The Sales-Marketing SLA Reboot — 60-Min Training

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Section 1 — Open & Diagnostic Cold Read (5 min)

Goal: surface the disagreement before anyone gets defensive.

Open by writing one question on the whiteboard: *"What, exactly, is an MQL at our company?"* Hand every person a sticky note. Sixty seconds. No talking. Stick them up.

• Read them aloud verbatim. You will hear 6-9 different answers in a room of 8 people.
• Name the gap out loud. "We have been arguing about a word we have never defined together."
• State the hour's deliverable. One MQL definition. One signed SLA. One recurring meeting. One leakage map.

Per Forrester's 2023 B2B Buying Survey, 65% of B2B buyers regret a purchase within 12-24 months when sales and marketing handoff was poor — the cost of fuzziness is not internal politics, it is churn.

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Section 2 — The MQL-to-SQL Definition Fight (15 min)

Goal: write one definition, on the wall, today.

The reason this fight never resolves is that teams confuse fit (does this account look like a customer?) with intent (are they actually shopping?). You need both, scored separately, then combined.

Use the HubSpot Smarketing two-axis model (Halligan/Shah, *Inbound*, Ch. 7):

• Fit score (firmographic + ICP): industry, employee count, tech stack, geography. Threshold: 60/100.
• Intent score (behavioral): demo request, pricing page 3+ visits, repeat sessions within 14 days, content downloaded past TOFU. Threshold: 40/100.
• MQL = Fit >= 60 AND Intent >= 40. Not OR. AND. This single change typically cuts MQL volume by 35-50% and raises MQL-to-SQL conversion from ~13% (industry median per Forrester) to 25-30%.

Write it on the whiteboard verbatim:

> MQL Definition (signed [DATE]): A contact at an account scoring >=60 on Fit AND >=40 on Intent in the last 30 days, OR any inbound demo request from an ICP-matched account regardless of score.

SQL Definition is what sales accepts after a discovery call: BANT-light (Budget acknowledged, Authority identified, Need articulated, Timeline within 6 months) or MEDDIC's M-E-C at minimum. Sales — not marketing — owns this gate.

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Section 3 — Drafting the Bidirectional SLA (10 min)

Goal: both sides sign, both sides have skin.

The classic mistake is a one-way SLA: marketing promises X leads, sales promises nothing. Jon Miller's Engagio playbook (and his 2016 *ABM Done Right*) makes this bidirectional. Write the template on the wall and fill it in live:

• Marketing commits to Sales:
• Volume: 240 MQLs/month minimum (matching the ICP definition above).
• Quality: >=25% MQL-to-SQL conversion rolling 90-day. Below 20% triggers a definition review.
• Speed: MQL routed to a named SDR within 5 minutes of scoring threshold (Marketo/HubSpot workflow, not human).
• Enrichment: Every MQL ships with company, role, intent signal, and last 3 touched pages.

• Sales commits to Marketing:
• Speed-to-lead: First touch within 5 business minutes for demo requests, 24 hours for scored MQLs. InsideSales/Velocify research (Oldroyd, MIT, 2007) still holds: 100x drop in qualification odds after 30 minutes.
• Working the lead: Minimum 6 touches across 12 business days before disposition (Rain Group cadence standard).
• Disposition: Every MQL closed-lost or recycled gets a dropdown reason code in the CRM within 48 hours. No free-text excuses.
• Feedback loop: SDR flags 3 "bad MQLs" per week with the *specific* reason; AEs flag closed-won themes monthly.

Sign it. Print two copies. Both leaders sign. Photo to Slack. Pin it.

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Section 4 — The Weekly Smarketing Meeting (10 min)

Goal: build the recurring forum so the SLA doesn't rot.

Per Sangram Vajre (*ABM Is B2B*, 2019) and HubSpot's original Smarketing playbook, the meeting must be weekly, 30 minutes, fixed agenda, both leaders present, RevOps facilitates. Schedule the recurring invite before the room leaves.

The fixed agenda — write it on a card, laminate it:

1. (5 min) Scoreboard read: MQLs delivered, SQLs accepted, conversion %, speed-to-lead median. RevOps owns the dashboard.
2. (5 min) SLA breaches: Any lead untouched past SLA? Any week where MQL volume or quality missed? Name the breach, owner answers in one sentence.
3. (10 min) Lead-quality jam: SDR brings 3 "bad MQLs" with screenshots. Marketing brings 3 "great MQLs" sales rejected. Disagreement is the point.
4. (5 min) Pipeline themes: What is closing? What objection is killing deals? Marketing turns this into next sprint's content.
5. (5 min) Commits for the week: One thing marketing will ship, one thing sales will ship, written in the doc.

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Section 5 — Leakage Diagnosis Workshop (15 min)

Goal: map where leads are actually dying — today, in our CRM.

Pull up the live CRM. Walk the Forrester/SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall stages on the screen for the last 90 days:

• Inquiry → MQL conversion. Healthy: 8-15%. Below 8% = scoring too tight; above 20% = scoring too loose.
• MQL → SAL (Sales Accepted Lead). Healthy: 70%+. The gap here is definition disagreement — fix Section 2.
• SAL → SQL. Healthy: 50-60%. Gap here is discovery rigor — SDRs are accepting leads they shouldn't work.
• SQL → Opportunity. Healthy: 60%+. Gap here is AE qualification — MEDDIC discipline.
• Speed-to-lead median. If above 30 minutes for demo requests, you are leaking 50% of contactable buyers before lunch (Oldroyd MIT study).

