What is a sales-marketing SLA — and what should be in it?
Direct Answer
A sales-marketing SLA is a written, jointly-owned commitment between the two functions that says exactly what marketing will deliver (volume, quality, speed) and exactly what sales will do with it (work it within N hours, mark every lead as contacted or not, qualified or not, with a reason).
It lives in a Notion or Google Doc, is co-signed by the VP of Marketing and the VP of Sales with RevOps acting as the steward, and is reviewed every quarter against actual numbers. Without those four ingredients it is not an SLA, it is wishful thinking.
TL;DR
- A real SLA names a number, a quality bar, a speed, and a feedback obligation, not just a vague promise to "deliver good leads."
- The five components that matter are volume by tier, MQL definition, speed-to-touch, disposition feedback, and a quarterly review cadence.
- The single biggest failure mode is letting disposition rate fall below 80 percent. Once sales stops marking leads, the SLA dies and the blame cycle returns.
- Pavilion's 2024 GTM Alignment Survey found that orgs with a documented SLA and 80 percent or higher disposition discipline saw 1.7 times higher MQL-to-opportunity conversion than orgs without one.
- A real SLA is short. Two pages. Anything longer gets ignored.
The 5 SLA Components That Drive Behavior
Most SLAs fail not because the document is wrong but because it is missing one of these five elements. Each one is a behavior contract. Drop one and the entire system leaks.
| Component | Who owns | Target | What breaks if it's missing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lead volume by tier | VP Marketing | 800 MQLs and 300 SAL-grade per month | Sales pipeline coverage becomes unforecastable, reps complain about dry spells |
| MQL definition (ICP fit, intent score, behavioral trigger) | VP Marketing plus RevOps | Specific, written, auditable criteria | Sales privately rejects MQLs and marketing has no way to argue back with data |
| Speed-to-touch SLA | VP Sales | 5 minutes for high intent, 30 minutes for standard MQL | Inbound conversion drops 8x past the 5-minute mark per the Lead Response Management study |
| Disposition feedback (contacted, qualified, reason) | VP Sales | 90 percent of MQLs dispositioned within 5 business days | Marketing flies blind on quality, scoring models drift, attribution breaks |
| Quarterly review cadence | RevOps as facilitator | One 90-minute meeting per quarter with both VPs | SLA goes stale, numbers drift, blame culture returns by month four |
The volume number is the easiest to write and the easiest to game. Marketing can flood the funnel with low-quality MQLs to hit the count, which is why the MQL definition has to be precise and co-authored. A real definition reads like: "ICP fit score 70 or higher AND intent score 60 or higher AND at least one behavioral trigger from the high-intent list (pricing page view, demo request, repeat visit within 7 days)." Vague definitions like "shows buying intent" are the reason sales reps stop trusting MQLs.
The 3 Failure Modes That Kill SLAs Within 2 Quarters
The first failure mode is the disposition gap. The SLA exists, marketing is delivering the volume, but sales is only marking 30 percent of leads as contacted or qualified. Without disposition data, every conversation degenerates into anecdote.
The AE remembers two bad leads from last week and decides the whole batch is junk. Marketing has no defense because no one logged what actually happened. Disposition rate is the single leading indicator of SLA health.
If it drops below 80 percent, the SLA is functionally dead even if the document still exists.
The second failure mode is the hidden MQL definition. The MQL criteria live inside the marketing ops team's scoring model in HubSpot or Marketo, not inside the SLA doc. Sales has no visibility into why a lead crossed the threshold.
When a rep gets a bad lead, they cannot audit the logic, so they assume the logic is broken. The fix is mechanical: copy the exact scoring rubric into the SLA doc as plain English, list the behavioral triggers, list the disqualifiers, and require both VPs to sign off on changes.
The third failure mode is the missing quarterly review. Without a recurring forum where both leaders look at the numbers together, drift compounds. Volume targets stay stuck at last year's plan even though the company has grown.
