29 October 2026

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Marketing and Sales SLA: How to Write One That Works

A marketing and sales SLA is a written, two-way agreement between the two teams. Marketing commits to delivering a set number of leads that meet an agreed definition. Sales commits to following those leads up within an agreed time and reporting back on what happened. That is all it is. The value comes from both sides holding the same numbers.

This guide shows what to put in it, how to build the first version in a week, and how to keep it from turning into a forgotten document.

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TL;DR

  • An SLA is a shared promise: marketing owns lead volume and quality, sales owns speed and follow-up.
  • Start with the maths. Work backwards from your revenue target using conversion rates and average sale value.
  • Define a “qualified lead” in plain words, with examples, before you set any targets.
  • Review it weekly at first. Change the numbers when the data says so.
  • An SLA says what must happen. An SOP says how. You need both.

Table of Contents

What a marketing and sales SLA is

The term comes from service level agreements between a provider and a customer. Here, each team is the other’s customer. Marketing supplies leads. Sales supplies follow-up and feedback.

HubSpot describes it as an agreement where marketing commits to a defined number of leads and sales commits to contact them within a defined timeframe, which creates joint accountability for the revenue goal. Salesforce makes a similar point: shared pipeline ownership and consistent messaging can support faster sales cycles, higher conversion and better retention.

Without an SLA, the usual story plays out. Marketing says it sent plenty of leads. Sales says the leads were poor. Nobody can prove either claim, because “lead” means something different in each room.

Why the two teams need one

Three problems show up again and again.

Leads go cold. If no one owns the time between a form fill and the first call, leads wait. Nobody planned that. It just happens.

Quality is argued, not measured. Sales calls leads bad. Marketing calls follow-up lazy. With no shared definition and no feedback loop, the argument never ends.

Targets don’t connect. Marketing is measured on volume. Sales is measured on closed deals. The two numbers never meet.

An SLA fixes this by putting one revenue target above both teams and splitting it into commitments each team can control.

What to include in the SLA

Salesforce lists the core parts of a sales and marketing SLA: lead definitions, follow-up timeframes, rejected-lead feedback and marketing volume targets. Here is how we would lay those out, plus the extras that make it work.

Section What it settles Owner
Shared goal The revenue number both teams work to Both
Lead definitions What counts as a lead, a qualified lead and a sales-ready lead Both
Marketing commitment Volume of qualified leads per month, by source Marketing
Sales commitment Time to first contact, number of attempts, how outcomes are logged Sales
Rejection feedback How sales returns a poor lead and what reasons are allowed Sales
Reporting Which numbers, how often, who sees them Both
Review Weekly check, monthly reset, quarterly rewrite Both

The shared goal

One sentence. For example: “Together we will add a set amount of new monthly revenue by the end of the quarter.” Every other clause links back to it.

Lead definitions

Write these in everyday words. Avoid scoring jargon at first.

Business Queensland gives a clear basic test. A real prospect has a need, the ability to make a buying decision and the ability to pay. It also suggests building an ideal customer profile from market research, using geographic, demographic and psychographic traits, and ranking prospects by sale value and chance of closing.

Turn that into three stages your teams can both recognise:

  1. Lead: someone who has given contact details or asked a question.
  2. Marketing qualified: fits the ideal customer profile and has taken a meaningful action.
  3. Sales ready: has a need, can decide, can pay, and has agreed to talk.

If you later add scoring, keep it under clear rules. Our piece on turning a lead scoring model into revenue with governance covers how.

The marketing commitment

This is a number, not a hope. HubSpot’s documented example sets workable-lead volume per sales representative as marketing’s commitment, with workable leads defined from historical profitability analysis. You can copy the idea: work out how many good leads each salesperson can handle, then set the target to match.

The sales commitment

The same example sets the number and frequency of attempts sales makes on each workable lead. That is what you want: a response time, a minimum number of attempts, and a rule for logging the result in the CRM.

Lead hand-off and follow-up rules

The hand-off is where most SLAs succeed or fail. Keep the rules short and checkable.

Time to first contact. Pick a window sales can meet on a bad day, not a good one. Same business day is a fair start for many B2B teams. Tighten it once you see the data. If you set a 5-minute target and the team misses it daily, the target is ignored by week two.

Attempts and channels. Agree how many attempts, over how many days, on which channels. A simple pattern is call, email, call, message, then a final email. The exact count matters less than having one.

Status changes. Every lead gets a status inside the CRM within a set time of the first attempt. No status, no credit. Our guide to CRM lifecycle stages for sales and marketing recommends starting with four or five stages, and that suits an SLA well.

Rejection with a reason. Sales can send a lead back, but only with a reason from a short list: wrong size, no budget, no need, unreachable, duplicate. Marketing reads that list weekly and adjusts targeting. This one rule does more to end the blame game than any other.

Recycling. Leads that are not ready now go back to marketing for nurture. Agree when they come back and what triggers it.

Follow-up is also a skill. If your team needs practical ideas for it, this piece on being an effective sales professional is a good place to start.

Build it from your revenue maths

You do not need a complex model. HubSpot says the basic revenue model needs lead-to-opportunity conversion, opportunity-to-closed-sale conversion and average sale value to work out how many qualified leads you need.

