MQLs were never supposed to be the North Star metric for marketing: Why modern B2B leaders are replacing MQLs with MER, LTV:CAC, and Pipeline Velocity.

TL:DR - The Problem with MQLs

We built the MQL because it gave us numbers to measure marketing. Those numbers got us a seat at the table but they also froze our budgets, starved brand investment and trained finance and sales to reward the shortest possible win. It’s time to stop confusing contacts with high-intent leads and treat marketing like the long and short game it actually is.

Why the MQL is a Prison (and why you should want out)

It’s no secret: marketing has always fought for a seat at the table. For years, it was viewed as a "fluffy" dark art—unlike Sales, which had a direct line to revenue. Without clear attribution, marketing became subjective. Everyone had an opinion on your job... except you.

Then came the digital explosion. We suddenly had 80-page dashboards and the chance to prove our impact. But this data revolution was led by CRMs focused on a single objective: Volume.

The MQL was born. Obtained through performance marketing, qualified through CRM lead scoring. Finally, a metric sales and the exec team could understand. It became the currency of marketing value. 

But today, that currency is devalued. In a rush to prove ROI, we built a system that incentivises quantity over quality. We built a prison that locks us into generating low-quality leads for an insatiable sales team. This pressure forces marketers into short-term tactics that eat budget, starve brands, and prevent the brave campaigns that actually drive long-term growth.

The Maths Behind the Problem: The 95-5 Rule

The biggest reason the MQL chase is failing you is simple maths. According to the LinkedIn B2B Institute, 95% of your potential buyers are not in the market today. In fact, they won’t be ready to buy for months, maybe years.

Yes, yes….you’ve all heard the stat. But let me frame it another way. You are literally killing your future pipeline. Quality leads dry up, forcing you to spend more to drive higher volumes of low-quality MQLs. The work gets harder every quarter, and the pressure mounts as you fight a bloody battle for the 5% of buyers who are currently active. 

The Payday Loan of Marketing

This pressure leads to the overuse of gated content—eBooks, webinars, and forced form fills. These campaigns fill up your CRM with “MQLs”, and with them come increasing MarTech costs. 

Gated content is the payday loan of B2B marketing. It's a quick hit of average data today, that destroys your long-term credit rating with the buyer tomorrow. Feeding the insatiable mouths of sales but killing your pipeline.

But what are you really paying for? An MQL? Or is it really just a glorified contact?

As Sarah Roberts, CMO at Boldyn Networks, puts it: “If you’re not brave, you’re exactly the same as your competitor. And 101 of marketing is that you’ve got to differentiate yourself. If you don't, you don't exist.”

By focusing only on capturing immediate leads (the 5%), you blend into a sea of sterile sameness, fighting over scraps with every other competitor using the same rational, product-centric playbook.

To break free of the MQL prison and rebalance efforts between the long and short of it, we need to replace (or supplement) our MQL obsession.

The Pivot: 5 Metrics to Replace the MQL

You can’t just walk into a board meeting and say, “the MQL is dead, we need to focus on brand instead.” You’re more likely to get fired than hired. But what do we replace it with? And how do we prove to the CFO (and Dave from Sales) that a brave brand campaign is an investment not a cost?

Here are five metrics you should add to your marketing dashboard immediately.

1. Marketing Efficiency Ratio: Total Revenue ÷ Total Marketing Spend

Forget trying to attribute every single pound to a specific click. The B2B buyer journey is too complex for that. And you fall into the attribution trap. Savvy marketers know there isn’t one single tactic that drives revenue growth, but the combination of all of them. And that’s why MER is the perfect holistic view of how your integrated marketing efforts are performing. It captures the halo effect of brand building that direct attribution misses.

And yes - count all revenue. While sales may claim they directly own a portion of revenue generation, your marketing campaigns would have certainly had some influence in the buyer journey - whether that was in raising awareness of the brand, supporting brand discovery or even converting that contact into an opportunity.

Done the sums? Want to know how you performed? Well, a healthy B2B MER often sits around 3 to 5, meaning for every £1 you spend, you’ve generated £3-£5 in revenue. If it’s under that, you’re wasting spend somewhere and it’s time to audit your marketing strategy. If it’s over, you are underspending and missing huge growth opportunities.

2. LTV:CAC Ratio: Lifetime value of a customer ÷ the cost to acquire

This is the ultimate measure of sustainable growth and highlights the long-term return on customer acquisition. It proves you aren’t just buying cheap leads that churn. You are acquiring high-value customers efficiently. 

