Leads are dead. Now what? Rethinking B2B fintech lead generation with Tom Kelly of spektr
From MQLs to buying committees, account engagement and pipeline: what our latest FMH Pulse discussion with Tom Kelly (VP Marketing at spektr) revealed about the future of B2B fintech demand generation.
For years, B2B marketers have been measured by their ability to generate leads.
More form submissions, more gated content downloads, more webinar registrations, and more marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) handed over to sales.
And yet, despite increasingly sophisticated marketing technology, attribution models and automation, the same uncomfortable question keeps coming back:
How much of this activity is actually helping the business win customers?
B2B fintech lead generation has a measurement problem. Traditional metrics can tell us how many individuals have interacted with our marketing, but often reveal far less about whether the businesses we want to reach are genuinely moving closer to a purchasing decision.
That was the starting point for our October edition of Pulse, the Fintech Marketing Hub's monthly community conversation, featuring Tom Kelly, VP of Marketing at spektr.
Under the deliberately provocative title Leads Are Dead. Now What?, we explored one of the biggest tensions facing B2B fintech marketers today: the disconnect between what marketing traditionally measures and what the business ultimately wants to achieve.
What followed was a conversation that went beyond the familiar argument that MQLs are an outdated metric.
We discussed what marketers should measure instead, how account-based marketing (ABM) could offer a more meaningful picture of demand, why engagement scoring and revenue operations matter, and how to demonstrate marketing's contribution when the buyer journey involves multiple people, channels and months of interaction.
We also tackled a growing challenge: as AI makes content easier to produce and companies increasingly turn to real-world experiences to differentiate themselves, what will genuinely earn the attention of B2B buyers next?
The key takeaway? Leads still have a role in B2B marketing. But counting leads alone rarely captures the complexity of demand generation. A more useful approach connects account fit, buying-group engagement and pipeline progression to understand whether marketing is helping the right companies become customers.
Here are the ideas worth unpacking.
Find your fintech marketing tribe.
Join 5,000+ fintech marketing minds across 42 countries shaping what's next. Follow for insights, subscribe for fresh perspectives, or join the FMH Inner Network to connect, collaborate and grow. Free for brand-side, in-house fintech marketers.
1. Are MQLs still useful for B2B fintech lead generation?
Let's start with a distinction.
A lead is not inherently worthless. Someone expressing interest in your product, downloading a report or attending your webinar can absolutely represent a meaningful commercial opportunity.
But a lead is an individual signal, not necessarily evidence of organisational buying intent.
And that distinction becomes particularly important in B2B fintech.
Consider a company evaluating a new payments infrastructure provider, compliance platform or financial technology solution.
The final purchasing decision might involve a product leader, CTO, compliance team, finance department, procurement and senior management.
These stakeholders have different priorities, different concerns and different levels of involvement in the decision.
Yet traditional lead generation often reduces this complexity to a surprisingly narrow question:
Did someone fill in a form?
The problem is that this tells us very little about what is happening inside the wider organisation.
A junior employee might download three reports without any immediate purchasing intention. Meanwhile, several senior decision-makers at a strategically important target account could be engaging with your content, seeing your campaigns and discussing your solution internally without ever submitting a form.
Under a traditional MQL-focused reporting model, the first scenario could appear more successful than the second.
This is where the fundamental shift discussed during Pulse begins.
Rather than asking how many individual leads marketing generated, marketers should increasingly ask:
Are we building meaningful engagement within the organisations that are most likely to become customers?
It sounds like a subtle change in language. In practice, it requires a significantly different way of thinking about B2B lead generation, marketing measurement, targeting and the relationship between marketing and sales.
2. From MQLs to account engagement: rethinking account-based marketing metrics
One of the strongest themes of our conversation with Tom was the importance of measuring engagement across target accounts, rather than looking at isolated interactions.
In a B2B environment, particularly one involving complex products and extended sales cycles, demand rarely emerges from a single campaign or touchpoint.
An account might encounter your brand through LinkedIn advertising, industry content, organic search, a webinar, an event and direct conversations with your sales team.
Different people within that account might engage with different activities.
Individually, these interactions may seem insignificant.
Collectively, they can help build a picture of whether the organisation is becoming more familiar with your brand, exploring a particular problem or moving towards a potential buying decision.
The account, rather than the individual lead, becomes an increasingly useful unit of measurement.
This introduces several important dimensions to marketing performance.
Account coverage: Are we reaching the businesses that matter most to our commercial strategy?
