Should you still set an MQL target at €50k+ ACV?

Why doesn't an MQL target work at €50k+ ACV?

An MQL target at €50k+ ACV rewards form fills from individuals, while the deal is decided by a group inside an account. On average, 13 people are involved in a B2B buying decision^↗. Forrester found that over 80% of buying decisions are made by a buying group of more than 3 people^↗. Most of the buying process happens where a form can't see it.

Fewer than 30% of eventual buyers ever filled out a form on the winning vendor's website, according to 6sense's 2024 and 2025 Buyer Experience studies^↗. 6sense sells account-based software, so read that as vendor research. It also reports that vendors see only 10–15% of the research activity behind a purchase^↗. A lead count measures that thin slice, then rewards marketing for making the slice bigger.

The easy way to grow it is volume: syndicated content, webinars and gated reports aimed at anyone. Most of the people it reaches aren't buying. LinkedIn's B2B Institute, drawing on Ehrenberg-Bass research, estimates that about 95% of potential B2B buyers are out of market at any given time^↗. 6sense estimates that, even inside a target account list, roughly 60% of accounts are not in market at any given time^↗. An MQL count can't tell those accounts apart from the ones that are.

Buyers are also further along than a lead score assumes. In 6sense's 2025 survey of about 4,000 B2B buyers, 94% said their team had ranked its shortlist by preference before engaging sellers^↗. Buyers chose a vendor from their Day One shortlist 95% of the time^↗. A download is weak evidence that an account is in market, and says little about whether you're on its shortlist.

The €50k line is a rule of thumb, not a law. What matters is how many people sign off and how long the cycle runs. Price is a proxy for both. In Forrester's 2024 business-buying research, 89% of purchases involved 2 or more departments^↗, and bigger tickets usually add approvers and time. Gong's 130% multi-threading figure below, for example, is for deals over $50k^↗. So the real test is this: if 3 or more people must approve and cycles run past a quarter, demote the MQL target, whatever the price.

How many leads does a €2M target need at €50k ACV?

At €50k ACV, a €2M new-ARR target needs 40 deals, and at a lead-to-close rate under 1% that means more than 4,000 leads a year^↗. Forrester doesn't say whether that rate counts all leads or only MQLs, and your own rate may be higher, so put it in.

A €2M target at €50k ACV needs about 1,330 to 4,000+ leads a year, depending on lead-to-close:

Note: Illustrative. Lead-to-close under 1% from Forrester, Saying Goodbye To MQLs (2023); the 2% and 3% rows are example rates, so use your own.

The point holds at any of these rates. The target rewards volume, not the 40 accounts that will buy, and it pushes marketing towards cheap leads, because nothing else fills the quota.

Sales won't work that queue either. Researchers in the Journal of Marketing call it the "sales lead black hole": the roughly 70% of marketing-generated leads that sales reps don't pursue, a figure their paper starts from rather than measures^↗. A 4,000-lead target makes that backlog more likely, not less. Then marketing and sales argue about lead quality instead of which accounts to move.

The account view starts from the same 40 deals and asks a different question. Which accounts, with which people involved? At a 25% opportunity win rate (an example rate, so use your own), 40 deals need 160 opportunities a year. Those 160 opportunities still have to come from somewhere. The difference is that they come from a named account list you can review line by line.

Deals with more of the buying group involved win more often

Deals move when more of the buying group is involved, and a lead count can't see that. Forrester's clients report a 50% increase in meeting-to-closed-won conversion when they deliver 3 or more buying-group members to sales^↗. At Palo Alto Networks, opportunities with several people attached were 8× more likely to advance than those with 1 person^↗. Its move from MQLs to buying groups came with a 17% higher closed-won rate^↗. Gong's analysis of 1.8M deals found that multi-threading was associated with win rates 130% higher on average in deals over $50k^↗.

The metrics differ, so don't add them up. They point the same way: the more of the buying group you reach, the likelier a large deal is to close. They are also correlations, because healthy deals attract more people. Test the link on your own closed deals before you set a target on it (see the baseline step below). In Gong's data, large strategic deals that reps won included an average of 17 contacts^↗, so don't copy that number into a €50k plan.

