Here’s a claim that lands badly in marketing meetings: your MQL target is the single biggest reason sales doesn’t trust the leads you send. Not the channels, not the creative, not the reps’ attitude. The number you set at the top of the funnel quietly corrupts everything below it.
The mechanism
Set marketing a volume target — hit X MQLs this quarter — and you’ve created a powerful incentive to loosen the definition of “qualified” whenever the number’s at risk. Not through bad faith; through ordinary pressure. When the quarter’s tight, the bar drops a little, more leads clear it, the target’s hit. Quality falls, sales notices, trust erodes.
The target rewards the wrong thing. It pays for volume of leads, when the business needs pipeline that closes. Those come apart the moment volume gets hard.
How sales experiences it
Reps don’t see your incentive structure. They just see the leads getting worse near quarter-end, learn that “MQL” is a marketing metric rather than a signal of real intent, and start re-qualifying everything from scratch — or ignoring it. The re-qualification is pure leaked pipeline: leads that go cold while they wait for a rep to re-check work marketing already claimed was done.
The honest counterpoint
Marketing does need a target; “as many good leads as possible” isn’t a plan, and volume matters. The point isn’t to remove accountability — it’s to stop measuring the thing that pulls against quality. A pure volume target with no quality counterweight is what does the damage.
What to measure instead
Tie marketing’s number to what happens after the handoff. Measure MQLs that sales accepts, or better, MQLs that become pipeline and revenue. The moment marketing is paid on accepted, converting leads rather than raw count, the incentive to loosen the definition disappears — and the definition is what sales was reacting to all along.
Pair that with a shared, written definition and a closed feedback loop, and the trust rebuilds because the incentives finally point the same way.
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