By 2016, something profound had happened. More and more clients talked about how they were moving away from MQLs and looking more at opportunities and revenue. Some of this was due to predictive lead scoring , and some of it was probably because of ABM, where you think about accounts, rather than leads. But some of it was simply because CMOs and demand generation leaders had convinced sales and executive leadership that revenue is a far more important metric than leads. And so when clients asked me about how they increase their MQLs by 30% YOY, they were much more receptive to hearing why they were barking up the wrong tree.

If you are a demand gen or marketing leader (or a BU leader or executive who manages them) and the metrics haven’t been set for 2017, I’d think long and hard about some other more important metrics. If you are doing ABM, you can always look to Engagio’s Marketing Qualified Account (MQA) approach or something akin to it. Or you can tie to company or product-line sales metrics like revenue, pipeline, opportunities, deal size, retention etc; At the end of the day, if you blow out your MQL numbers but the company misses on those downstream numbers, you aren’t going to get a huge bonus or promotion. So why not hitch your wagon to the only numbers that truly matter to the company?