Pay follows the same logic. 6sense says organisations that tie marketing pay to opportunity creation rather than leads do better, citing an 8% improvement in outcomes, though it doesn't say which outcomes or publish the underlying data^↗. Both 6sense and Gong sell software for this way of working, so read their numbers as vendor research. Forrester's findings and the Palo Alto story point the same way.

When do MQLs still help?

Keep the hand-raise and drop the target. Even 6sense, which argues hard against lead-based marketing, says lead capture has a role as part of identifying the buying group^↗. A demo request from a fit account is the strongest signal you'll get, so treat it as one.

There are 3 cases where lead capture still does useful work:

• Demo and pricing requests. These people asked to talk. Speed matters more than scoring. HBR's 2011 study covered US companies, most of them B2C. Firms that tried to contact a lead within an hour were nearly 7× as likely to qualify it as those that tried even an hour later^↗. The data is old, so treat it as direction, not a benchmark.
• New categories. When buyers don't yet know the category exists, education comes first, and a content download can be the first sign of interest. 6sense puts this at roughly a quarter of buying journeys, without publishing the data^↗.
• Mixed motions. If you also sell a lower tier, keep an MQL target for that segment only and run the account scorecard for deals of €50k and up. Route by account fit at the point a lead is created.

Give every demo request an owner and a clock. Route requests from fit accounts to a named rep, not a shared queue, and report time to first contact every week.

Use this as the test. If 3 or more of these are true, an MQL target can still do a job. If they aren't, take the MQL count off the target sheet and report it for context only.

What should replace the MQL target?

Replace the MQL count with a short account scorecard, and move to it in stages. Most guides say adapt, don't abandon. We agree on keeping the hand-raise and disagree on the target: at €50k+ a lead count shouldn't be on anyone's comp plan. Forrester, which led the case against MQLs, advises moving from MQLs to opportunities on a crawl, walk, run basis, adopting the idea more deeply over time^↗.

An account scorecard replaces 1 MQL count with 5 targets, 1 signal and 1 reach measure:

Note: panelhop scorecard. Set each target from your own CRM baseline.

Each line answers a question a CRO actually asks. Are the right accounts in market? Are enough of the people who decide involved? Where do accounts stall? Does marketing create deals that sales works and wins? None of those answers comes from a form-fill count. Marketing owns target accounts engaged, pipeline created and reach. Buying-group coverage is shared with sales, and progression and win rate are sales-owned.

Define the two new counts before you use them. Count roles, not names: economic buyer, champion, technical evaluator, user lead, procurement or legal. A role counts when that person has attended a meeting or replied in the last 60 days. An account counts as engaged when at least 2 people from it show meaningful activity in 30 days: a meeting, a reply, or a demo or pricing page visit by a consented or known contact. Account-level intent also counts, if it comes from a provider you have a data processing agreement with.

Don't cut education for the 95% out of market. Measure it by reach in target accounts, not by forms.

Set each target from your own baseline, not from a benchmark. Pull the last 4 quarters of closed-won and closed-lost deals, count the buying-group roles on each and note the stage where lost deals stopped. Contact roles are often missing, so also count people from each account who attended meetings or were on email threads, which you can get from calendar and email sync. That gives you a starting coverage number and the stall point to fix first. If you have no baseline yet, start at 3 or more buying-group roles per opportunity, the threshold in Forrester's client data^↗. Because each target traces back to named deals in your CRM, you can defend it. Fix the contact data first, though: in Validity's 2025 survey of 602 CRM users and administrators, 76% said less than half of their organisation's CRM data was accurate and complete^↗.

Build coverage lawfully. In the EU, most buying-group contacts come from the deal itself: ask the champion who else is involved, invite them to the next meeting and log their role. If you enrich contacts from third-party data, document a legitimate-interest basis and send the Art. 14 GDPR notice within a month, or at first contact. In Germany, don't cold-email people who haven't opted in (§7 UWG). Use introductions, events, LinkedIn and, where presumed consent applies, the phone.

The move takes 3 steps. Don't skip the first: the back-test and the 2 quarters of numbers you report next to the MQL count are what earn sales' trust in the new targets.

Agree the definitions with sales before the first quarter's numbers come in. Which accounts are on the target list, what counts as engaged and which roles count towards coverage? Settle those first, or the new scorecard inherits the old argument about lead quality.