SLA between marketing and sales
Definition
A written agreement between the two teams: the volume and quality of leads marketing commits to, and the response time and follow-up attempts sales commits to. Both halves carry numbers, so both halves can be checked.
How it works
It ends the recurring lead-quality argument, where sales calls the leads bad and marketing calls the follow-up slow, by turning both claims into reports. It holds four things: the MQL definition, precise enough that either team can score a lead yes or no; marketing’s monthly volume; sales’ first-response time and minimum attempts before a lead may be marked dead; and the return path for rejected leads, with a reason. Derive the volume from the revenue target: revenue divided by average deal size is the deals you need, and deals divided by your win rate is the opportunities marketing’s leads must become. What keeps it alive is cadence: the numbers reviewed monthly, and the MQL definition reopened each quarter, because the ICP moves and a definition written in January describes January.
What to watch for
Open the document and count the commitments per side; an SLA that only binds marketing is a quota with a signature. Take ten recent MQLs and have both teams score them against the definition; where they disagree, the argument the SLA was meant to end is still running underneath it. Check that follow-up attempts are logged as activities in the CRM, because a commitment nobody can count cannot be enforced. And look at when both numbers were last read out in a meeting.
The question you ask
“What response time has sales committed to in writing?”