Buying groups vs MQLs: what changes when you stop counting leads

An MQL is a marketing qualified lead: a single person whose score crossed a threshold, usually from form fills, email clicks and page visits. A buying group is the set of people inside an account who will make or influence a specific purchase. The first model asks "is this person ready?" The second asks "is this group, for this opportunity, moving?"

Forrester's analysts set out the problem in their "Saying Goodbye To MQLs" series: MQLs do not make purchase decisions alone, passing leads one at a time strips away the context of the decision, and many organizations still run revenue processes built around a single lead while buyers purchase as groups. Their Buyers' Journey Survey 2023 found that 93% of B2B buyers participated in a buying group of two or more people and 71% in a group of four or more.

The gap is wider for enterprise deals. Forrester's State of Business Buying 2026 reports that on average 13 internal stakeholders and nine external participants influence buying decisions. An MQL model sees whoever filled in a form.

The strongest published example is a Forrester client story. Forrester reports that in Palo Alto Networks' pilot, opportunities with multiple people attached were "eight times more likely to advance in the pipeline" than opportunities with one person, and that the focus on buying groups led to larger deals and a "17% higher closed-won rate." Treat it as one company's result, reported by its advisor, not as a benchmark.

Forrester's analysts also relay client feedback that when marketing delivers three or more buying group members to sales, clients see "a 50% increase in their conversion rates from meetings to closed won." That is anecdotal, but it points to the measure that matters: how much of the group is engaged when sales starts work.

Your own CRM can test the same idea before you change anything. Compare win rate and cycle length for closed opportunities with one contact role against those with three or more. If the difference is material, you have your internal case.

1. Define the buying roles for your main opportunity types with sales, usually five to eight roles, and the minimum set that signals a qualified group.
2. Link contacts to accounts and to opportunities, using buying roles on contacts and contact roles on opportunities.
3. Change scoring so signals add up at account and group level, and stop discarding later engagement from the same account as duplicates.
4. Change routing so sales receives an account view with roles engaged and missing, not a stream of individual leads.
5. Change targets: replace MQL volume with opportunities that have a qualified buying group, pipeline and win rate.
6. Run old and new reports side by side for one quarter, then switch the headline target.

The reporting work is where most teams stall. Our guide to MQL to buying group reporting in HubSpot and Salesforce covers the definitions, fields and dashboards in each CRM.

• Sales will lose leads: they will receive fewer, richer handoffs with the account context attached. Keep fast routing for direct hand-raisers such as demo requests.
• We cannot identify the whole group: you do not need to. Start with the roles you can see and add anonymous account-level activity as a signal, as Forrester’s analysts recommend.
• Our targets are set in MQLs for this year: run the buying group view in parallel and propose the switch at the next planning cycle with your own evidence.
• The CRM is not ready: fix contact-to-account links and opportunity roles first; they are worth doing whatever model you use.

Forrester's analysts list the same barriers in their 2023 review of the shift: a cultural attachment to MQLs, fear that sales will not engage and concern that the change is too difficult. None of them is a technical problem.

No. Buying groups describe how customers buy; ABM is one way to sell to them. A demand generation program that captures inbound interest can still qualify by buying group rather than by lead. ABM programs depend on buying groups more heavily, because coverage of the group in target accounts is their main lever.

Buying group qualification also helps inbound programs that are not account-based. When a demo request arrives from an account where three other people read pricing and integration pages that month, the request deserves a different response from a single student download. The model makes that context visible to whoever follows up.

If you are also moving to account-based programs, our 90-day plan for migrating from lead-based demand generation to ABM sequences both changes so sales sees one process, not two.

We still use MQLs as a diagnostic during the transition, because they show where individual interest is rising. We stop using them as the target, because a target shapes behaviour, and an MQL target rewards volume from the wrong people.

Our ABM services team and our RevOps team run this switch with marketing, sales and finance together.

For the role mapping and plays that build consensus inside accounts, see our buying group consensus program.

If you want to test the case on your own closed deals, talk to our team.