Run the live diagnosis:

• Calculate each stage conversion on screen. Don't pre-cook the numbers — let the room see them raw.
• Circle the worst stage in red. That is the team's project for the next 30 days.
• Name an owner. Not "marketing" or "sales" — a person, with a name and a Friday deadline.

For a 50-rep $50K-ACV org, a 10-point speed-to-lead improvement is typically $2-4M in incremental ARR within two quarters (HubSpot State of Sales 2024).

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Section 6 — Close, Sign, & Calendar (5 min)

Goal: leave with artifacts, not vibes.

• Read the signed SLA aloud. Both leaders sign physically. Photograph. Post to #revops Slack.
• Send the recurring Smarketing invite from the room — same day, same time, weekly, both leaders required, RevOps facilitates.
• Assign the leakage owner and Friday deadline.
• Schedule the next quarterly reboot for 90 days out.
• One-line close from the CRO: "We are one revenue team. The handoff is the product. We rebuilt it today."

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The Three Levers You Pull During the 60-Minute Session

The entire reboot hinges on three operational levers that most teams have never formally tuned. Lever 1: Lead Definition Alignment. By minute 15, the room must agree on a single, written MQL definition (e.g., "company with 50+ employees, job title Director+, visited pricing page twice in 7 days"). Without this, every downstream metric is meaningless. Lever 2: Response-Time Commitment. Sales agrees to contact every MQL within 5 minutes during business hours (not 2 hours, not next day). Data from InsideSales.com and Harvard Business Review consistently shows calling within 5 minutes yields 100x higher contact rates than waiting 30 minutes. Lever 3: Closed-Loop Feedback. Marketing agrees to suppress any lead that sales marks as "not ready" for 90 days, and sales agrees to log a reason code for every MQL that gets disqualified. This creates a clean data loop that prevents the same leads from cycling through forever.

The One Metric That Tells You If the SLA Is Working

Ignore MQL volume for the first 30 days after the reboot. The only number that matters is MQL-to-SQL conversion rate (the handoff metric). A healthy B2B SaaS team targeting $25K-$500K ACV should see this rate land between 15% and 30% within two quarters. If you're below 10% after 90 days, the SLA needs renegotiation — likely on the definition side (marketing is passing too many unqualified leads) or the response side (sales is ignoring the speed commitment). Track this weekly in a shared dashboard, not a spreadsheet that gets updated once per month. The weekly Smarketing meeting (30 minutes, no slides) is where you review this single number and decide whether to tighten or loosen the SLA terms for the next quarter.

Common Pitfall: Treating the SLA as a Marketing Document

The most frequent mistake is letting marketing draft the SLA alone and then "presenting" it to sales. This guarantees resentment and non-compliance. The reboot session must be co-facilitated by a neutral RevOps lead (or VP of Revenue) who enforces equal airtime. Sales must own the response-time clause; marketing must own the lead-quality clause. If either side feels the SLA was imposed, the document becomes shelf-ware within two weeks. The signed SLA should live in the shared CRM as a permanent record, not in a Google Doc that gets forgotten after the training ends.

FAQ

Q: What if sales refuses to commit to 5-minute speed-to-lead? A: Compromise on demo-request only (the highest-intent slice, usually 10-15% of MQLs). Get the win on that segment, prove the ARR lift, then expand. Don't die on the whole-volume hill in the first meeting.

Q: Our MQL volume will crash if we use AND instead of OR. Won't marketing get fired? A: Volume goes down, conversion goes up, pipeline dollars go up. Reframe marketing's KPI from MQL count to MQL-sourced pipeline $ before the meeting. Forrester data shows this shift is the single biggest predictor of alignment survival.

Q: Do we need a fancy attribution tool? A: No. A shared dashboard in HubSpot, Salesforce, or even a Google Sheet pulled by RevOps weekly is enough for the first quarter. Tooling follows agreement, not the reverse.

Q: What about PLG / self-serve signups — do they bypass this? A: PLG signals (activation, second-session, team invite) become your Intent score inputs. The SLA still applies — the threshold and SDR routing logic just change. Sangram Vajre's "PQL" framing covers this.

Q: How do we handle ABM accounts vs. inbound MQLs? A: Two lanes, one SLA document. Inbound MQLs follow the scoring gate; ABM target accounts are pre-qualified by definition and routed direct to AE, with marketing committing air cover (ads, content, events) instead of lead volume.

Q: Who owns the SLA when it breaks? A: RevOps. Not sales, not marketing. RevOps is the neutral referee, owns the scoreboard, and escalates to the CRO/CMO together when a breach persists past two weeks.

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Sources

1. Halligan, Brian and Shah, Dharmesh. *Inbound Marketing: Attract, Engage, and Delight Customers Online*. Wiley, 2014 (Ch. 7 on Smarketing and SLA).
2. Miller, Jon. *ABM Is B2B* (with Sangram Vajre), Ideapress, 2019; and Engagio "Clear & Complete Guide to Account Based Marketing," 2016.
3. Forrester (formerly SiriusDecisions). "Demand Waterfall, Rearchitected," 2017; Forrester B2B Buying Study, 2023.
4. Oldroyd, James. "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads," MIT/InsideSales.com, 2007 (still the speed-to-lead benchmark).
5. Vajre, Sangram. *Account-Based Marketing for Dummies*, Wiley, 2016.
6. HubSpot. "State of Sales Report 2024" and "Service Level Agreement Template" (free, hubspot.com/service-level-agreement-template).
7. Rain Group. "Top Performance in Sales Prospecting" benchmark study, 2023 (6-touch / 12-day cadence).
8. Dixon, Matthew and Adamson, Brent. *The Challenger Sale*, Portfolio, 2011 (for the SDR-to-AE qualification handoff).