shifting customer preferences, any factor can influence how a ‘lead’ is defined and interacted with. So, it’s up to brands to curate an agile criterion that their MQL can easily fit into.

MQLs will be the mainstay of future marketing conversations for a while. Whether they are dead or need reshaping is the primary question.

But the truth is that as the business scales, its own internal definition of an MQL might necessitate modifications. So, it boils down to a much-needed cross-departmental synergy, positioning your organization to observe every atom of the buyer’s journey

Targeted Lead Generation: Quality Over Quantity

Lead Generation can be stressful work. As with everything in marketing, lead gen has to yield results, or it becomes hard to justify the costs behind it.

The race to deliver leads is real and intense. And that’s why marketing teams chase numbers— it gives them something concrete to hold on to. But this method has a chunk in its armor—the amount of leads marketing teams hand-off to sales has dipped in quality.

Most are irrelevant, and the others don’t want to be contacted.

While marketing teams celebrate the achievements of numbers, they fail to create any real impact.

Marketing teams need to broaden their horizons and hone in on what actually matters- targeted leads.

What Are Targeted Leads?

If you have heard about segmentation, you know the essence of targeted lead generation. Essentially, it means discovering high-value leads over a broad and general market.

These are leads who want what you’re selling or something analogous to it. And then, you go a step further and divide these leads based on behavior, geography, and other factors vital to your campaign and segment them.

You would then assign scores to these leads, and the leads with the highest score would be your target leads. A core component of ABM’s success is to find these leads.

Why Targeted Leads Matter in B2B

Personalization and ABM have become the norm— many organizations, if not most, use ABM to capture high-value accounts by delivering them personalized messages.

This is the crux of targeted leads. They help you understand which leads matter and what campaign you should run on them. In a lot of cases, targeted lead generation will help you find individuals belonging to the same account.

That is why it is a goldmine for marketers.

Targeted leads change campaigns from a disjointed one to one of precision.

How to Identify and Attract Targeted Leads

But, the level of precision will be based on the quality of the leads, and that is the modern challenge, one that has been prevalent since the pandemic. Any organization that can provide quality over quantity will be the last one standing.

The rest will either fall under obscurity or end up failing. With the latter being the most possible outcome- after all, data is changing. In the coming years, it will be safeguarded with ferocity. For now, third-party data and buying lists are all too common, but the shift has already arrived. The only reason these systems are still working is because the organizations that outsource them are desperately trying to showcase marketing metrics.

But then, how do you move beyond this? You identify and attract targeted leads. And make no mistake, you want to attract the right leads.

Let’s begin with the first step.

Attracting Targeted Leads

1. Identifying your ICP

This process might be the easiest of them all. If you want to identify your target leads, all you need is to look at your product/services.

After all, you have identified a gap in the market and are actively looking to solve it. This solution itself will direct you towards your ICP.

1. Addressing ICP Pain Points

Once you identify your ICP, it’s time to get to know what they value— these are called their pain points. These pain points exist on a macro and micro level. The macro ones are usually obvious— maybe their tech stack isn’t working, or the ROI they intended for isn’t matching reality.

Then, there are pain points beyond the obvious— technical issues, downtimes, engineer-specific problems, etc. These issues are almost conversational. They happen in the office room or on social media channels. But once you have identified them:

1. You will have to craft content around these pain points
2. Craft campaigns that address these pain points
3. Speak in a language the buyer understands
4. Be where the buyer/consumer is
5. Use these channels to address the key pain points.

And the reason behind this is to attract the lead. Once people see that you solve their problem, they will be drawn towards you.

They will ask you questions to understand if you’re the right fit— in this process, you will lose some of the leads for the time being, but that’s alright.

Because it’s now time for identification.

Identifying Target Leads

Identification of target leads can sound tricky. It essentially means analyzing behaviors and understanding which leads are standing out for your particular solutions and services.

But what does this identification look like?

You can use scoring models or behavioral cues to figure out what the identifiers are. Based on the campaign, there are many identifiers you can employ. But here are the basic ones that you can cover:

1. Behavioral Cues: First, let’s understand that on-site behavior is limited. You cannot understand the buyers’ thought process with such a small data set. Whitepaper downloads, e-books, and webinar viewing are good signs but leads that do this are not Sales-qualified. Today’s buyers are complex, and so is their journey— while these behaviors are positive indicators, marketing folks should not make them their guiding compass.
2. Social Listening: A lot of identifiers can be gleaned from social media— once a segment has shown consistent interest in your offers, you can start observing them on socials and communities, listening to what they have been saying. This method will help you know which leads are actively looking for solutions and what they are looking for.
3. Segmentation: Based on behavioral cues, you must divide the leads into segments. These segments will niche your leads and empower you to personalize their experience.
   1. Through segmentation, you can continuously monitor the behavior of the leads— which gives you more behavioral data, strengthening your personalization. This is called a positive feedback loop. An action that helps reinforce other positive actions.
   1. Segmentation also empowers marketing teams to identify which channels the leads prefer. Some leads may prefer LinkedIn, while some may prefer emails, and for some, it’s advertising- through this closed loop of understanding behavior, segmentation, crafting personalized messages, and delivery through preferred channels, you can understand which leads are the ones you need to target.

