Last week, I grabbed beers with Bill, a former CEO of mine from early in my career. He told me that his company has been struggling with lead generation and he has basically hit the reset button on their marketing.
Bill has a background in sales (coincidentally also a background in brewing beer as a homebrewer and at Triple Crossing, the very brewery where we had this conversation), and was struggling to figure out how to rebuild a marketing program from the ground up that would support a new direction for the company.
We spent the better part of two hours catching up, geeking out about AI tools, and discussing the work of Jason Lemkin, a prolific business thought leader and one of the founding members of the SaaStr community and conference. But most of our conversation centered on marketing metrics, on which we had some friendly disagreement.
Including when I worked for him, Bill had always set lead-based goals for marketing—X number of MQLs per quarter, for example. I countered by suggesting he make his marketing leader responsible for dollars of pipeline or revenue generated.
The next morning, I woke up to this message from him.
He’d apparently asked Jason Lemkin’s AI chatbot for a second opinion. The AI agrees with me.
Revenue. Always revenue.
It’s incredible to me that so many businesses still task their marketing leaders with delivering a certain volume of Marketing Qualified Leads and not much else. They build compensation plans around it. They structure board reports around it. And in doing so, they inadvertently sow the seeds of inefficiency, inter-departmental conflict, and stalled growth.
Bill’s dilemma isn't unique. It's a trap many businesses fall into. And it got me thinking about the fundamental misalignment that a lead-based goal creates. It's time we moved on. Here’s why your marketing leader needs to be accountable for dollars of pipeline and revenue—not just the leads that feed them.
The High Cost of Cheap Leads
Imagine you are a marketing leader (you very well may be!). You are smart, driven, and have a number to hit. Your bonus is tied to delivering 1,000 MQLs this quarter. The business's ultimate goal, of course, is revenue, but your primary, most immediate incentive is that MQL number.
What do you do? What any rational person would: optimize for the metric you are paid to deliver.
The quarter starts strong, but by the middle of month two, you’re pacing behind. The pressure mounts. You need to open the spigots. So, you reallocate your budget. The thought-leadership content and community-building efforts are impossible to attribute directly to an MQL this quarter. So, you dial them back and put those funds toward a "State of the Industry" report. It’s broad, appeals to everyone (and therefore, no one specific), and you promote it with bottom-of-funnel lead gen ad campaigns with broad targeting on LinkedIn. You might even buy a list to cold email—a cardinal sin, but the pressure is immense.
The MQLs start pouring in. The chart goes up and to the right. By the end of the quarter, you hit 1,124 MQLs. You get your bonus. On paper, you’re a hero.
But what happens next?
