If you spend time in any B2B marketing conversation right now, you have probably noticed how often one topic keeps resurfacing.
“The MQL is dead. ABM is the future.”
It shows up in LinkedIn posts, conference talks, and internal planning meetings. Some teams are moving away from MQLs altogether. Some teams are even moving away from leads altogether. And yet, others still rely on them heavily. TBH, most are still trying to figure out what role (if any) the MQL should play going forward.
But why does this debate exist in the first place? And what does it mean for your 2026 marketing strategy?
Why the MQL conversation will not go away
MQLs were introduced to solve a practical problem. Marketing and sales needed a shared way to prioritize leads and decide when engagement warranted follow-up.
Frameworks like the SiriusDecisions (now Forrester) waterfall gave teams structure. Inquiry, MQL, SAL, SQL created consistency across reporting, forecasting, and handoffs. For a long time, this model worked well enough.
So what changed? Enter: a whole new way for B2B buying decisions to happen.
Buying behavior outgrew the original model
In many B2B organizations today, especially in SaaS, deals involve:
- Multiple stakeholders, many of which we don’t even know about
- Different roles engaging at different times, especially in the ~dArK fUnNeL~
- Activity spread across channels and months, or even years
Qualification no longer happens at a single moment, on a single record. Momentum builds gradually, across an entire account, for a long, long time.
When teams rely on an individual MQL to represent readiness, we see frustration. Frustration from sales that they don’t have the right contact. Frustration from marketing that all the time and money spent to get all of the other contacts on the account engaged, is not showing up on the Lead Source.
That frustration fuels the claim that MQLs are dead. BUT…
ABM enters the discussion
ABM gained traction because it reflects how buying looks today. It’s not a campaign, it’s a lifecycle (whole separate blog post). For context, we need to remember that ABM centers around:
- Account-level engagement
- Collective interest across roles, but unique to each role
- Context around timing and intent
As teams adopt ABM, individual lead qualification gets questioned. That does not mean MQLs must disappear entirely. It does mean their purpose changes.
For many teams, ABM influences how qualification is interpreted rather than replacing it outright.
How qualification is evolving
What many organizations are landing on is a more layered approach:
- Individual engagement contributes to account-level signals
- Multiple people engaging matters more than one high-scoring lead
- Readiness is evaluated over time, not at a single threshold
- BUT, inbounds are still the highest-value indicator that there is immediate, tangible interest across an account
In this setup, MQLs still exist in the system, but they carry less weight on their own. They function as signals that feed broader account evaluation.
What the debate is really pointing to
When teams argue about whether MQLs are dead, the underlying issues tend to be operational:
- Misalignment between marketing and sales expectations
- Metrics that do not reflect how deals progress, both on the sales side and the marketing side
- Lifecycle models that have not kept pace with go-to-market strategy
The ongoing discussion highlights a need to revisit how qualification is defined and how it supports the revenue motion.
A more useful place to focus
Instead of deciding whether to keep or abandon MQLs, many teams benefit from stepping back and asking:
- What signals indicate buying momentum for us?
- How do individual actions roll up to account interest?
- How should marketing and sales act on those signals? And when?
For some companies, traditional MQLs still fit. For others, account-based qualification makes more sense. Many end up with a hybrid model, both for the handoff and for reporting, that reflects their market, sales cycle, and target audience.
The reason this topic keeps coming up is simple. B2B revenue models are still evolving, and qualification sits at the center of that evolution.