Speed-to-touch targets get ignored once SDR headcount is cut. Disposition rates slide. By month four of an unreviewed SLA, sales and marketing are back to blaming each other in Slack, and the SLA doc is a dead artifact on a shared drive that no one opens.
A $40M ARR cybersecurity company hit all three of these failure modes simultaneously in 2023. Their original SLA was written in 2021, ran six pages, and nobody on the current sales team had read it. RevOps rewrote it in two pages: 700 MQLs per month, 250 SAL-grade, 5-minute SLA on hot inbound, 30-minute SLA on standard MQL, mandatory disposition with a five-option dropdown (contacted-qualified, contacted-not-qualified, uncontactable, wrong-fit, duplicate).
Within two quarters, MQL-to-opportunity conversion climbed from 12 percent to 19 percent. Nothing about the leads changed. The only change was discipline.
The Disposition Feedback Loop (the gate that keeps sales honest)
Disposition feedback is the unglamorous mechanic that makes every other part of the SLA work. It is the gate where sales tells marketing, in structured data rather than Slack vibes, what happened to each lead. Without it, the SLA collapses into a one-way commitment where marketing is accountable for numbers and sales is accountable for nothing.
A working disposition loop has four ingredients. First, a required CRM field with a constrained dropdown — contacted-qualified, contacted-not-qualified-with-reason, uncontactable-after-N-attempts, duplicate, or wrong-fit. Free-text fields are ignored.
Second, a workflow rule that fires the field as required on every MQL handed off, with a 5-business-day window. Third, a weekly dashboard in Sigma, Looker, or Salesforce reports showing disposition rate by SDR, by AE, and by source. Fourth, a manager-level conversation that treats disposition rate as a performance metric, not a clerical chore.
HubSpot ships a clean MQL workflow that hooks into Salesforce custom fields for this purpose, and most RevOps teams build the SLA-attainment dashboard in Sigma or Looker on top of the underlying CRM data. The tooling is not the hard part. The hard part is the management commitment that says: a rep who closes deals but does not disposition leads is not in compliance, and that gets surfaced in the QBR.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a fair disposition rate target? Eighty percent within five business days is the floor. Best-in-class RevOps teams run at 90 to 95 percent. Below 70 percent and the SLA has no signal to learn from, so you are flying blind on lead quality.
Who owns the SLA doc? Joint ownership by the VP of Marketing and VP of Sales, with RevOps as the operational steward. RevOps schedules the review, pulls the data, and keeps the doc version-controlled. The two VPs sign off on every change. If one VP owns it alone, it stops being an SLA and becomes a wishlist.
What happens if marketing misses the volume number two months in a row? Treated as a Sev-2 issue surfaced in the next weekly RevOps standup, not a quarterly surprise. Marketing presents the root cause (channel softness, attribution shift, content gap) and a corrective plan. If the miss is structural rather than executional, the SLA volume target itself gets renegotiated in the quarterly review.
Sources
- Pavilion. 2024 GTM Alignment Survey. Https://www.joinpavilion.com/resources
- Forrester (formerly SiriusDecisions). Demand Waterfall framework. Https://www.forrester.com/research/
- HubSpot. Service Level Agreement (SLA) Marketing and Sales Template. Https://www.hubspot.com/sales-marketing-sla-template
- Sales Hacker. How to Build a Sales and Marketing SLA That Actually Works. Https://www.saleshacker.com/sales-marketing-sla/
- OpenView Partners. RevOps Benchmarks Report 2024. Https://openviewpartners.com/blog/
- Lead Response Management Study (Oldroyd, MIT). Speed-to-lead conversion curves. Https://www.leadresponsemanagement.org/
- Salesforce. State of Sales 2024 — buyer-seller alignment metrics. Https://www.salesforce.com/resources/research-reports/state-of-sales/
- Gartner. B2B Buying Journey research, marketing-to-sales handoff friction data. Https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/insights/b2b-buying-journey