The Quarterly Liars Club

Vendors and distributors demand high lead volumes to satisfy Boardrooms, and partners provide inflated MQL counts to keep the MDF (Marketing Development Funds) flowing. 

Both sides know the "leads" are mostly junk, but the system rewards the charade.  It doesn't matter how big the dataset is, how fabulous the content is; just because someone downloads something interesting, no amount of railroading them is going to make them place a PO in that quarter, unless they're ready, unless you've dropped lucky with a bluebird.

It sounds obvious; many concur, and then return to the age-old practices because the 'system' doesn't allow for anything else.

It’s time to resign from the club. If you want a pipeline that converts, you have to stop valuing activity and start valuing velocity.

The death of the “lead count” metric

In a world of Intent-Qualified Leads (IQLs), the old scorecard is your biggest enemy. If you’re still measuring success by the number of names entered into a CRM, you are incentivising waste. A partner who passes 10 high-intent, account-level opportunities is infinitely more valuable than one who passes 500 webinar "clicks."

We need to kill the "more is better" mantra. The new metric for channel success isn't volume; it’s high-value sales conversations. If the lead doesn't have the context to spark a real dialogue, it shouldn't be in the report.

Rebuilding the bridge of partner trust

The biggest casualty of the MQL mantra isn't just the budget; it's trust. Sales teams stopped looking at marketing leads because they were tired of having to live the lie. By shifting the focus to IQLs, you aren't just "improving quality"; you're performing a cultural reset.

When a partner knows that a vendor lead is backed by genuine intent data and a clear narrative, they prioritise it. 

When a vendor sees that a partner is only passing "ready" deals, they invest more. This creates a trust dividend: a faster, leaner, and more profitable feedback loop that actually scales.

CRMs full of clicks and opens are often just graveyards leads that were never going to be.  They look good on a spreadsheet but they stall your business. Real growth comes from velocity; how quickly an account moves from a signal to a signature.

Intent-based marketing allows you to stop "nurturing" people who will never buy and start accelerating the ones who are already moving. It’s the difference between a clogged pipe and a high-pressure stream. You don't need a bigger funnel; you need a clearer path.

It takes a backbone to report smaller numbers (in the beginning)

The hardest part of moving to an IQL model is the "optics." Reporting 20 leads when you used to report 200 feels like a failure to the uninitiated. But the organisations that win are the ones brave enough to trade the illusion of scale for the reality of revenue.  Get it right, and there's no reason why that 200 isn't achievable again - but with a pipeline that is far better quality, just by taking a different approach.

Your sales team shouldn’t be wasting time churning through the “lead mill”, they should be doing what they do best:  Building relationships that close.