Why It's Time to Bury the MQL – With Jon Miller, the Marketo Co-Founder Who Helped Popularize It
About this episode
Jon Miller discusses the failures of traditional B2B marketing strategies and the need for a modern approach.
Jon Miller co-founded Marketo, the company that helped turn MQLs, lead scoring, and the demand waterfall into the operating system of B2B marketing. Now he's the one telling you to throw most of it out. When Jon did the same playbook at Demandbase that worked brilliantly at Marketo, it flopped. That failure changed how he thinks about almost everything. In this conversation, Carolyn sits down with Jon, co-founder of Marketo and Engagio (which merged with Demandbase), to dig into why the traditional B2B marketing playbook stopped working, what brand actually does for demand gen that most teams never account for, and what a modern measurement framework should look like in 2026. What we cover: Why the same playbook that worked at Marketo failed at Demandbase Why MQLs aren't inherently bad, but how they became a game most marketing teams were rigging without realizing it The case against marketing-sourced vs. sales-sourced attribution (and why it breaks the teamwork you need to win) What a modern CMO dashboard should actually include Why the buying process is chaotic and nonlinear and why treating it like a simple funnel has always been the wrong model How AI is finally making true…
More episodes of GTM Live
- Identifying Your Marketing Levers When the CRM Data Isn’t Perfect (data trust, finding leverage fast, AI analytics hallucinations)
- Why Marketing Can't See Its Own Impact (The Answer is in Your RevOps Setup)
- What a SaaS CMO and VP of RevOps Found Hiding in Their Own Data
- Why Most Marketing Leaders Can't Prove Their Revenue Impact [Workshop Recording]
- What 4 Days in Florida Taught Us (AI, SEO, Product Marketing, Brand Investments & More)
- “If Attribution Worked, Nobody Would Fight About It” – with Matthew Sciannella
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the GTM Live podcast page.