How to Write a Sales and Marketing SLA (With Template)

In most B2B companies, sales and marketing point the finger at each other. Marketing says sales does not follow up on the leads, sales says the leads are worthless. Both are a little bit right, and neither of them fixes it. A sales and marketing SLA shuts that discussion down by making the commitments measurable: how many leads, at what quality, and followed up how fast. In this article you will read which commitments belong in it, how to make them concrete, and what a workable template looks like.

What a sales and marketing SLA actually is

An SLA (service level agreement) between sales and marketing is a framework of commitments in which both teams set out what they can expect from each other. Marketing promises a certain volume of qualified leads at an agreed quality. Sales promises to follow up on those leads within a fixed window and to report back on what happens to them. Not a non-binding intention, but an agreement with numbers and a review moment.

The point of an SLA is not bureaucracy. It is that you aim both teams at the same goal: revenue from new customers. Without a shared definition of “a good lead”, marketing optimises for quantity (because that is what it is judged on) and sales optimises for the easiest deals (because that is how it hits target). The leads marketing delivers then fall exactly into the gap between the two. An SLA closes that gap.

This is also precisely where lead generation stops being a marketing trick and becomes a growth engine. Lead generation is the capture layer of one orchestrated engine: attract, qualify, hand over, follow up, close. The SLA is the hinge between the capture layer and sales. If you want to understand how that whole layer fits together, start with the pillar what is lead generation.

The three commitments that really matter

An SLA can balloon endlessly with clauses nobody follows. Stick to three commitments that make the difference: volume, quality and follow-up time.

1. Lead volume: how many, and derived from what

Marketing commits to delivering a certain number of qualified leads per month. But you do not invent that number. You derive it from the revenue goal. Work backwards: what revenue does sales want to close, what is the average deal value, so how many deals is that, and how many qualified leads do you need to hit that number of deals given your lead-to-customer conversion rate.

You only know that last figure once you measure it. In the beginning you work with an estimate and adjust. The value is not in the exactness of the number, but in the fact that both teams use the same number. If marketing promises one number and sales is counting on something entirely different, it always goes wrong, regardless of who is doing good work.

A second reason to derive volume from the revenue goal: it makes the conversations businesslike instead of emotional. If sales wants more deals, it asks for more leads or a higher conversion rate, and that is a commitment you can build a case for together. If marketing wants to justify its budget, it shows how much of the revenue goal came in through its leads. The number becomes a shared calculation aid, not a stick to beat each other with.

2. Lead quality: define the lead before you talk numbers

This is the commitment that gets skipped most often, and the most important one. What is a qualified lead? Until you have pinned that down together, you argue about volume while the real problem is quality.

Make it concrete with criteria you can see in your CRM:

• Profile (fit): does the company match your ideal customer? Think of industry, company size, region, the role of the contact person.
• Intent (interest): what has the lead done? A downloaded checklist carries different weight than a requested demo or a completed quote form.
• Timing: is there a concrete trigger or budget in the short term, or is this orientation for later?

Lock down the difference between an MQL (marketing qualified lead, ready to hand over) and an SQL (sales qualified lead, accepted by sales as a real opportunity). The transition from MQL to SQL is the measuring point where you see whether the quality commitment holds up. If sales structurally accepts fewer than half of the MQLs, the definition is wrong and you adjust it together, instead of continuing to push marketing on volume.

3. Follow-up time: how fast sales contacts a lead

The third commitment goes the other way. Sales commits to a hard follow-up time: a handed-over lead is contacted for the first time within an agreed window. In B2B, interest goes cold fast. Whoever requests a quote today will request one from a competitor tomorrow. A lead left sitting for days confirms exactly the distrust the whole lopsided relationship runs on: “see, those leads are worthless.”

Also agree on what following up means. Calling once and giving up when nobody picks up is not follow-up. Lock down a minimum number of contact attempts across a fixed number of working days, through several channels (phone, email, LinkedIn). And lock down that sales reports back: accepted, rejected, or nurturing. Without that feedback, marketing never knows whether it is delivering the right leads and cannot improve anything.

The follow-up commitment is also the place where the two teams learn to trust each other fastest. As soon as sales notices that quickly followed-up leads more often result in a conversation, the idea that the leads are worthless disappears. And as soon as marketing sees the feedback, it can adjust at the source: if leads from one channel structurally convert worse, marketing moves budget away from it. That way the SLA becomes a feedback loop that lifts quality a notch every month, instead of a commitment you make once and forget.

A workable template

Keep the SLA to one page. The shorter it is, the greater the chance that both teams actually live by it. A usable structure:

• Goal: why this SLA exists, in one sentence tied to the revenue goal.
• MQL definition: the exact criteria (fit, intent, timing) a lead meets before marketing hands it over.
• SQL definition: when sales accepts a lead as a real opportunity.
• Volume commitment: number of MQLs per month that marketing delivers, derived from the revenue goal.
• Follow-up commitment: maximum time to first contact, minimum number of attempts, and the duty to report back.
• Measuring points: MQL-to-SQL acceptance, follow-up time, and lead-to-deal conversion.
• Review: who looks at the numbers and when, and how you adjust the commitments.

Fill in every field with numbers you choose together, not with figures from a blog. Your sales cycle, deal value and target audience determine what is realistic.

Steer on lead-to-deal, not on volumes

The biggest pitfall of an SLA is judging it on the wrong number. Steer marketing purely on the number of leads handed over and you get a lot of mediocre leads. Steer sales purely on closed deals and every harder lead gets ignored. The number that binds both teams is lead-to-deal conversion: of the leads delivered, how many become customers?

That single number makes both teams jointly responsible for the same result. Marketing cannot inflate conversion with more bad leads, and sales cannot hit target by letting good leads sit. That is why correct lead-to-deal attribution is the foundation: you have to be able to trace back which leads, from which source, eventually became revenue. Only then does the blame game stop and real improvement start.

Review monthly, together, with the numbers on the table. Not to settle scores, but to adjust the definitions and numbers based on what the data shows. An SLA is a living document, not a contract that disappears in a drawer.

How this fits into your growth engine

An SLA repairs the handover, but the handover is just one link. The leads you hand over first have to be attracted and qualified, and then followed up and closed. We look at that whole chain as one system: not loose lead lists, but qualified pipeline that measurably becomes revenue. If you want sales and marketing to genuinely run in sync, that starts with how we set up B2B lead generation around shared definitions and attribution.

Want to read on about the neighbouring links? Look at when you are better off outsourcing lead nurturing and the difference between appointment setting or buying leads.

Would you like help writing an SLA that fits your sales cycle and revenue goal? Get in touch and we will look together at where the leads are getting stuck in your process.