Buying-group engagement: Are we engaging multiple relevant stakeholders within those businesses, or repeatedly reaching the same individual?
Engagement depth: Are target accounts demonstrating progressively more meaningful interactions with our content, events and campaigns?
Engagement over time: Is activity growing, remaining consistent or declining?
Commercial progression: Are engaged accounts moving towards sales conversations, opportunities and ultimately revenue?
Crucially, these dimensions should not be treated as interchangeable.
An account repeatedly seeing paid advertising is not necessarily showing purchase intent. A high number of impressions demonstrates exposure, not automatically meaningful engagement.
But when signals are considered together, and connected to an agreed target-account strategy, marketers have the potential to build a much more useful picture of progress.
This thinking is increasingly reflected in broader B2B marketing research. Gartner's 2026 guidance on ABM measurement emphasises the need for metrics specific to account-based marketing, buying-group behaviour and incremental performance rather than relying exclusively on traditional demand-generation measures.
For fintech companies targeting relatively small groups of high-value customers, this matters enormously.
Winning the attention of several relevant stakeholders at ten strategically important organisations may ultimately be more valuable than generating hundreds of disconnected leads with little commercial relevance.
At spektr, Tom's team works from a deliberately short list of priority accounts, and every channel is judged on one question: is it engaging an account on that list?
It's an important shift from optimising campaigns for lead volume towards assessing their contribution to strategic account engagement.
The challenge is proving that value.
3. Which B2B marketing metrics should replace MQL volume?
This was arguably the most important tension raised during the session.
Shifting the conversation towards engagement makes strategic sense.
But marketing teams do not operate in a vacuum.
There are quarterly targets to meet, pipeline expectations to satisfy, budgets to defend and senior stakeholders who understandably want to know what commercial return they are getting.
It's easy to argue that marketers should stop obsessing over MQLs.
It's much harder to explain to a CEO, CFO or sales director why an increase in account engagement should be considered evidence that marketing is doing its job.
This is where the discussion moved towards account scoring, account tiering and stronger alignment with sales.
If marketing is going to use engagement as a measure of progress, it needs a consistent definition of what meaningful engagement actually looks like.
Simply counting interactions isn't enough.
A useful measurement approach needs to distinguish between at least three different questions.
First, is this the right account?
An organisation might be highly engaged but completely outside your ideal customer profile (ICP).
Account fit should therefore be considered separately from behavioural activity. Company characteristics, commercial potential, market relevance and strategic priorities all matter.
Second, how engaged is the account?
Once an account is identified as relevant, its activity can be examined across channels, contacts and different types of interaction.
Repeated engagement from several relevant stakeholders may be a more meaningful signal than a single content download.
Third, is that engagement translating into commercial progress?
This is the step that closes the gap between marketing reporting and business performance.
Are previously unengaged target accounts becoming active? Are engaged accounts entering meaningful conversations with sales? Are opportunities emerging from accounts receiving sustained marketing attention?
Do engaged accounts convert, and win, at a higher rate than comparable accounts marketing hasn't reached?
And, over time, do these accounts progress into pipeline and revenue?
A practical B2B account engagement measurement framework
The following framework illustrates how marketing teams can connect activity with meaningful commercial outcomes.
Measurement area | What it tells you | Example KPIs |
Account fit | Are we targeting commercially relevant companies? | ICP fit, account tier, target-account coverage |
Buying-group reach | Are we reaching the right stakeholders? | Relevant roles reached, buying-group coverage |
Account engagement | Are interactions deepening? | Repeat engagement, relevant content interactions, event participation |
Buying intent | Are there indications of active consideration? | Product enquiries, demo requests, relevant high-intent activity |
Pipeline progression | Is engagement associated with commercial movement? | Sales-accepted accounts, opportunities, conversion and win rates |
Revenue outcomes | Are target accounts becoming customers? | Won revenue, deal velocity, account expansion |
The distinction between account fit, engagement and intent is particularly important.
An account can be a perfect commercial fit without currently demonstrating interest.
Another might show considerable activity but have little realistic potential to become a customer.
A third could be showing stronger buying signals, but still require extensive education and relationship development before an opportunity materialises.
A scoring model should help teams interpret those differences rather than hide them behind another arbitrary number.
Why sales and marketing must agree on what matters
The session also touched on the role of sales in reviewing and prioritising account lists.
This is essential.
If marketing independently decides which accounts are important, what constitutes valuable engagement and when an account becomes sales-ready, it risks recreating the same disconnect that has historically undermined confidence in MQLs.
