A service-level agreement between sales and marketing is the contract that stops the finger-pointing. It defines what a qualified lead looks like, how fast sales has to work it, and what happens when either side misses. This guide walks you through writing one both teams will sign and operate.
Time: 1 week to design, ongoing operation
The SLA fails the moment marketing and sales define a qualified lead differently. Lock the definitions first and write them as plain-English sentences, not acronyms. A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a contact that has shown enough intent to be worth a human touch. A sales qualified lead (SQL) is one that sales has personally confirmed is a fit and has an active buying interest. Pin the exact fit criteria (industry, company size, role, geography) and the exact behavior criteria (score threshold, demo request, pricing-page visit) to each definition. Then make every rep and marketer repeat them back from memory before you move on.
Response time is the single biggest lever in the SLA. Forrester and lead-management research has shown for years that contact rates fall off a cliff after the first five minutes. Set hard numbers and write them into the agreement. A reasonable baseline for most B2B teams is five minutes for inbound SQLs during business hours, one business hour for MQLs that marketing has flagged as hot, and the end of the next business day for everything else. The numbers matter less than the fact that they are written down, measured, and visible to leadership.
One call is not a follow-up. Spell out exactly how many attempts a rep must make, over what window, and across which channels, before a lead can be marked worked. A common pattern for inbound SQLs is eight to twelve touches over fourteen days across phone, email, and social. MQLs typically get a lighter cadence, five to seven touches over three weeks, before they are either converted or sent back to nurture. Write the cadence into the SLA and build the sequences in your CRM or sales engagement tool so it is enforced by default, not by willpower.
A healthy SLA assumes some leads will be bad and gives sales a clean way to send them back without starting a political war. Build a short, fixed list of pass-back reason codes (wrong title, wrong company size, no budget, not evaluating, bad contact data) and a short list of disqualify codes (competitor, student, test lead, out of territory). Require a reason code on every pass-back and disqualify so marketing can learn from the pattern. Set a cap on pass-backs per rep per month to prevent abuse, and require a quick marketing review of any lead that gets passed back more than once.
An SLA that is reviewed quarterly is a wall decoration. Build a dashboard that shows SLA performance in near real time, broken down by rep, by segment, and by lead source, and wire it to alerts the moment a response-time commitment is about to breach. Most CRMs can send a notification to a rep, their manager, and a shared channel when a lead has been sitting untouched past the SLA window. The point is not to shame reps, it is to catch the lead before it goes cold and to make the data undeniable at the Monday meeting.
The SLA is a living document and the standup is where it stays alive. Hold a thirty-minute weekly meeting with sales and marketing leadership and one or two reps on rotation. Walk the dashboard, name the top three breaches by name, name the top three wins by name, and leave with one specific change to make before the next meeting. Keep the ritual tight and keep the tone fixed on the system, not the people. The goal is a joint operating rhythm where both teams see the same numbers and own the same outcome.
Quarterly, pull both teams into a longer working session and rewrite the parts of the SLA that are not working. Response-time floors may need to drop as the inbound mix changes. Touch counts may need to rise as deal size grows. Reason codes may need to be split as the business adds segments. Treat the SLA like a product: ship a version, measure it, and ship the next version with a clear changelog so every rep and marketer knows what changed and why.
A rule nobody enforces is not a rule. Tie SLA performance to something that matters: a slice of variable comp for reps, a quarterly bonus modifier for marketing leaders, a hard input to performance reviews, or all three. Enforcement does not have to be punitive. The best teams reward the top-quartile SLA performer monthly and the bottom-quartile performer gets a coaching plan with a clear bar. The point is that the SLA shows up on the same page as the paycheck and the review, which is what makes it stick.
A sales and marketing SLA is a written agreement between the two teams that defines what a qualified lead is, how fast sales will work it, how many touches it will get, and what happens when either side misses the commitment. It is the operating contract that stops the finger-pointing when pipeline slips.
Research from Forrester, SiriusDecisions, and HubSpot consistently shows contact rates drop sharply after the first five minutes. A reasonable baseline is five minutes for inbound SQLs during business hours, one business hour for hot MQLs, and the end of the next business day for everything else. Pick numbers you can staff for and enforce them.
An MQL (marketing qualified lead) is a contact that has shown enough intent through score, behavior, or form fill to be worth a human touch. An SQL (sales qualified lead) is one that a sales rep has personally confirmed is a fit and has an active buying interest. The MQL is marketing's bar, the SQL is sales' bar, and both teams must agree on the definitions in writing.
For inbound SQLs, eight to twelve touches over fourteen days across phone, email, and social is a common baseline. For MQLs, five to seven touches over three weeks is typical. Write the number into the SLA, build the sequences in your CRM, and measure compliance on the dashboard.
Revenue operations should own the document, the dashboard, and the weekly standup. Sales leadership and marketing leadership are joint signatories. An executive sponsor (CRO, VP Revenue, or CEO) owns enforcement when the agreement is broken. Shared ownership without a single operations owner is why most SLAs quietly die.
Review it weekly in a short standup, iterate the document quarterly in a longer working session, and version it like a product (v1.0, v1.1, v2.0) with a published changelog. The weekly rhythm keeps it alive, the quarterly rhythm keeps it accurate.
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