Fifty-five percent of B2B professionals said increasing MQL-to-opportunity conversion was one of their top three demand-generation goals for 2025, while 52% prioritized better measurement of demand-gen ROI, according to Demand Gen Report’s 2025 Demand Generation Benchmark Survey.
Thirty-one percent also wanted to move away from lead volume and MQL generation toward more high-quality leads.
That puts greater weight on what happens after a lead is generated, from qualification and sales acceptance to opportunity creation and revenue.
So, how many leads does sales really need?
After all, a campaign can produce a healthy stream of form fills while sales spends its time sorting through accounts with little chance of becoming customers.
When that happens, generating more leads only adds to the problem.
That makes “no” a more useful word in marketing meetings:
- No to poor-fit prospects.
- No to channels that produce cheap inquiries with little sales value.
- No to campaigns that look productive in a dashboard while consuming time elsewhere in the business.
Disruptive Advertising has made a similar argument in its recent work on lead generation.
Founder and CEO Jacob Baadsgaard says marketing teams need agreement on what success looks like before money is committed, with attention placed on business outcomes rather than activity alone:
“Lead volume is only useful when it leads to revenue. Marketing teams need to look at what happens after a lead comes in, then use that information to decide which campaigns deserve more budget and which ones need to be reduced.”
Quality Does Not Mean Giving Up Volume
Some 93.8% of marketers said lead quality had improved over the previous 12 months, and 24.5% said lead volume had increased significantly. Half said it had somewhat increased, according to HubSpot’s 2026 State of Marketing data.
The research drew on responses from more than 1,500 marketers across the globe.
“The harder task is deciding which activity deserves additional budget and which activity can be left behind,” Baadsgaard says.
That decision becomes easier when marketing and sales agree on what counts as a useful lead.
“Company fit, job role, buying intent and progression into an opportunity tell a more useful story than a raw lead total,” he adds.
Disruptive has made the same point through its own advertising work.
In one example, the agency found that campaigns were producing large numbers of inexpensive leads while revenue was falling because lead quality had deteriorated.
Disruptive says the sales team had to process five times as many leads to make a sale.
After lead quality was added to campaign decisions, lower-quality campaigns could be reduced when sales capacity was under pressure.
Marketing Budgets Leave Less Room for Weak Channels
Fifty-six percent of CMOs say their marketing organization lacks the budget needed to execute its 2026 strategy, while 54% report insufficient resources, according to Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey.
Those budget limits leave less room for campaigns that generate activity without producing sales opportunities.
AI adds another reason to pay attention to what happens after a lead is generated.
Disruptive has warned that Google and Meta can produce large volumes of unqualified leads when campaigns are trained around inexpensive clicks or leads.
Its recommendation is to feed later-stage outcomes, such as qualified appointments and closed revenue, into campaign decisions.
Marketers, therefore, have to decide what the advertising system should pursue.
Cheap leads can still be useful, but only when they connect to the business outcomes that matter.
The change in thinking is therefore less about producing fewer leads and more about refusing to treat every lead as equally valuable.
Baadsgaard advises marketing teams to connect advertising decisions to revenue from the start.
“The most useful question is what happened after the lead came in. Campaigns should be judged by qualified opportunities and closed deals, so budget follows the activity that produces revenue.”
That requires better reporting conversations.
“If reporting stops at clicks, form fills or other early actions, the team is missing the part of the journey that determines business value," Baadsgaard says.
“CRM data should feed back into the ad accounts, so campaigns learn which leads become customers.”
The goal is to connect ad performance to the revenue those leads eventually generate
“Start with the sale and trace the journey back to the campaigns and clicks that contributed to it.”
“That gives marketing a much better basis for deciding what deserves more budget and what should be reduced,” Baadsgaard adds.
Lead quality needs to be judged by what happens after acquisition.
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