A more useful approach starts with shared definitions.
Sales contributes its knowledge of commercially relevant accounts, buying processes and readiness indicators.
Marketing contributes visibility into engagement patterns, channel activity and the wider buying journey.
Together, the teams can agree which signals warrant continued marketing activity, which justify closer investigation and which indicate a genuine opportunity for sales engagement.
The goal is not to replace an MQL score with an equally opaque account-engagement score. It's to create a shared language for evaluating commercial progress.
And that leads to an equally important question: who owns that language?
4. How to measure account engagement without a RevOps team
Another practical question emerged during the discussion: what if your business doesn't have a dedicated Revenue Operations (RevOps) function?
This is a particularly relevant challenge for growing fintech companies.
The ideal version of modern B2B marketing often assumes the existence of sophisticated data infrastructure, integrated marketing and sales systems, clean CRM records, attribution capabilities and dedicated operational support.
The reality can look very different.
A relatively small marketing team may be responsible for demand generation, content, events, digital advertising, CRM administration, reporting and sales coordination, often with limited specialist support.
Tools such as HubSpot and 6sense came up in the wider conversation, alongside questions about systems, automation and the operational resources needed to manage engagement data.
But the underlying problem is not simply which technology to buy.
A sophisticated platform cannot compensate for a lack of agreement about what the business is trying to measure.
Before investing in additional systems, teams need answers to some more fundamental questions.
What constitutes a target account? Which stakeholders are relevant? What activities can we reliably track? When does engagement become actionable? How do we connect marketing interactions with CRM records? And how do we prevent sales and marketing from reporting completely different versions of reality?
Start with a simple account-based measurement process
Without dedicated RevOps support, an initial framework does not need to be particularly elaborate.
It could begin with a shared target-account list, consistent CRM fields, a small number of agreed engagement indicators and a regular marketing-sales review.
Marketing and sales can establish a manageable process:
Agree on priority accounts and their commercial relevance.
Identify the stakeholders involved in buying decisions.
Define a small set of measurable engagement and intent signals.
Review account activity alongside sales conversations and opportunity progression.
Refine the scoring criteria as actual commercial outcomes emerge.
The purpose is to establish a repeatable process before introducing complexity.
That does not eliminate the need for better infrastructure as a business grows. But it helps ensure that any future investment in automation or account-intelligence tools is supporting a defined commercial process rather than simply creating more data.
For smaller B2B fintech teams, that distinction can be especially valuable.
5. The missing story in B2B marketing attribution: the buyer journey
Another interesting point surfaced towards the end of the conversation: the value of mapping and visualising the buyer journey.
This deserves more attention than it often receives.
Traditional campaign reporting tends to organise performance around channels, campaigns and individual conversions.
LinkedIn generated a certain number of clicks. Search produced a certain number of enquiries. An event attracted registrations. A webinar delivered attendees.
Each activity is assessed against its own immediate results.
But that structure often fails to explain how B2B purchasing decisions actually develop.
A prospect might first encounter your brand through a LinkedIn campaign. Weeks later, someone else from the same organisation might read an article or attend an event. A different stakeholder might begin researching your product category through search. Eventually, a member of the buying committee initiates a conversation with sales.
The resulting opportunity might be attributed to the final conversion.
Yet the organisation's familiarity, confidence and understanding of the solution may have developed through numerous earlier interactions.
This is particularly relevant when buying committees are large.
One of the observations made during Pulse was that the number of touchpoints involved in reaching a conversion can be considerable.
That creates a challenge not only for measurement, but also for communication.
How do you demonstrate marketing's contribution when much of its work happens before an opportunity formally exists?
One answer is to tell a more complete account-level story.
Instead of presenting a disconnected collection of campaign metrics, reporting could show how engagement within a strategic account developed over time.
Which stakeholder groups were reached? Which channels contributed? Was there an increase in meaningful engagement? When did sales become involved? What changed before the opportunity was created?
This does not automatically establish causation. Marketing exposure and engagement should not be presented as definitive proof that marketing created a sale.
But a well-constructed account journey can provide more meaningful evidence of marketing's role than a last-click attribution model alone.
It can also highlight gaps.
Perhaps marketing is consistently reaching technical decision-makers but failing to engage the commercial buyers who approve budgets.
Perhaps target accounts are consuming educational content but rarely advancing to product consideration.
Or perhaps there is substantial engagement without effective sales follow-up.
