Emilio Garcia warns that marketers optimize for Marketing Qualified Leads as if they were the goal itself, when they're just a proxy for revenue. Teams broaden the definition and reward the metric alone, losing sight of what actually drives business results.
for most marketers, either themselves or their bosses might lose a little bit of the connection with that idea. It becomes an optimization by just optimization. You lose connection with the concept that that metric is just an approximation to what you truly want. And then you start, then you start focusing solely on the metric rather than in the true impact. I think that's the context that I want to add, right? That is that when you say, well, I'm really going to reward the team on MQLs, you can run into the— usually the most typical scenario that happens is that because the definition of MQLs sometimes falls directly into the marketing department. Then you start being broader and broader on what is an MQL. That's a mistake, right? The forgetting that MQLs are a proxy for the true impact, which is revenue.
