Marketing and sales SLA
Also known as: marketing and sales SLA, sales and marketing service level agreement
A marketing and sales SLA is a written agreement that states how many leads marketing delivers, how fast sales follows up on them, and what happens when either side misses its number.
Without a written agreement, a missed lead follow-up or a slow marketing month turns into a debate about whose fault it is, and the debate repeats every month because nobody wrote down what “on time” or “enough” actually means. An SLA replaces the debate with two numbers both teams agreed to in advance.
SLA compliance % = (leads contacted within the target response time / total qualified leads) × 100Example
Say marketing agrees to deliver 300 qualified leads a month, and sales agrees to contact each one within 30 minutes of the handoff. In a month where sales contacts 270 of 300 leads within that window, SLA compliance is 270 divided by 300, or 90%. If the response time target were 4 hours instead of 30 minutes, the same team might contact all 300, showing how much the compliance number depends on the target chosen, not only on effort.
These figures illustrate the formula and are not a benchmark drawn from any published source.
How to use it
Set the lead volume target from historical pipeline data, not from a wish, and set the response time target based on how fast a lead’s interest actually cools, which a sales team can usually describe from experience even without a formal study. Review compliance on both sides monthly in the same meeting, so a missed number on either side gets a reason attached to it immediately, not three months later.
Common mistakes
A frequent mistake is writing an SLA with a volume target for marketing but no response time target for sales, which leaves half the agreement unenforced. A second is setting a response time target nobody can realistically hit given current headcount, which guarantees the SLA fails and gets ignored within a quarter. A third is treating the SLA as fixed once written, instead of revisiting it when team size, lead quality or the product itself changes.
An SLA works better with an attribution model in place, since attribution shows which channel is producing the leads that actually convert after the handoff, not just the ones that hit the volume number.