You're counting MQLs, but your CRM is counting something else entirely

Good Morning {{first_name}}!

It’s Wednesday - and that means it’s time for your Property Playbook - an issue where we dig into your CRM’s properties to give you better results with improved strategy.

Simple. 💅

Listen, lifecycle stages are great. However, it’s just a bucket of people. The date at which people entered the different stages is more important. Because an MQL who entered this stage a week ago is much different than someone who has been sitting there for 18 months.

Pull up your contact properties. We are going on a field trip.

Let's get into it.

Most CRMs have this record. Sometimes, it’s auto-filled (because it makes sense).

This field records the exact date and time a contact entered the MQL stage in your Lifecycle Stage Pipeline. When it is populated, you can calculate time-to-MQL, spot seasonal qualification patterns, and build workflows that actually respond to when a contact crossed that threshold, not just that they did.

Here’s the harsh truth - marketing must capitalize on MQLs when they are true MQLs. MQLs go through time decay.

Here is what we see in almost every portal: Lifecycle Stage is at 100% fill rate. The MQL entry date is at 0%, or the MQL entry date field isn’t leveraged at all in marketing efforts.

You have the foundation with lifecycle stages, and you can count the number of contacts - thus, the volume of MQLs. But who tracks how those MQLs are moving through the funnel?

Marketers focus on nurture, but the timestamp gets ignored because MQL reporting tends to stop at quantity. How many contacts hit MQL this month? That is the question. How long did it take, and what triggered it? Those questions do not get asked.

When marketing is measured on MQL volume, the incentive is to lower the bar. Every webinar attendee becomes an MQL. Every content download becomes an MQL. This is a structural problem, and it shows up in the data as a lifecycle stage that is always moving forward but never being audited.

And the decay rate means MQLs slowly become leads, disengaged and become a lost cost.

If you have a 0% fill rate on this field, that means no one has checked whether the contacts that entered MQL were actually ready, or just counted.

Retention signal: if your MQL entry dates are blank, you also cannot calculate how long it took a contact to become a client. That gap shows up later, quietly, when retention is lower than it should be and no one can explain why.

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Here are three things to explore this week:

Play 1: MQL Audit Workflow

Trigger: “Date Entered as MQL” is known AND the contact has been in the MQL stage for more than 30 days without progressing to SQL.

Action: flag for sales review and send an internal notification. This surfaces the contacts sitting in a stage they should have moved out of.

Play 2: Time-to-MQL Baseline Report

Use “Date Entered as Lead” alongside “Date Entered to calculate the average lead-to-MQL time. Once you have a baseline, you can set workflow triggers for contacts moving faster or slower than average; both are worth paying attention to.

Play 3: Re-qualification Check for Long-Stalled MQLs

If a contact entered MQL more than 90 days ago and has never exited, “Date Existed MQL Stage”, route them to a re-engagement sequence. The goal is not to push them forward. It is to find out whether they should still be in the pipeline at all.

Go to Contacts > Filter > Add filter > Contact properties > Search "date entered Marketing Qualified Lead."

Set the filter to "is unknown." That list is your starting point.

If this is the conversation you have been putting off, 44fjord works with teams to build the foundation that makes these numbers trustworthy. If you want to talk about what a partnership could look like, reach out to the team using the contact form on 44fjord.com/contact

In case you missed our Q1 Signals Report, you can grab it here.

Lastly, our Lifecycle Audit Checklist is gearing up for release in June! This audit checklist comes with a video guide to walk you through what to look for, how to diagnose it and a good amount of solutions to keep things moving forward in your funnel.

TL;DR

MQL volume is not a marketing metric, but rather a counting metric. The number only means something when you can tell me when it happened, how long it took, and whether it led anywhere. If your entry date field is empty, you are not measuring MQLs. You are measuring stage assignments. Those are very different things and make a huge impact on your pipeline and reporting meetings.