Why You Need An SLA Between Sales and Marketing

Service level agreements are the glue the binds commitments between service providers and clients. But why implement such an agreement between two groups that are on the same team? Marketing and sales groups work closely together to accomplish the same end goal - revenue growth. On the path to revenue, there are a number of customer interactions and processes that could fall under the scope of either sales or marketing responsibilities. An SLA between sales and marketing will help clarify rules of engagement between these groups and define expectations in a manner that will avoid ongoing confusion.

A few key points to consider regarding the SLA: it should define, quantify, and provide room for review. The following will describe these points in detail.

Define

The basic most basic consideration of an SLA between sales and marketing would be to establish a common definition of key terms, important terms to define:

Lead

Prospect

Account

Contact

MQL

SQL

Other definitions should clarify team roles, responsibilities, and handoffs between the two teams.

Quantify

A more thorough sales and marketing SLA should help to improve actual performance. In order to do this, including time frames and measurable benchmarks will go a long way toward creating an SLA that serves to embed excellence in marketing and sales team performance.

Borrowing a best practice from client service delivery SLAs, a sales and marketing SLA can also include the costs associated with violation of any SLA parameter. These costs can be articulated in terms of credits, cash or even some type of company-specific currency. However it is documented, including this and other measurable performance indicators in the SLA will help close the loop on accountability and cements ownership of processes and expected results.

Review!

Finally, a mention of when the SLA should be reviewed is important as SLAs are only as useful as they are relevant to the realities of the business environment. It is always helpful for teams to consider specific events (shift in product, number of SLA breaches, new org chart, etc) that indicate a need to change the SLA to ensure that the document is consistent with the most current workflows.