I Lost a Friend Over MQLs — The Real Problem Wasn’t Him

I’ve been writing this series about how B2B teams should rethink intent, paid media, and the role of marketing in the buying cycle. But there’s a story I haven’t told that sits underneath all of it — and it’s the reason I care about getting this right.

Earlier in my career I was a CRO. The CMO at that company wasn’t just a peer — he was someone I considered a real partner. We worked closely. I trusted him. And one quarter, he did something that ended the friendship and permanently changed how I think about the marketing-and-sales relationship.

It’s taken me years to be honest about what actually went wrong.

The System We Were Both Operating Inside

Every CRO knows the pattern. Marketing reports on activity — website visits, content downloads, webinar registrations, tradeshow scans — all of it converted into MQLs and handed over the wall. Sales receives the MQLs, works the ones that look real, and quietly deprioritizes the rest. Marketing sees the deprioritization as sales not doing its job. Sales sees the volume as marketing inflating its own scoreboard. The CEO and CFO watch the friction and conclude — not unreasonably — that this dysfunction is part of why growth is harder than it should be.

I was the CRO in that picture. I was numbers-focused because I had to be. My quarterly commitment to the business depended on a set of leading indicators that had to hold up. The MQL number coming out of marketing was one of them. So I watched it. I trusted it. And — this is the part I underestimated at the time — I trusted the person producing it.

The Quarter That Changed Everything

Marketing was struggling that quarter. The lead volume wasn’t there. I knew it was a hard one, and I assumed we were both working the problem from our respective sides.

What I didn’t know was that, partway through the quarter, my CMO partner had quietly changed the criteria for what qualified as an MQL. Not a strategic recalibration. Not something we discussed. A unilateral decision to loosen the definition so the headline number would land where it needed to land.

From my seat, I saw the MQL number hold up. I saw the conversion rate from MQL to opportunity start to slide. I started asking my sales leaders why the quality was dropping. They didn’t know. I didn’t know. We chased the wrong diagnosis for weeks.

I only found out what had happened after the quarter closed.

I won’t pretend the conversation was easy. I lost what I thought was a partnership and what I had genuinely considered a friendship. The trust didn’t come back. Not with him, and — for a long time — not with the function.

Why It Took Me Years to Understand What Really Happened

For a long time I told this story as one about a person. He optimized for himself instead of for us. He made a choice. That part is true.

But it’s not the whole truth, and it’s not the useful part.

The harder, more honest reading is this: the system we were both operating inside structurally rewarded exactly what he did. His scoreboard was MQL volume. Mine was conversion. The handoff between us was the entire battlefield. When the volume number was in trouble, the only lever fully under his control was the definition of the metric itself. I would have liked to believe I’d never have done the same thing in his position. I’m not as sure about that as I used to be.

The MQL framework is a relic of a buying world that no longer exists. It assumes the buyer identifies themselves to marketing, gets handed to sales, and progresses through a linear funnel that both functions can see and agree on. None of that is how B2B buying actually works anymore. Buyers do 75–80% of their evaluation anonymously, in the dark funnel, before they’ll engage anyone. By the time someone fills out a form, the meaningful decisions have already been made. The MQL is a fiction we built to make the handoff feel measurable.

And as long as the handoff is the scoreboard, two good people running marketing and sales will keep ending up on opposite sides of the table.

What I Spent the Rest of My Career Looking For

After that quarter, I became preoccupied with one question: what would a measurement system look like that made this kind of failure structurally impossible? Not a system that requires CMOs and CROs to be unusually virtuous. A system where the metrics themselves don’t put them in conflict.

The answer, I’ve come to believe, has three properties. It’s built on observable buyer behavior, not internal handoffs — intent signals, website engagement, buying committee coverage, late-funnel behavioral indicators. Things that exist whether marketing or sales claims credit for them. It’s shared, meaning both functions are measured on the same things — pipeline influenced, buying committee penetration, conversion at each behavioral stage. The arguments over MQL definitions disappear because the MQL is no longer the unit of account. And it’s defensible to the CFO. When the CEO and CFO ask why growth is harder than it should be, the answer isn’t a finger pointed across the table. It’s a shared dashboard with shared accountability for shared numbers.

To the CMOs and CROs Reading This

If there is friction in your partnership right now, I would gently suggest it is probably not personal. It is almost certainly structural. The MQL handoff is one of the most reliably relationship-damaging mechanisms still in widespread use in B2B, and it survives mostly because no one has stopped to ask why we still do it the way we do.

The teams that are getting this right are quietly retiring the MQL as the unit of account and replacing it with a behaviorally grounded scoreboard that both functions own. The friction goes away because the incentive to game the metric goes away.

I think about that lost friendship more than I expected to. Not because I think the relationship could have been saved — I’m honestly not sure it could have. But because I’ve come to believe the system we were operating inside put both of us in a position where someone was eventually going to make a choice like the one he made. I’d rather spend the rest of my career making sure other CMOs and CROs don’t end up in that same position than relitigate who was right.

Build the shared scoreboard. Retire the handoff. Protect the partnership.