The SAL (sales accepted lead) is a Useless Inefficient Stage to Measure

I don’t know why everyone insists on creating a stage for SAL (sales accepted lead). It’s useless, inefficient, and lengthens the sales process.

The reason why people create it is to measure something unnecessary in the grand scheme of things and something that often puts an unnecessary wedge in between sales and marketing.

Think about it, you have a lead that comes in to the database and eventually becomes a contact which hopefully becomes an MQL. Now, it goes over to sales or the sdr team to validate and qualify. Regardless of who it goes to, if it’s not a good lead, it gets marked as such and sent back to marketing to either nurture or do nothing with it. However, if it is good, then it gets put into an opportunity, usually a Stage 0 or Stage 1 depending how you have your stages set up. Once it becomes an opportunity, it’s an SQL. So why do we need SAL? It’s a useless stage and measures nothing you can’t already get out of your ‘MQLs which didn’t convert’ reports.

Also, no one cares about them except maybe the demand gen team, because they are probably measured on it (even though MQLs are a lagging indicator). If you have enough MQLs not converting to opportunity you need to look at where the source of those MQLs came from, were they in your ICP, and the reason sales disqualified them because there could be a disconnect between marketing and sales here.

Here’s how I’ve set this up in the past at almost every company I’ve worked.

First, I convert to an all contact database if I can, and get rid of the term “leads” which is another useless thing to track in marketing. (A future post coming soon on this topic).

Then I explain it with this graphic:

Suspect is where most people get tripped up. Lists you import from ZoomInfo or Sales Navigator are Suspects, marketing cannot and should not email them. (I mean you can but you’ll impact your ISP and overall email deliverability for spamming people.)

Once someone gives you their info, engages with your content or brand in some way then they become a Prospect and are usually scored in your marketing automation platform. Now the whole company can email them, including marketing.

They continue to engage and you eventually MQL them.

Then you think you need a stage to put those MQLs in so that sales can work them, right? But you don’t. If you set up a report of MQLs untouched and look at it daily, and also set up MQL alerts inside of your CRM and Slack, then the MQL stays as an MQL until it either goes to Nurture or SQL.

But, if you feel you absolutely MUST add SAL so you can track what your SDRs are working on (because, I’ll admit, most need to be babysat), then you can add it in to look like this:

However, it’s really not necessary. You could also achieve measuring your SDRs with a custom field and a pull-down list of “working”, “meeting booked”, “qualified”, etc. so you can measure the SDRs more effectively.

When you talk about how many SALs there were, it really doesn’t mean anything. Sales may think it helps them quantify the number of “at bats” they have, but there is a bigger problem to look at here. In all of the companies I’ve worked at SALs were always above 95% but the real data to look at was how many of those turned into opportunities, or SQLs. Just looking at the percentage of MQLs that turn into SALs doesn’t really tell you much, which is why I think it’s useless and an inefficient way of measuring marketing’s impact.

Measuring MQL to SQL conversion rate is much more telling of how marketing’s efforts contribute to pipeline and ARR. Beyond that you can look at closed lost reasons and at what stage to uncover more of what’s happening.

If sales insists on adding in the stage of SAL to the sales process, let them. Just don’t bog yourself down with having to look at those reports as a marketer. It’s a waste of your time.