After all, marketing isn’t just about getting the deal. It typically touches the entire customer lifecycle. It’s the fuel for the flywheel. Even better, this metric doesn’t just audit marketing, it measures the combined effort of sales and marketing by adding up the costs of ad spend, agency fees, salaries and tools to create the CAC number.

So, what’s a good score? Aim for a ratio of 3:1 or 4:1. If you are at 1:1, you are bleeding money. If you are at 5:1, you might actually be under-spending and missing growth opportunities. 

You can also get granular with this metric and examine your LTV:CAC ratio across your channels to see which ones are most effective at driving high-value customers.

3. CAC Payback Period: CAC ÷ (average monthly revenue x gross margin %)

We all know we have to spend to acquire customers. Which means we have to spend ahead of the game, knowing at some point the customers we help acquire will eventually pay us back.

The CAC payback period shows CFOs exactly how long it takes to recoup their marketing spend. It essentially determines how fast you can afford to scale.

Even better, investors love this. If you spend £10k to get a customer, it tells you how many months of their subscription it takes to pay that back. Your ideal target, less than 12 months. If you're under 18 months, cash flow might be a bit tight. Over 18 months and you're burning cash too fast.

4. The Revenue Forecast Model

This might just be your secret weapon. Most of the time, marketers show historical data or details with CTRs, CPMs, or CPLs. Instead, you need a calculator that forecasts the revenue you can expect from your spend.

We’ve built a simple Revenue Engine Template that does this for you. It replaces "MQL goals" with "Pipeline Targets" and calculates exactly how much budget you need to hit your revenue number based on your actual conversion rates.

View the Revenue Forecast Model here

Note: It’s important to caveat this is a forecast. Reality can often throw up unexpected curve balls, but this gives you a mathematical baseline to defend your budget.

5. Incremental Revenue per Channel & Tests

To win at marketing effectiveness, you have to experiment. It’s not an exact science and nor should it be. We’re targeting emotional drivers after all. Testing is one of the only ways you’ll be able to separate brand effect from conversion channel noise. So you will need to design controlled brand investment pilots, a key part of your 2026 strategy. But, how?:

1. Pick a cluster of accounts / regions / demographics as a test segment, with a comparable holdout / control group.
2. Run a high-distinctiveness, brave brand campaign in the test segment for 12 weeks. Ensure creative uses fluent devices early and often.
3. Keep activation channels running equally in both cohorts.
4. Measure: (a) short-term ad recall + mental availability. If you can’t do that, then look at (b) change in inbound quality (high-intent to opportunity rate) and (c) incremental revenue over the next 6 - 12 months.

If the test moves MER and reduces CAC for the cohort, you’ve bought budget credibility.

Changing the Narrative: From Leads to Leverage

MQLs have kept us locked in a prison. A prison that has seen our performance locked into generating leads at all costs. The reality is, we have many more levers we can pull to improve marketing efficiency, effectiveness and revenue for the brands we work for.

For example: 

• Speed to Lead: Improve your meeting acceptance rate by testing embedded calendars (Calendly/Chili Piper) instead of "Thank You" pages.
• CRO: Convert more hand-raisers by A/B testing value-based CTAs (e.g., "See Pricing" vs. "Book Demo").
• Pipeline Acceleration: Improve sales win rates by retargeting open opportunities with case studies.
  

Furthermore, distinctiveness and brave creatives multiply the impact of your media investment. So, invest, experiment, and test new ideas, fluent devices, and campaigns to earn budget credibility. Research shows that strong, distinctive assets improve ad recognition and compound media ROI. If your creative underperforms, you’ll just pour money into a leaky bucket.

To achieve success, we need to play the long and short fairly equally. We need to move away from 8:92 and closer to something like 60:40 (brand vs activation). It doesn’t need to be immediate; you can do it in phases. But as soon as you start treating brand spend as growth capex, you’ll start to see much better returns on your marketing investments across the board.

I’ll leave you with a short quote that you can use to explain the pivot to your CFO or CEO.

“We spend heavily on converting the 5% of buyers in the market today. That works — in the short term. But 95% of lifetime value comes from buyers who aren’t looking now. If we invest in building mental availability and distinctiveness, the probability that we’re considered when buyers move into the market increases. That reduces future CAC and improves LTV; MER improves, and shareholder value follows.”

Ready to modernise your marketing? Join our Brave Collective, a community of B2B professionals breaking free from the tyranny of MQLs.