Sales accepted lead

SAL sits between MQL and SQL and closes a specific loop: marketing hands a lead off, and sales either accepts it (agrees it's worth working) or rejects it (kicks it back with a reason, wrong company size, no budget signal, bad timing). Without that explicit accept-or-reject step, MQLs can pile up in a queue with no clear owner and no timeline for a first response.

The SLA the SAL step is built to enforce

GTM Engineering vs Marketing Ops vs RevOps describes RevOps as the function that owns "the SLAs between marketing, sales, and CS that keep leads from rotting in a queue." The accept-or-reject decision at the SAL stage is where that SLA actually gets enforced in practice: a defined window for sales to respond, and a required reason code when a lead gets rejected instead of accepted.

Where a company sits on this depends on team size more than doctrine. A two-person sales team can run the accept-or-reject conversation in a Slack thread and never need a named SAL stage in the CRM. Once a team has multiple reps and multiple lead sources feeding it, an explicit SAL stage is usually what keeps leads from sitting unclaimed because everyone assumed someone else grabbed it.