Marketing and sales SLA: the agreement that ends the fight

A marketing and sales SLA is the written agreement in which both teams, with post-sale alongside them, define what each one hands to the next, with criteria, deadlines and a way to measure it in the CRM. The fight between “the leads are bad” and “sales doesn’t work the leads” starts where this agreement is missing. Marketing delivers what its target asks for, the rep discards whatever does not look like an opportunity, and neither side can prove its point because nobody wrote down what a qualified lead was or how fast someone should call. If you lead one of these teams, the argument about blame ends when the three leaders sign the same definitions and start reading the same report.

In a good share of the diagnostics I run, marketing shows MQLs above target and sales shows pipeline below target, in the same meeting. In the CRM, I find leads with no logged activity and discards with no reason. With that data, no leader can tell a bad lead from a badly worked one, and the decision about the media budget ends up depending on who argues better.

What is a marketing and sales SLA?

SLA stands for service level agreement, the contract that IT and support teams use to set deadlines and quality between whoever provides a service and whoever receives it. In a revenue operation, marketing provides a service to sales when it delivers opportunities, and sales provides a service to post-sale when it delivers a customer with context. The commercial service level agreement turns those deliveries into commitments with an owner, a deadline and an indicator, and part of the market calls this alignment smarketing, a blend of sales and marketing.

A useful SLA fits on two pages and states what each team delivers, by when and at what quality, all the way to the customer handoff to CS. Each commitment needs a field or report in the CRM that shows whether it was met. An agreement nobody measures turns back into opinion in the first bad month.

Why do marketing and sales fight over leads?

The fight starts in how targets are designed. Marketing is usually measured on lead volume, sales on meetings and closed deals, and post-sale on satisfaction and renewal, as I describe in Revenue Operations in practice. Each team optimizes its own metric, and one team’s metric does not depend on the next team’s result. In a survey of 412 senior marketing and sales leaders in North America and Western Europe, 90% reported that their functional priorities conflict with one another (Gartner, 2024). Marketing can hit its target with leads nobody will convert, and a rep can hit the meeting target while ignoring half of the queue they received.

“The leads are bad”

The rep who complains about lead quality is usually partly right. An MQL defined by a content download, with no question about company size or buying timeline, produces a queue full of students, competitors and companies outside the profile. The rep calls a few of those contacts, decides the queue is worthless and goes back to their own prospecting, and the good lead that arrives later waits for days.

“Sales doesn’t work the leads”

The marketer who complains about follow-up is also partly right, and the CRM shows first attempts days after conversion and “not interested” logged after a single call. In RevOps and CRM in B2B funnel management I describe how this exchange of accusations used to drain more energy than the funnel itself. Both complaints describe the same hole: no team wrote down what it delivers, and leadership has no yardstick to judge who failed.

What should an SLA between marketing, sales and customer success define?

I organize the agreement into five definitions. The first four govern the border between marketing and sales in both directions, and the last one governs the customer’s entry into post-sale. Each one becomes a field, a rule or a report in the CRM after the leaders approve the text, following the order of the method I use in RevOps, with a written process before the tool.

Qualified lead criteria

The criteria combine two axes. The first is fit, with industry, company size, job title and region drawn from an ICP that sales and marketing approve together. The second is buying intent, where a request for a quote or a demo weighs more than a content download. The SLA defines the minimum combination for a lead to become an MQL and what the rep confirms in the first conversation for it to become an SQL, and I recommend taking those criteria from the discovery script of consultative selling, with a stated pain and an identified decision maker. In a survey of more than 200 sales leaders, 62% described their sales and marketing functions as defining qualified leads differently (Gartner, 2023). Write it so that two people looking at the same record reach the same conclusion.

Volume and quality marketing delivers

Marketing commits to a number of MQLs per month, calculated backwards from the revenue target, the average deal size and the conversion rates the CRM shows today. The number alone reproduces the fight, so the SLA ties volume to a quality target, such as the rate of MQLs accepted by sales. If the volume arrives and acceptance drops, marketing leadership reviews channel and criteria before the next month.

Sales response time and number of attempts

On the sales side, the commitment is speed and persistence. The SLA sets how fast the rep makes the first attempt, how many attempts they make, through which channels and over how many business days before closing the lead out. Speed matters because the buyer who asked for contact is researching that week and may have reached out to a competitor the same afternoon. Automatic lead routing enters the agreement as a commitment of whoever runs the CRM, because without it the rep cannot meet the deadline.

