Marketing Qualified Account (MQA)
An MQA doesn't measure whether a single person showed interest. It measures whether an entire account, with multiple people involved, is behaving like a company approaching a collective purchase decision.
“Five people from the same company quietly reading your content in two weeks tell a story none of the five, individually, could tell alone.”
Otto GTM ObservatoryWhy the account, not the contact, is the right unit in ABM
In an account-based strategy, the purchase decision rarely depends on a single individual: it typically involves an economic buyer, a technical user, and often an internal influencer or gatekeeper. Qualifying only on each individual contact's behavior risks ignoring a much more predictive aggregate pattern: multiple people from the same company beginning to consult relevant content in the same period, even if none individually exceeds the individual MQL threshold.
Defining an MQA requires explicitly establishing which aggregate signals count: minimum number of distinct contacts involved, specific roles reached (not just volume), and the time window within which activity must concentrate to be considered a coherent pattern rather than coincidence.
Anti-patterns
Common mistake: applying the same qualification criteria designed for individual leads in an ABM context, missing aggregate interest patterns distributed across multiple contacts from the same account.
Second mistake: defining the MQA based only on activity volume (visits, downloads) without considering the diversity of roles involved, qualifying accounts where all engagement comes from a single technical user with no decision-making power.
Practical Application
A B2B company observes an enterprise account has 4 distinct contacts (a VP Sales, two sales managers, an IT admin) who consulted site content over 3 weeks, none individually qualified as MQL. Applying an MQA definition based on at least 3 distinct roles active in the same time window, the account gets qualified and prioritized to the ABM team, which closes the opportunity in 45 days.