Viewed this way, reporting becomes more than a retrospective performance exercise.
It becomes a tool for deciding what marketing and sales should do next.
6. From demand generation to pipeline: balancing long-term influence with short-term accountability
There is a reason MQLs have remained so persistent in B2B marketing.
They are relatively straightforward to count, assign and report.
Account engagement, buying-group development and marketing influence are much harder to reduce to a single quarterly target.
And that creates a genuine commercial tension.
Marketing teams need to help build demand among companies that may not be ready to buy today.
At the same time, businesses still need opportunities and revenue now.
An organisation cannot pay its bills with account engagement alone.
This makes it important to avoid replacing one oversimplified marketing philosophy with another.
The answer is not to abandon lead generation, ignore conversion metrics or dismiss performance marketing.
It is to recognise that different metrics answer different questions.
Lead generation can help measure immediate demand capture.
Account engagement can help indicate whether marketing is building visibility and relationships within commercially relevant organisations.
Pipeline progression can help show whether that activity is contributing to opportunities.
Revenue remains the ultimate commercial outcome, even when marketing's precise contribution cannot be isolated perfectly.
A more mature measurement approach considers all of these rather than forcing a single metric to carry the entire burden of proving marketing's value.
There is also a practical implication for how success is communicated internally.
Instead of reporting that marketing generated 200 MQLs, a team might be able to explain that it expanded relevant stakeholder engagement across priority accounts, identified accounts showing stronger commercial signals and supported progression into qualified opportunities.
But that narrative only becomes credible when it is supported by consistent evidence and reviewed against actual sales outcomes.
Engagement should not become a convenient explanation for the absence of commercial results.
It should become one of the ways marketers understand and improve the path towards those results.
And marketing's role shouldn't end when an opportunity is created. Keeping open deals engaged with customer proof and relevant content can matter as much as creating them.
7. The future of B2B fintech demand generation: what earns attention in the AI era?
Towards the end of Pulse, our conversation moved beyond measurement to the wider question of what is working, and what might work next, for B2B fintech marketers.
Because even the best measurement framework is only useful if marketing can generate meaningful attention and engagement in the first place.
And that is becoming increasingly difficult.
AI has dramatically reduced the effort required to create marketing content.
Articles, social posts, reports, video scripts and campaign variations can now be produced at a speed that would have been difficult to imagine only a few years ago.
But easier production does not automatically create more valuable content.
If anything, it raises the competitive bar for earning attention.
When every company can produce more content, the ability to publish becomes less distinctive.
That led us to discuss another noticeable development in B2B marketing: the growing emphasis on in-person experiences.
Executive breakfasts, private roundtables, invite-only dinners, community gatherings and industry meetups.
For fintech brands looking to differentiate themselves from an increasingly noisy digital landscape, events offer something that cannot be replicated quite so easily through AI-generated content: genuine human interaction.
But there is a catch.
What happens when everyone decides that events are the answer?
If the same senior executives are invited to multiple breakfasts and roundtables every week, simply hosting an event stops being a differentiator.
The format itself is no longer enough.
The more relevant question becomes what makes a particular experience genuinely worth someone's time.
Is it access to peers they wouldn't otherwise meet? A conversation they cannot have publicly? Insight that goes beyond what they could find online? An opportunity to solve an immediate professional challenge?
This creates a useful connection back to the earlier discussion about engagement.
A crowded event calendar doesn't necessarily translate into deeper commercial relationships.
An attendee list may create opportunities for follow-up, but attendance alone is not a reliable indicator of purchase intent.
An event should ideally be assessed by the relevance of the people involved, the quality of the interactions and the relationships or opportunities that develop afterwards, not simply by the number of registrations.
For B2B fintech marketers, the challenge is moving from creating more opportunities for attention to creating interactions that deserve attention.
That principle also sits at the heart of a broader shift in fintech marketing tactics: connecting content, brand, community and acquisition activity around commercially meaningful outcomes.
8. What should B2B fintech marketing teams actually prioritise?
The conversation raised no single magic metric or universal demand-generation playbook.
And that's probably appropriate.
A Series A fintech selling into a narrow group of enterprise buyers faces a different measurement challenge from a more established company targeting a broad SME market.
Commercial maturity, sales-cycle complexity, team structure and available data will all influence the most useful approach.
Nevertheless, several practical principles emerge from the discussion.
Start with the accounts that matter
Marketing performance becomes much easier to interpret when it is connected to clearly defined commercial priorities.