Recycling reason

A lead the rep rejects goes back to marketing with a reason picked from a closed list that both teams define together. Outside the profile, invalid contact, no project in the next twelve months, already a customer and competitor are common reasons, and each one sends the lead to a different destination: discard, data correction, nurturing or referral to post-sale. The closed list removes the generic “not interested” and shows marketing where to adjust the criteria. A return with no reason counts against sales, and a return for fit counts against marketing’s quality target.

What sales hands to post-sale

The handoff to CS is the part of the SLA companies forget most. The rep who closed the deal knows the pain behind the purchase, the success criterion the customer defined, who sits on the buying committee and what was promised during the negotiation, including what stayed out of the written proposal. If that lives in the rep’s head, onboarding starts with the customer telling the story again, and the promise post-sale does not know about arrives as a complaint. The SLA makes those four items mandatory for a deal to reach closed won and adds a short conversation between the rep and the implementation lead before kickoff, in the format I detail in B2B post-sale.

SLA template: commitments, owners and CRM measurement

This table is the skeleton I use to run the conversation between the leaders. The deadlines and targets are starting points that each company adjusts to its own sales cycle. The right-hand column keeps the agreement from ending up forgotten in a shared folder.

Commitment	Who delivers	Deadline or target	How to measure in the CRM
Lead within MQL criteria	Marketing	Monthly volume calculated from the revenue target	MQLs per month and by source
MQL quality	Marketing	Acceptance rate agreed in the SLA	Accepted MQLs over delivered, by channel
Routing to the rep	Operations or CRM	Automatic, at conversion	Owner assignment date compared to conversion date
First attempt	Sales	Same business day as delivery	Time between MQL and first activity
Cadence and acceptance or return	Sales	Attempts and business days set in the SLA	Activities per lead and recycling reason from a closed list
Discovery before the proposal	Sales	Pain, success criterion and decision maker filled in	Deals in proposal with complete fields
Handoff to CS	Sales	Complete fields and internal meeting before kickoff	Closed won deals with handoff logged
Confirmation of what was promised	Post-sale or CS	Validation at kickoff	Gaps between promise and scope logged on the deal

How do you measure a marketing and sales SLA in the CRM?

The SLA lives in a few fields and one dashboard: MQL date, assignment date, first activity, attempts, recycling reason and, on the deal, the discovery and handoff fields. The CRM records most of those dates when the lead changes stage, as long as the team runs the process inside the tool, which is why the SLA depends on CRM adoption as much as on goodwill between teams. If the rep works the lead through personal WhatsApp and logs only the close, the response time report measures the logging delay.

The RevOps metrics matrix organizes the dashboard by owning team and by the question each metric answers. Each leader picks a few metrics to track weekly and leaves the rest for the monthly review. A row with no matching field in the CRM becomes a configuration task before it becomes a target.

Metric	Owning team	Question it answers
MQLs delivered by source	Marketing	Did the agreed volume arrive, and from which channels?
MQL acceptance rate	Marketing and sales	Are the qualification criteria calibrated?
Time to first attempt	Sales	Does sales meet the agreed deadline?
Recycling reasons	Marketing and sales	Where does the queue lose quality?
Conversion from MQL to SQL and to closed won	Revenue leadership	At which stage does the funnel get stuck?
Closed won with complete handoff	Sales and CS	Does CS receive the customer with context?
Time to first value	CS	Does the customer reach the success criterion on time?
Renewal by source	CS and marketing	Which channels bring customers who stay?

The monthly review between the three leaders

The SLA loses strength in the second month if nobody looks at the dashboard together. The ritual I propose is a one-hour monthly meeting between the marketing, sales and post-sale leaders, with the operations person presenting the numbers in funnel order, from marketing’s delivery to the problems CS found in onboarding. Whoever runs it shows the number before any interpretation, and individual performance stays for each team’s one-on-ones.

Each decision leaves the room with an owner and a date. A recycling reason that grows leads marketing to review criteria or channel, and a response time that worsens leads sales to review routing or the team’s workload. Once a quarter, the meeting reviews the SLA text, because the company changes its offer and its targets over the year.

What does each leader gain from the SLA?

Marketing leadership

Marketing leadership gains a data-backed defense of its own work. With response time measured and returns logged, it can show which channel generates leads that sales accepts and converts. The media budget starts being discussed by conversion all the way to revenue.

