What if you didn’t follow up on MQLs?

What if you ignored your high intent signals — no follow-ups, no calls, no emails — to see if leads would self-identify and reach out?

It sounds counterintuitive, but if a lead is really interested (at least according to your scoring tools), shouldn’t they eventually fill out a form or call you? That’s the experiment we’ve been running.

For the past six weeks, we’ve been tracking web traffic, testing something many clients would love to try but can’t: no outbound calls, nudges or follow-ups — just observation.

The experiment setup

Using Warmly, we set parameters around ICPs, buyer personas and first- and third-party intent signals. For this test, visitors had to meet two criteria:

• Spend at least 28 seconds on the site.
• Visit at least two pages.

The results: Who showed up

After filtering out competitors and consultants, 15 visitors from the last 45 days met the criteria:

• 10 moderate-confidence leads.
• 3 high-confidence leads.
• 2 very high-confidence leads.

The terms “lead” and “confidence level” are defined by the tools tracking their activity. 

Our highest-intent visitor returned 24 times over two weeks, spending 26 minutes across pages like Team, Services, Solutions and Blogs. That sounds qualified, right? We’re still waiting for a form submission.

Dig deeper: 5 suggestions for moving beyond MQLs

Why didn’t they convert?

A closer look revealed four likely reasons:

• Bad data: Some contacts were miscategorized, such as people tied to a company but no longer employed there. 
• Poor descriptors: The tool calls visitors and their behaviors “leads,” which is overly confident.
• Wrong fit: Our personality profiling showed some visitors were exploring on behalf of others or just casually browsing.
• The nature of our business – We don’t sell widgets. We sell consultative, relationship-driven services. Our sales cycle is longer and depends heavily on trust and timing.

The MQL game everyone plays

Imagine we pushed these visitors into HubSpot as leads, like most organizations do. Here’s the dirty little secret both marketing and sales know (but rarely say out loud):

• Marketing knows many of these leads aren’t qualified but still has targets to hit, so they get passed along. 
• Sales knows it too, but SDRs need something to chase.

And so the cycle continues.

With the explosion of tools that capture anyone who glances at a website, we’re generating more contacts than ever. But calling them leads is misleading. At best, they’re responses.

This creates a ripple effect inside organizations. 

• SDRs spend their days chasing people who never asked to be contacted, which inflates activity metrics but doesn’t move revenue forward. 
• Marketing feels pressure to prove ROI by pushing names down the funnel.
• Sales wastes energy qualifying people who were never prospects in the first place. 

It’s busywork disguised as pipeline. Worse, it damages brand perception. Think about the buyer’s experience. They casually browse a blog and within 24 hours, they’re getting cold outreach from a rep who assumes they’re ready to buy. 

Instead of building trust, that approach erodes it. Prospects stop engaging, unsubscribe or ghost entirely. What could have become a warm, organic relationship now feels like a pushy sales play.

Sales teams, once quick to ignore these non-qualified names, now burn rep capacity trying to turn responses into leads. It sounds ridiculous because it is.

But here’s the thing: I’ve never met a sales leader who’ll willingly give up headcount. The mindset is, “The more reps I have, the better chance I’ll hit quota.” And the game continues.

Dig deeper: Why the MQL model is failing B2B marketing and what to use instead

Breaking the cycle

The only way out is for marketing and sales to get brutally honest about how ineffective this cycle is — and start aligning around realistic performance goals.

The winners? Potentially everyone:

• Marketing stops chasing vanity metrics.
• Sales spends time on truly qualified conversations.
• Prospects get the freedom to explore without being hounded the moment they click.

Forward-looking organizations are already rethinking the model. Instead of measuring success by the number of MQLs, they’re shifting toward deeper funnel metrics that reflect actual buying intent:

• Meetings or demos requested.
• Trials.
• Even hand-raisers who explicitly ask for help. 

The difference is that these signals come from prospects on their terms, not from an arbitrary threshold in a marketing automation tool. Just because you can track every visitor doesn’t mean you should hand them off. 

Give prospects space to explore your company, your services and your value at their own pace — and let them raise their hand when ready. Doing so saves your team time and energy, and leads to better conversations when the moment is right.

Stop counting MQLs — start counting conversations

If you want to build real pipeline, shift the focus away from vanity numbers (because sales doesn’t believe them either) and toward genuine intent. 

Let your buyers engage when they’re ready, not when your lead-scoring system says they should. That’s where trust begins — and where growth actually happens.

Dig deeper: How strong brands build stronger B2B pipelines