If you’re still measuring marketing success by the number of MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) you generate, you’re optimizing for a metric that no longer reflects reality. Recent research from The APAC B2B Buyer Journey Research Report by Green Hat and 6sense has revealed a shocking truth that should completely reshape your approach to B2B marketing:

Buying decisions aren’t made by individuals; they’re made by committees of 12.8 people on average.

Yep, that’s right. You need nearly 13 people to make a B2B purchase decision. 

And, yet, most marketing teams still track, measure, and report on individual leads as if a single person somewhere is making those decisions alone. It’s time to face facts: The MQL as we know it is essentially dead. So what should you focus on instead? Let’s dive into the more relevant metrics for B2B marketers—and how to shape your strategies around them.

The Problem with Traditional Lead-Based Marketing

For decades, B2B marketers have obsessed over the MQL. We’ve built elaborate scoring models to determine when an individual lead crosses the magical threshold from “not ready” to “sales ready.” We’ve created content nurture flows designed to move individuals through the funnel. We’ve celebrated every time a prospect downloads a whitepaper or attends a webinar.

But there’s a glaring disconnect between this approach and how B2B buying actually happens today.

According to the The APAC B2B Buyer Journey Research Report:

• B2B buying committees (again, averaging 12.8 stakeholders) engage in approximately 1,280 interactions during their buying journey.
• 82% of buyers have their requirements mostly set before contacting vendors.
• 82% of buyers reach out to their preferred (and eventually winning) vendor first.
• The average buying journey spans 13 months, with first vendor contact typically happening around 9.5 months.

These stats highlight the futility of a lead-centric approach. When a single person fills out a form or engages with your content, you’re seeing just one person—basically, one piece of a much larger buying puzzle. 

This is why B2B marketers need to look beyond individuals and tailor marketing efforts to buying groups. 

Why Buying Groups Matter More 

Buying teams are complex ecosystems with diverse roles. 

Each role has different priorities, concerns, and information needs. The CEO cares about strategic value and ROI. The technical team cares about implementation and integration. Procurement worries about vendor risk and contract terms.

The research also shows that these buying teams have different interaction patterns and influences on timelines:

• C-suite involvement typically leads to shorter buying cycles and smaller buying groups.
• IT and HR involvement correlates with longer cycles and larger buying groups

Additionally, because of the weight of these decisions, 77% of organizations hire external consultants or analysts to guide decision-making. 

Therefore, a single MQL—regardless of how “qualified” they seem—can’t possibly represent this diverse set of perspectives and needs. These buying patterns are also impossible to capture in traditional lead-scoring models. A high-scoring MQL from IT might actually indicate a longer, more complex buying process—not an opportunity that’s closer to closing. This is why it’s important to zoom out and look at the collective behavior of the buying group.

What Are the Better Metrics to Measure? 

It’s time to replace MQLs with metrics that better reflect how B2B buying works today. Luckily, there are two metrics that will help you shape more effective strategies. 

1) Marketing Qualified Accounts (MQAs)

MQAs focus on company-level engagement rather than individual activity. This means you don’t analyze if the individual is ready to talk to sales or not. You analyze whether or not the company is showing buying signals.  

An account becomes “qualified” when:

• Multiple stakeholders engage with your content.
• Engagement spans different departments or roles.
• Content consumption aligns with typical buying patterns.
• Engagement intensity increases over time.

Through this lens, you can better identify an actual opportunity—not just an individual with a passing interest.

2) Marketing Qualified Opportunities (MQOs)

For companies with multiple products or solutions, MQOs take the concept a step further by focusing on specific opportunities within accounts. This approach:

• Aligns marketing metrics with sales pipeline.
• Recognizes that different buying groups may form around different initiatives.
• Enables more precise tracking of marketing influence on revenue.

An opportunity becomes “qualified” when:

• Multiple stakeholders engage with content about a specific solution.
• Their engagement patterns suggest an active buying process.
• Content consumption progresses through typical evaluation stages.
• Interactions indicate growing consensus around a specific need.

By tracking MQOs, you’re not just seeing which accounts are active but which specific solutions they’re evaluating, allowing you to deliver precisely targeted content to the right buying group at the right time, with a measurable impact on pipeline and revenue.

How to Implement This Shift

Transitioning your focus from individuals to buying groups is a huge mental shift, but it also requires tactical changes to your strategy, tech stack, and measurement infrastructure. These are some of the most important immediate actions to take.

1) Map the full buying committee.

Begin by understanding who’s typically involved in purchase decisions for your solutions:

• Identify all stakeholder roles and their typical concerns.
• Understand their relationship to each other.
• Map their involvement at different buying stages.
• Document their typical content needs and preferences.

Tip: Interview your last 10 closed-won deals to identify all stakeholders who were involved. Ask your champion to draw an actual map of who influenced the decision and at what stage. You’ll likely discover 3-4 “hidden influencers” who never directly engaged with your marketing or sales teams but had significant sway in the decision. Although it may be tedious to do this exercise, it can drastically improve your results. 