Sales leadership

Sales leadership gains a queue with criteria and a formal path to return what does not fit. The manager can hold reps accountable for working good leads with a number in hand. The forecast becomes more reliable because the top of the funnel keeps the same definition from one month to the next.

Post-sale and Customer Success leadership

CS leadership gains a customer with context. Onboarding starts knowing the pain, the success criterion and the committee. An out-of-scope promise shows up in the handoff meeting, while it can still be fixed, and at renewal CS shows the result against the criterion the customer defined at purchase.

A playbook for leaders to implement the SLA

This is the playbook I use with leadership teams. It starts from the data the CRM already holds and only reaches configuration after the three teams approve the text. The operations person follows every step.

1. Pull the baseline. Take from the CRM the average time to first attempt, the share of leads with no activity, the discard reasons in use today and the MQL to SQL conversion. If the data does not exist, its absence is the first finding.
2. Write the definitions with the three leaders. One working session closes the MQL and SQL criteria, the recycling list and the handoff fields, with the operations person noting what becomes a field.
3. Calculate volume backwards. Use the revenue target, the average deal size and the baseline conversion rates.
4. Configure the CRM after the text is approved. That covers mandatory fields, automatic routing, deadline alerts for rep and manager, and the dashboard with the metrics matrix.
5. Prepare the people who operate it. SDRs, reps, marketing analysts and onboarding need to know what the SLA asks of each of them and where to log it, or the dashboard measures logging instead of work.
6. Run the first monthly review and adjust. The first month calibrates criteria and deadlines with real data, and the quarterly review updates the text.

The three leaders sign the document together with the executive they report to. The signature gives the monthly review the authority to hold one team accountable in front of the others. Without a sponsor above the three, the first conflict over targets goes back to hallway conversation.

Sales SLA and L&D: what HR needs to assess

How to recognize the need

The signs show up in results meetings and engagement surveys before they show up in reports. Leaders who disagree about the month’s lead count, reps who do not trust the queue and onboarding that starts with the customer explaining what they bought all point to the same gap. Before treating the case as a conflict between people, ask the leaders whether a written SLA exists and who measures compliance.

Who should take part

The core is the leadership of the three teams, with the direct managers of SDRs, sales and onboarding, who enforce the agreement day to day. The operations or CRM person takes part because they turn the definitions into fields and reports. The executive team joins the opening and the final validation.

How to measure

The training satisfaction score says little about the SLA. Agree on a CRM baseline with the leaders before the program and compare, after one or two review cycles, the time to first attempt, the MQL acceptance rate and the closed won deals with complete handoff. MQL to closed won conversion responds later, over windows of at least one average sales cycle.

If the marketing, sales and CS leaders at your company argue about leads every week and none of them can prove their point with the CRM, that is the work of the in-company Revenue Operations training. I run the program on your funnel and your data, with the three leaders and the operations person in the same room, and the group leaves with the SLA between marketing, sales and CS in writing and the RevOps metrics matrix ready to configure in the CRM you already use. The first monthly review happens the following month, on the baseline we pull together.

Frequently asked questions

What is a marketing and sales SLA?

It is the written agreement in which marketing and sales define what each team delivers to the other, with criteria, deadlines and a way to measure it in the CRM. In its complete version, it includes the handoff to post-sale.

What is the difference between MQL and SQL in the SLA?

An MQL is a lead that meets the fit and intent criteria marketing and sales agreed on. An SQL is a lead the rep confirmed in a conversation, with a stated pain and an identified decision maker. The SLA writes both criteria down so the transition does not depend on the opinion of whoever looks at the record.

What is the ideal response time for sales to work a lead?

The deadline depends on the type of request and the size of the team. A request for a quote or a demo calls for an attempt on the same business day, and the CRM measures compliance by the difference between the MQL date and the first activity.

Does the SLA need to include post-sale?

Yes, because the handoff to CS is where missing definitions cost the most. The rep logs the pain, the success criterion, the committee and what was promised, and CS confirms it at kickoff. Without that part, the out-of-scope promise only surfaces at renewal.

How do you measure SLA compliance in the CRM?

Create fields for MQL date, first activity, attempts and recycling reason, plus mandatory handoff fields on the deal, and review the dashboard at the monthly meeting. The dashboard only measures the work if the team logs activity inside the CRM.

Who should take part in the monthly SLA review?

The marketing, sales and post-sale leaders, with the operations or CRM person presenting the numbers. The SDR and onboarding managers join when the agenda involves response time or handoff. Once a quarter, the review covers the agreement text and includes the executive team.