Demandbase — the company that built an entire category on “MQLs are dead, MQAs are the future” — just published a mea culpa. Their words: they rushed to make friends with the new kid and left MQLs in the dust.
Their new recommendation? Run both. Simultaneously. As parallel funnels.
Welcome to the party. I’ve been holding your seat.
The Industry Created a False Binary (Then Sold Software Against It)
Here’s what actually happened over the last decade. ABM platform vendors needed a wedge to sell against the entrenched marketing automation incumbents. That wedge was “MQLs are broken.” Conferences amplified it. Analysts validated it. Thought leaders built careers on it. And a generation of B2B marketers internalized a false choice: you’re either running a lead funnel (old, unsophisticated) or an account funnel (modern, strategic).
Except nobody told the CFO.
The CFO still wanted cost-per-lead. The board still wanted to know acquisition cost by channel. Sales still chased human beings who raised their hands, not abstract account scores. And every CMO who showed up to a QBR saying “we don’t track MQLs anymore, we track MQAs” got the same look — the one that says explain to me how you’re spending my money.
I’ve sat across the table from PE operating partners asking exactly that question. The answer was never “pick one.” The answer was always “build architecture that speaks both languages.”
What Double-Funnel Actually Means (Without the Marketing Theater)
A double-funnel isn’t two disconnected pipelines and it isn’t a compromise. It’s one revenue journey measured through two lenses: people and accounts.
Lead/MQL path: Your classic inbound and demand motion. Someone downloads something, attends something, requests something. You measure them as a human — inquiry to MQL to SAL to opportunity to revenue. This is the math your CFO understands and your finance team can model.
Account/MQA path: Your ABM motion. Multiple people at a target account showing coordinated engagement. You measure the account — target to engaged to MQA to opportunity to revenue. This is how buying committees actually behave.
Both paths converge at the same pipeline stages. Same meetings. Same opportunities.
Same closed/won revenue. You’re not running competing systems — you’re running synchronized measurement of the same messy, multi-threaded buying process that complex B2B has always been.
Why This Matters More If You’re PE-Backed
Here’s where this gets pointed for the people I work with.
If you’re a marketing leader in a PE-backed company, you don’t have the luxury of ideological purity about metrics. You need to answer two questions in every board meeting, and they require different funnels to answer:
“What’s the cost to acquire a customer and which channels are efficient?” — That’s lead math. Person-level attribution. MQL conversion rates. CAC by source. Kill your lead funnel and you can’t answer this. Your operating partner will notice.
“Are we focused on the right accounts and is sales working the highest-value opportunities?” — That’s account math. Target account coverage. Engagement velocity.
Pipeline concentration in ICP. Kill your account funnel and you’re back to spray-and-pray with a Salesforce dashboard on top.
The companies I see win aren’t choosing between these questions. They’re building systems that answer both — with clean data, shared stage definitions, and routing logic that treats an MQL and an MQA with equal urgency.
The Real Maturity Line
The debate was never MQL vs. MQA. That was vendor marketing dressed up as thought leadership.
The real maturity line is between organizations running a single-funnel reporting model — picking one lens and hoping it captures enough signal — and organizations running double-funnel revenue architecture where people and accounts are parallel views into the same revenue engine.
If you’re still being told to “move to MQA” like it’s a destination, ask a different question:
Why are we abandoning measurement our CFO needs to adopt measurement our board doesn’t understand yet?
Build both. Synchronize them. Report in whatever language the room requires. That’s not a compromise — that’s operational fluency.
The irony of the company most associated with killing MQLs now recommending you run them in parallel is not lost on me. Sometimes the best vindication is just… patience.