The MQL is killing your pipeline

By the time a "hot lead" notification finally hits your inbox, 81% of your buyers have already chosen a preferred vendor. If you are still handing your sales team a single lead and expecting them to magically manufacture an opportunity, you are not doing demand generation; you are ignoring the rest of the buying group and forcing sales to do your work for you.

In 2026, the winning formula is not finding a champion; it is enabling a consensus across the entire buying group.

Stop chasing ghosts in your customer relationship management (CRM) system

For years, marketers have celebrated the marketing qualified lead (MQL) as the ultimate success metric. We found one person who clicked an email, and we threw them over the fence to sales. But buyers do not operate in a vacuum. They operate in buying groups—families of stakeholders that are often as dysfunctional as they are decisive.

When you focus solely on one champion, you leave the rest of the group out in the cold. This puts the entire burden of proof on your champion to sell your solution internally to influencers, IT, procurement, and finance. If that champion is busy, and they always are, your deal stalls.

Focusing too much on that champion means that we've left other buying group members out in the cold and therefore have left all the onus on that champion to bring the rest of the buying group along with them. - Jessica Fewless, Head of Marketing and Partnerships, Inverta

Getting one lead is not sufficient. Saying that an account is "ready" based on one person's activity is not sufficient. True success comes from engaging multiple stakeholders and addressing their potential objections before they become deal-killers.

Recognize that the enterprise buyer is a crowd, not a person

The shift to buying groups is not a philosophical preference; it is a statistical necessity. Shanta Kohli, chief marketing officer at Sysdig, notes that after analyzing their revenue data, they found a clear tipping point: the power of five. When they engaged five different personas within an account, the likelihood of moving to a proof of value was three times higher than with a single contact.

Tyler Bernstein at Sendoso saw similar results in the mid-market. Deals with four or more people involved were three times more likely to close than those with only one.

The logic is simple: people do not make decisions on their own anymore. They do it in groups across multiple departments. If your marketing only speaks to the champion, you are ignoring the people who actually sign the checks or maintain the infrastructure.

Ditch personalization and focus on relevance

We have spent a decade obsessed with personalization. We think putting a first name in an email or mentioning a prospect’s college is the pinnacle of marketing. It is not. In fact, individualized messaging can make buying groups 59% less likely to reach a consensus. When everyone in a group receives a different message, they struggle to agree on what problem they are actually trying to solve.

Instead of personalization, aim for relevance.

Relevance is what helps your prospect understand their challenges and helps them do a better job. It builds trust in your brand. Jessica Fewless describes this as a shift from "vibes" to "value" marketing.

• Vibes Marketing (Top of funnel): This is your thought leadership. It is role-specific. It uses offbeat creative to break through the noise. It makes the individual feel seen and understood.
• Value Marketing (Middle and bottom of funnel): This content speaks to the collective whole. It highlights the collective value you bring to the entire organization. It is designed to help the group reach a consensus.

Relevance is what will get you noticed and what your recipient will find value in. Relevance is what helps your prospect understand their challenges, helps them do better at their job, and helps build their trust in your brand. - Jessica Fewless, Head of Marketing and Partnerships, Inverta

Arm your champion to defeat the eleventh hour saboteurs

One of the most effective ways to market to a buying group is through buyer enablement. You should provide your champion with the tools they need to sell your company internally.

Consider the "eleventh-hour saboteurs": procurement and IT. These departments often enter the conversation late and kill deals because their specific concerns—security, integration, or cost—were never addressed.

A perfect example is a company selling to accountants. They knew IT would be a make-or-break factor. Instead of trying to market directly to IT, they gave their accountant champion a "security checklist" to share with their IT counterpart. This enabled the champion to stop the saboteur in their tracks.

As Tyler Bernstein notes, the more voices procurement hears saying "we need this tool," the faster the deal moves. It is not about bullying procurement; it is about creating enough internal pressure and clarity that saying "no" becomes difficult.

Re-architect your compensation to drive the right behavior

You cannot expect your team to market to accounts if you are still paying them for leads. If your business development representatives are compensated on volume, they will revert to the lead-generation hamster wheel every time things get difficult.

Shanta Kohli suggests a radical shift: align compensation to buying behavior. This requires strong alignment with the chief executive officer, the chief revenue officer, and the chief financial officer. However, simply changing the pay structure is not enough. To move the needle from quantity to quality, you must also provide the structural framework for that engagement to happen. Once you stop measuring success by the individual lead, you free the organization to collaborate around the account.

At Sysdig, they operationalize this behavioral shift through a "pod" structure. Instead of silos operating in a vacuum, the pod creates a cross-functional unit dedicated to account activation. A pod consists of:

• A business development representative
• A field marketing manager
• AN account executive
• A sales engineer
• A growth marketer

This pod works together to "pounce" on or "surround" accounts that show intent. They do not wait for a lead to be passed over a fence; they orchestrate a multi-channel effort to engage the entire buying group simultaneously.

Unless you do not have sales buy in to drive a quality metric versus a volume metric, you're gonna be on that hamster wheel forever. You have to work with sales to make some of these big changes. - Shanta Kohli, CMO, Sysdig

Stop waiting for the 3% to fill out a form

Research shows that only 3% of your buyers will ever fill out a form. If you are waiting for that form fill to start your marketing, you are ignoring 97% of your market.

Buyers are scrolling on LinkedIn. They are asking colleagues for recommendations. They are asking artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT for the best solutions to their problems. By the time they reach out to you, they have already completed the vast majority of their research and are ready to make a decision.

Marketing to buying groups requires tracking signals at both the account and individual levels. By analyzing your first party engagement data along with third-party signals and data, you gain a high-fidelity view of an account. This approach reveals not just that an account is active, but whether the entire buying group is assembled and how deeply they are engaged with your narrative.

Build your implementation roadmap

Transitioning to buying group marketing is a mindset shift, not a technical overhaul. You can use the tools you already have, but you must change how you use them.

1. Audit the data: Look at your historical deals. How many people were involved in your last ten "closed won" opportunities? Compare that to your "closed lost" deals. The data will likely prove that more stakeholders equal higher win rates.
2. Define the Marketing Qualified Account: Sit down with your sales and operations leaders. Agree on what an engaged account looks like. Is it three people from the ideal buyer profile? Is it activity from two different departments?
3. Redesign the funnel: You may need to run two funnels simultaneously as you transition. One for legacy lead reporting and one for account-level engagement. Over time, the account-level data will prove more predictive of revenue.
4. Create consensus content: Stop making every piece of content about a single persona. Create tools that address the intersection of interests between DevOps, finance, and security.

It is a mindset shift. There's a whole bunch of metrics and new reports that we will have to wrap our heads around... but really, it is just a mindset shift, and we have the data to prove that this is worth it. - Hannah Swanson, VP of Marketing, Intentsify

The choice is yours: Volume or Velocity

The era of the "lonely MQL" is over. Sales teams have written off marketing because we have spent years delivering one-dimensional data. By shifting to buying groups, you move from being a "lead provider" to a "revenue partner."

You will see higher conversion rates. You will see larger deal sizes. You will see faster account velocity. But most importantly, you will finally be marketing the way your customers actually buy.

Stop marketing to ghosts. Start marketing to groups.

Download our 15-slide Buying Group Business Case template to convince your leadership team that the MQL is dead.