GTM Hot Takes Show Episode 9 - "No More MQLs"

​"No more MQLs!"

​For decades, the Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) was the North Star for GTM teams. Now, it’s being called a bottleneck, a vanity metric, and the single biggest source of friction between Sales and Marketing.

​Some say the MQL is dead. Others claim it’s evolving into a smarter, more sophisticated signal. The only thing we know? Everyone has a take.

​We’re done with polite handoffs. We’re pitting Marketing vs Sales to expose the MQL for what it really is: an outdated metric holding revenue back.

​This is the debate that will reshape how you think about your funnel. You’ll hear:

• ​Why the MQL became the source of so much dysfunction between Sales and Marketing

• ​What you replace it with (Hint: The answer isn’t just a better scoring model)

• ​How modern RevOps teams are building a pipeline-first, MQL-free framework

• ​Is the MQL simply an easy excuse for Marketing to say "my job is done"?

• ​How AI and real-time intent data make the MQL completely irrelevant

• ​What a truly unified, full-funnel GTM looks like when you kill the MQL for good

​ Where do you stand? Don’t expect everyone to agree. Expect the opposite.