I don't believe in lead scoring.

At least not the way most B2B companies use it.

We've built an entire industry around the idea that we can predict buying intent by assigning points to digital behavior. Someone downloads a whitepaper, they get 5 points. They open three emails, another 10. They visit the pricing page, add 15. Eventually they hit some arbitrary threshold and suddenly they're an MQL.

Then they're routed to sales, who are expected to call them because the system has determined they're ready.

Except the person never actually asked to talk to anyone.

They were researching. They were learning. Maybe they were evaluating the market, trying to understand a problem, or simply doing their job. That's what buyers do long before they're ready for a sales conversation.

And then we're surprised when sales stops trusting marketing's leads.

There's another problem with the way we've built this system.

The MQL target doesn't come from the market. It comes from a spreadsheet.

Leadership sets a revenue target. Sales works backward to determine how many deals are needed, then opportunities, then SQLs, and eventually MQLs. By the time that math reaches marketing, someone has decided that the company needs 800 MQLs next quarter.

But the market doesn't know that. There aren't suddenly 800 more buyers because the spreadsheet says there should be. Your addressable market is finite, and you can't manufacture buying intent that isn't there.

So when the number becomes the objective, teams eventually start lowering the definition of what counts as a lead.

The dashboard looks healthy. The pipeline doesn't necessarily follow.

This is where marketing leaders deserve some empathy.

Marketing usually didn't create the system they're being asked to operate. Someone else set the revenue target. Someone else built the conversion assumptions. Someone else decided what qualified means. Marketing was handed the number and told to hit it.

And when you hold a function accountable for a metric it had no real authority to define, you shouldn't be surprised when that function starts optimizing for the metric. That's not a marketing problem. It's a GTM management problem.

The scoring model isn't the disease. It's a symptom of a larger one. We're trying to turn an inherently messy buying process into a clean set of numbers that fit neatly into a funnel spreadsheet.

I suggest taking a much simpler approach. An MQL should be an ICP account that has explicitly asked to talk to sales.

That's it.

If they want a conversation with sales, they're an MQL.

Everything else stays with marketing. We educate, we nurture, we stay relevant, we build trust, and we let the buyer decide when they're ready to have a sales conversation.

That doesn't mean the other activity isn't valuable. Quite the opposite. A buyer may engage with your company for months before raising their hand, and all of those interactions matter. They just don't need to be artificially converted into an MQL along the way.

And this is where things get uncomfortable. If you adopt a stricter definition, your MQL volume is probably going to fall.

That's okay.

Sales should spend its time with people who actually want a conversation. When the leads coming from marketing consistently meet that standard, sales is much more likely to take them seriously. Marketing also stops spending its time trying to manufacture activity that makes the dashboard look good but has little relationship to revenue.

The conversation with leadership changes, too. Instead of asking "how many MQLs did we generate?" you can start asking better questions:

Those are harder questions to answer than how many people crossed an arbitrary lead scoring threshold. They're also much more useful.

Your dashboard will look worse. Someone will probably ask why MQL volume is down.

Good! That conversation is long overdue.

I'd much rather explain why we generated fewer qualified leads than explain why hundreds of "qualified" leads never became customers.

But there's an important caveat. You can only make that decision if marketing has the authority to define what qualified means. If the organization has already decided that marketing must produce a certain number of MQLs every quarter, then changing the definition without changing the expectation just creates a different problem.

That's why this isn't really a debate about lead scoring. It's a debate about what marketing is actually accountable for, and whether the organization is willing to measure it honestly.

Buying intent isn't something you calculate. It's something a buyer expresses.

Digital behavior can tell you that someone is interested. It can help you prioritize accounts. It can give your team useful context about what people are researching. But a score doesn't turn that activity into intent.

If someone has to be scored into intent, they probably haven't expressed it yet. And I'd rather wait for the signal than pretend we can manufacture one.

This connects to something we're digging into right now. Along with Eric Gruber and Kristina Jaramillo at Personal ABM, we're running a study on where B2B revenue actually gets stuck once it's in the pipeline. The early responses are already pointing somewhere uncomfortable, and if you want to see where your own revenue is most likely leaking, you can add your numbers and get the findings first. It takes about 10 minutes:

These are the kinds of conversations happening every day inside MarketingHQ. We're less interested in how to generate another 500 MQLs and much more interested in how marketing organizations can build systems that sales trusts and leadership can connect to revenue.

If that's the kind of conversation you're looking for, come join us. Inside the community, you'll get:

VP, Product Marketing, Observability at Elastic

VP, Brand Management, Entertainment (London) at Authentic Brands Group

Sr. Director, Demand & Digital Marketing at Elastic ($200,400 - $316,900)

Director, Marketing at WellSky

Associate Director, Partner Marketing (Remote) at Zeta Global

Lead Product Marketing Manager, Carta Law at Carta

Senior Account Based Marketing Manager at Culture Amp

Brand Experience Manager, Purell at The Clorox Company

Senior Product Marketing Manager, Enterprise SaaS at Vizient ($88,900 - $155,500)

Partner Marketing Manager at 6sense

Senior Marketing Manager, Growth (Remote) at Webflow

Product Marketing Manager at Forter

Partner Marketing Strategist at Intel

Field Marketing Manager, Mexico at Databricks

Internal Communications & Events Specialist, London at Isomorphic Labs

Find many more roles on our MarketingHQ Job Board

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