If you think that, at some point, you need to use intuition, you are correct. Data can only help you get a clean list of sorts. The actual identifier will be your own experience and understanding of the product.

And remember, no matter how polished your message is, it must reach the audience it’s meant for. By understanding the channels and how to use them, your personalization efforts will come to fruition.

Channels for Targeted Lead Generation

Let’s go through the list of channels that are available to you at any given time. While this list will only touch on the basics, our blog on lead generation channels is a masterclass of the topic! Once you know the channels you want to use, give that piece a read to know how to use it effectively for growth.

So, you usually have 7-8 available channels based on your budget. Like life, marketing channels are free-to-play but pay-to-win.

You can and will get results with “free” marketing campaigns, but that takes time and a lot of patience.

The channels are:

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO is the golden child for all marketing teams. It helps you rank and attract traffic almost free of cost. Of course, there are tools like SEMRush, Ahrefs, and Moz, but they can be used for free with limited powers. And so can the Google Adword tool. SEO is the peak of organic marketing. The idea is to create content and optimize your web pages for the user, elevating their experience. Once you do that, your pages (hopefully) will rank on Google and other search engines like DuckDuckGo and Bing.

But ranking is complex and takes a while to get right— teams with budgets should focus on more than SEO.

Advertising (PPC)

This brings us to SEM and advertising. These are paid campaigns that charge you for every click based on the keyword’s price. Usually, these show up as sponsored links on Google and other search engines and display ads on other websites. But the idea behind it is the same. It’s digital advertising, shown to your ICPs through the internet.

Email

Email is a powerful channel. It has a great ROI. But there is a catch— it is also one of the few to get right. Either email blast 1000 people and end up in spam or build a reputation for yourself as a value provider. Email is what you should be mastering at all costs.

Social Media

There are leads who will prefer LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook, et. al. as their preferred channel. This means you will have to showcase your expertise, content, and marketing messages on this channel. Every segment will have its channel and require adaptation, from language to design. But the core message has to be the same.

Events, Webinars, and Conferences

Are your target leads attending webinars and events? If yes— which it mostly is— you must use this channel. Events and webinars are easy to understand. They are a gathering of people interested in services similar to yours. You can host or attend these to observe how your potential buyer interacts.

Outreach

Outreach is an effective channel. It entails sending cold emails, calls, and messages to your ICP. For targeted lead generation, this essentially means calling your prospects that you think are high-value. Note: Outreach is not necessarily cold. You can also do warm outbound.

How to Qualify and Nurture Targeted Leads

Qualification and Nurturing need nuance— something often missing from novice teams. That is, they must understand what their buyer wants, how to deliver value, and which channel to use.

Qualification of Target Leads

To qualify a lead, marketing, and sales teams must align themselves and define what MQLs and SQLs mean for them. Once you have the definition down, it comes down to lead scoring.

This lead scoring model must map the customers’ journey and reflect in-real scenarios, not ideal ones.

The leads with the highest scores should be segmented and matched to the definition you have set.

Nurturing

The most famous or rather infamous channel for nurturing is email and for a good reason. People, especially on the top, check their emails quite often. But as we’ve said, this is not an immutable truth and is subject to change based on the lead segment. Maybe they prefer LinkedIn.

But all nurturing must provide value and give something to the potential buyer— and this giving must be selfless. This value can be from a newsletter or through appropriate sales enablement content.

Targeted lead generation is about observing behavior.

A high-value account can only be identified and marketed by understanding its behavior. There are always markers that signify. But there is a crucial step missing between identification and marketing, and that is overreliance on metrics that don’t matter.

The error marketing teams make while observing their potential buyer is to over-optimize everything and forget that they are not tracking metrics but real people with real motivations and emotions.

These things cannot be quantified completely. There are gaps in behavior that only an observer can fill. These observations are born out of experience- instinct. What these metrics should do is provide a rough draft and signifier for these observations.

Why does the buyer buy? A hypothesis can be set, and data will prove a definitive answer.

But to reach that point, you need trial and error. Without experience, all marketing campaigns will remain noise.

Targeted lead generation might promise to set you apart. All you have to do is try.