Here is a worked example with made-up numbers, for illustration only:

  • Revenue target: $60,000 new revenue a month
  • Average sale value: $3,000, so you need 20 closed sales
  • Opportunity to close: 25%, so you need 80 opportunities
  • Lead to opportunity: 20%, so you need 400 qualified leads

That 400 is marketing’s number. The 20% and 25% rates are what sales protects by following up well. If either rate falls, the target is missed, and the data shows which team’s step slipped.

Check the pipeline side as well. Our note on pipeline coverage as 1 divided by win rate shows how much open pipeline you need to hit a target. And if your stages are vague, seven well-defined sales pipeline stages will make the conversion rates trustworthy.

Which numbers to track

Keep the dashboard small. HubSpot’s example tracks workable leads per representative, attempts per workable lead, connect rate and conversion to forecasted pipeline, with automated daily monitoring and weekly alignment meetings.

A starting set for most teams:

Metric Who it tells you about
Qualified leads delivered vs target Marketing
Time to first contact Sales
Attempts per lead Sales
Connect rate Both
Rejection rate and top reasons Both
Lead to opportunity conversion Both
Pipeline created vs target Both

Show marketing’s numbers and sales’ numbers on the same screen. That is the whole point.

How to create the SLA in a week

Doug Davidoff’s HubSpot guide, published 22 January 2020, recommends bringing marketing, sales and sales-development leaders together to agree roles, responsibilities, process, targets and accountability. The old date does not change the logic. Here is a simple week.

  1. Day 1: Pull the last six to twelve months of data. Lead sources, conversion rates, average sale value.
  2. Day 2: Run the revenue maths above. Write the target.
  3. Day 3: Hold one workshop with both leaders. Agree lead definitions and the rejection list.
  4. Day 4: Write the SLA on one or two pages. Set up CRM fields and reports to match.
  5. Day 5: Share it with both teams. Explain the why. Start.

Keep it short. A two-page SLA gets read. A twelve-page one gets filed.

How to review and enforce it

An SLA with no review is just a document. Set three rhythms.

Weekly, 20 minutes. Look at the table above. Pick one thing to fix. Read the rejected leads.

Monthly. Check whether targets still match the revenue goal. Move numbers if the data says so.

Quarterly. Rewrite parts that no longer fit. Retire rules nobody uses.

Enforcement is mostly visibility. When both teams see the same live numbers, the conversation changes from opinion to fact. If a team misses a commitment two weeks running, the question is not who is at fault. It is what in the process is broken, and who can fix it.

Tie someone senior to the result. One named owner for the SLA, often the head of revenue or the founder in a smaller business, keeps it alive.

SLA or SOP: what is the difference?

People mix these up. An SLA sets expectations and measures: what will be delivered and how well. An SOP is a step-by-step instruction for how a task is carried out.

In practice: the SLA says sales contacts every qualified lead within one business day. The SOP says which script to use, what to log in the CRM and who to tell if the lead is unreachable. Write the SLA first. Then document SOPs for the steps that most often go wrong. The same logic applies beyond sales: our 14-day client onboarding workflow is an SLA playbook for the stage after the sale.

Common mistakes

  • Targets set in a meeting, not from data. If the numbers are not tied to conversion rates, they are guesses.
  • One-way SLAs. If only sales has duties, marketing will not buy in. If only marketing has duties, sales will not.
  • Too many metrics. Five to seven is enough.
  • No CRM support. If logging a status takes five clicks, it will not happen.
  • Never revisited. Markets change. Channels change. The SLA must too.
  • Spend decisions ignored. If channel mix shifts lead quality, the SLA needs to know. For wellness brands, see where to spend first on Meta or Google ads.

Our perspective

We see the same pattern in wellness brands. The content team publishes. The sales or bookings team follows up. The CRM holds some of the data. Nobody owns the gap between them.

An SLA helps, but only if it sits inside a working system. A document on its own will not move revenue. What moves it is a live view of leads, follow-up and conversion that both teams check every week, plus one person accountable for acting on it.

That is why we do not hand over decks. We map the constraint first, then build and run the system with the client. In one wellness engagement, monthly revenue grew from $65k to $110k once content, operations and revenue were aligned. An SLA was one part of that, not the whole story.

If you take one thing from this guide, make it this: write fewer rules, measure them in the open, and review them every week.

— Jordan

Get the SLA built on your real numbers

If you run a wellness brand and are not sure where leads are leaking, start with our 90-minute business audit. It costs $499 AUD one-off. We look at your content, operations and revenue, find the main constraint and give you a tailored 90-day plan. Lead hand-off and follow-up rules are often part of that plan.

Book the Plexo Business Audit. If you want to see how we work after the audit, read about our health and wellness marketing agency services.

FAQ

Who should own the marketing and sales SLA?

Both teams sign it, but one senior person should own it. In a small business that is usually the founder or head of revenue. They call the weekly review and make sure changes get made.

How many leads should marketing commit to?

Work it out from your own data. Take your revenue target, divide by average sale value, then work backwards through your close rate and lead-to-opportunity rate. The result is the qualified lead number. Adjust it each quarter.

What happens if one team misses the SLA?

Treat it as a process question first. Check the numbers on both sides of the hand-off. If a team misses two weeks in a row, find the cause: capacity, lead quality, tooling or unclear rules. Then fix that cause.

Does a small team need an SLA?

Yes, a short one. Even with two people, you should agree what a qualified lead is and how fast follow-up happens. One page is enough.

Sources

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