For example, let’s say you’re a CRM platform. After mapping your typical buying committee, you might find that while IT stakeholders are your most engaged audience, finance leaders are actually the most influential in final decisions (despite having minimal content engagement). With this insight, you might create a piece of content like The Finance Leader’s Guide to CRM ROI that IT champions could share upward. By addressing a critical stakeholder’s concerns early in the process, this single piece of content could notably accelerate decision-making.

2) Create multi-stakeholder content strategies.

With deeper insight into who makes up a buying committee and what their individual needs are, you can develop content that speaks more directly to them. 

• Create role-specific content that addresses unique concerns.
• Develop “consensus-building” content that helps align diverse stakeholders.
• Design content packages that can be easily shared among committee members.
• Create tools that help buying groups collaborate on decisions.

Tip: Create “buying committee bundles”—curated sets of resources packaged together for easy sharing. For example, when someone downloads a technical whitepaper, offer them a bundle that includes an executive summary for leadership, ROI calculator for finance, implementation timeline for project managers, and security documentation for IT. This approach acknowledges the reality that your direct contact is likely gathering information on behalf of multiple stakeholders.

You can also create distinct content tracks within a single piece of content by including role-specific sections that speak to individuals’ needs/wants. This facilitates the committee-based buying process, making it easier for your audience to get the information they need.

3) Implement account-based technologies.

Most legacy marketing automation systems were built for lead-based marketing. To effectively engage buying groups, you need:

• Account-based marketing (ABM) platforms that track account-level engagement.
• Intent data tools that identify anonymous research activity.
• Content intelligence platforms that analyze content consumption patterns.
• Journey orchestration tools that can manage multi-person experiences.

Tip: Start with the technology you already have. Most marketing automation platforms can be configured to support basic account-based approaches through contact-to-account mapping and account-level scoring models. Before investing in new technology, you can maximize your existing tools while building the business case for more sophisticated solutions.

4) Redefine qualification models.

In lieu of lead scoring, implement account scoring or opportunity scoring:

• Develop models that consider the number of engaged stakeholders.
• Weight engagement by role and activity type.
• Include intent signals and anonymous research activity.
• Factor in typical buying patterns for your industry.

Tip: You can build a buying group coverage score with this formula:

1. Identify the 5-7 key roles typically involved in purchasing your solution.
2. Assign a weight to each role based on their influence (e.g., Economic Buyer = 30%, Technical Evaluator = 25%).
3. Track engagement by role across the account.
4. Calculate a percentage score representing how much of your ideal buying group is engaged.

Note: If you’re using Marketo, HubSpot, or similar traditional marketing automation, start by creating a simple account scoring model that aggregates individual lead scores at the account level. Then create a “buying role” field for contacts and weight activities differently based on role. This gives you basic buying group insights even without specialized ABM technology.

5) Reimagine performance metrics.

As you shift focus from leads to accounts and opportunities, your performance metrics must evolve too:

• Track account engagement rather than form completions.
• Measure buying group coverage. (What percentage of the typical buying group is engaged?)
• Monitor journey progression at the account level.
• Evaluate marketing influence on pipeline and revenue.

Example dashboard metrics:

• Buying Group Coverage: Percentage of key roles engaged per account.
• Multi-Thread Rate: Average number of contacts engaged per account.
• Account Journey Progression: Movement through defined account stages.
• Time to Committee Formation: How quickly you identify and engage multiple stakeholders.
• Pipeline Influence: Marketing touchpoints across all buying committee members.

Tip: Don’t abandon lead metrics overnight. Instead, create a transitional dashboard that shows both lead-based and account-based metrics side by side. Track conversions at both levels for 3-6 months to demonstrate the superior predictive power of buying group metrics. This helps you build organizational confidence in the new approach.

6) Give yourself time to transition.

Don’t expect to transform your entire marketing approach overnight. Marketing stakeholders who are accustomed to lead metrics may want to resist the change (understandably), but you can address their concerns by:

• Showing the research that supports the buying group approach.
• Running pilots that demonstrate improved results.
• Creating transitional metrics that bridge the gap between leads and groups.  

Just start with a single high-value segment. Select one product line or market segment and implement a buying group approach for that segment only. This can be your controlled experiment to demonstrate the effectiveness of the new approach. 

Remember that you’re not abandoning all aspects of lead generation. Individual interactions still matter—but they matter as pieces of a larger account engagement strategy, not as standalone indicators of sales readiness.

Focus on the complete picture of account engagement, craft strategies that address the full buying committee, implement technologies that support buying group journeys, and you’ll be able to forge ahead of your competition—one buying group at a time. 

(BTW, if you’re not sure where to start, you might need the right partner to support your ABM strategies. Find out more about how we can help you become our next case study.)