Marketing Qualified Lead is still the headline B2B metric and still wrong. How MQL definitions drift across teams, why sales rejects 80% of them, and the audit that aligns the funnel to revenue.
B2B marketing pillar — the structural shifts (MQL is a lie, dark funnel, AI Citation Share), attribution and measurement, demand creation versus demand generation, the 2026 operating model, and why B2B compounds inside AI engines.
The Marketing Qualified Lead is a comfort blanket, not a performance indicator. Complex buying cycles. Anonymous decision-making. The dark funnel. Why B2B marketing kept reporting on the wrong number.