Agree with sales on the organisations worth pursuing and understand the different stakeholders involved in their purchasing decisions.
Measure buying-group engagement in context
Avoid treating every click, impression or content download as an equivalent indicator of interest.
Look at relevance, frequency, depth, buying-group coverage and progression over time.
Keep genuine intent signals distinct from passive exposure.
Connect account engagement to pipeline
Marketing should be able to investigate whether growing account engagement is associated with commercial progression.
That means making CRM integration, sales collaboration and consistent measurement definitions priorities rather than afterthoughts.
Make marketing attribution tell a business story
Campaign dashboards explain how channels performed.
Account-level reporting can help explain what happened within the organisations marketing is trying to influence.
Both matter, but they serve different purposes.
Resist the temptation to solve every problem with another tool
Technology becomes more useful when the process, ownership and definitions are clear.
A workable measurement framework is better than a sophisticated but poorly understood one.
Prioritise the quality of attention
Whether through content, paid media, events or community-led marketing, the critical question is not simply how much activity is generated.
It is whether that activity reaches the right people and creates a meaningful reason for them to engage.
Frequently asked questions: MQLs, ABM and B2B fintech marketing measurement
Are MQLs still relevant in B2B marketing?
Yes, but MQL volume alone is an incomplete measure of B2B marketing success. MQLs can indicate individual interest, while account-level and buying-group metrics help evaluate engagement across the organisations involved in purchasing decisions. Pipeline and revenue outcomes are needed to assess commercial progress.
What should B2B fintech marketers measure instead of MQLs?
Useful alternatives include target-account coverage, buying-group engagement, engagement depth, qualified sales conversations, opportunity creation, pipeline progression and revenue. These metrics should be evaluated alongside account fit and genuine buying-intent signals.
How do you measure account engagement in ABM?
Account engagement can be measured by combining interactions across identifiable stakeholders and channels, such as relevant content consumption, repeat website activity, event participation and sales engagement. The emphasis should be on meaningful patterns and changes over time, rather than simply adding up all interactions.
How can marketers demonstrate marketing's contribution to revenue?
By connecting marketing engagement data with CRM records, tracking account progression and examining whether marketing-engaged accounts advance towards opportunities and revenue. Attribution should consider the wider buyer journey while recognising that correlation alone does not establish causation.
The bigger takeaway: B2B fintech marketing needs a better scoreboard
Perhaps the most important conclusion from our Pulse discussion is that the debate about MQLs has become a little too binary.
Leads are not dead.
But treating lead volume as the primary indicator of B2B marketing success increasingly fails to capture the complexity of how organisations research, evaluate and purchase solutions.
The opportunity is to shift towards a model where marketing performance is understood through the development of commercially relevant accounts, engagement across buying groups and progression towards genuine opportunities.
That shift will not happen simply by changing the metrics on a dashboard.
It requires stronger alignment with sales, clearer definitions of engagement and intent, better visibility into buyer journeys and more confidence in explaining how marketing contributes to business outcomes.
There is also a warning here.
As the industry moves towards account engagement and buying-group measurement, marketers must avoid recreating the same problems that made MQL reporting frustrating in the first place.
A new scoring model is not automatically a better one.
More data does not necessarily mean more clarity.
And calling something account-based does not make it commercially meaningful.
A simple test: if a new metric doesn't change which accounts sales calls next week, it's a rename.
The objective should be to make marketing's contribution easier to understand, test and improve.
Which brings us back to the original question:
If leads are dead, what comes next?
Maybe the better answer is that we stop looking for a single replacement.
Instead, we build a more complete picture of demand or one that acknowledges the multiple people, channels, interactions and decisions involved in winning a B2B customer.
Because ultimately, the goal was never to generate an impressive number of leads.
It was to help the right companies become customers.
This article was inspired by our October 2026 edition of Pulse, the Fintech Marketing Hub's monthly conversation for fintech marketers, featuring Tom Kelly, VP of Marketing at spektr.
Pulse brings fintech marketing professionals together to exchange perspectives, discuss real-world challenges and explore the ideas shaping our industry.
What's your take?
Are MQLs still a useful measure of marketing performance, or has your team already shifted towards account engagement and pipeline?
And if you've made the transition, what's been the hardest part: getting reliable data, building the scoring model or convincing senior management?
Join the conversation in the FMH Inner Network and share what is actually working for your team.
If you enjoyed this article, don't forget to share it with your network and subscribe to the Fintech Marketing Monthly Digest!
Comments