Sales and marketing SLA template

Most SLAs are written after a bad quarter, signed in a meeting, and never referenced again. The document isn’t the problem. The missing part is that nobody measures whether either side kept their side of it, so within six weeks it’s a file in a shared drive.

What follows is the document plus the reporting that makes it real. Edit the numbers, keep the structure.

Section one: the definitions block

Write these first and do not proceed until both sides sign off. Every SLA argument I’ve watched traces back to two people using the same word differently.

The distinction between disqualified and recycled is the one teams collapse, and collapsing it is expensive. A good-fit company that isn’t buying this quarter is an asset. Marking it dead loses it.

Standardise these against the definitions everyone else uses where you can, starting with marketing qualified lead (MQL), so your reporting is comparable to anything external.

Section two: what marketing commits to

Three commitments, all measurable weekly. Volume alone is not one of them.

Volume. A monthly floor stated in qualified opportunities, not leads. Example: 118 marketing-sourced qualified opportunities per quarter, derived from the pipeline maths in your demand generation plan template rather than from last year plus ten percent.

Quality. A maximum rejection rate. Example: no more than 20 percent of MQLs rejected for fit reasons over a rolling month. If rejections exceed that, marketing pauses the source causing it rather than arguing about it.

Data completeness. Every delivered MQL carries company name, employee count, job title, source, and the qualifying action that promoted it. A record missing any of these is not a delivered lead and does not count toward the volume commitment.

The data completeness clause is the one that surprises marketers and delights reps. A rep who has to look up the company before calling loses four minutes per lead, and across 200 leads a month that’s most of a working week.

Section three: what sales commits to

Speed, persistence, and honesty about outcomes. All three, or the other two don’t matter.

Five minutes sounds aggressive until you look at what it’s worth. The decay curve on inbound response time is steep and well documented across B2B research: contact and qualification rates drop sharply within the first hour and keep falling. Most teams that commit to five minutes hit it about 40 percent of the time in month one, which is still a substantial improvement compared to their previous median of four hours.

The rejection reason list, as an example set:

Note that only three codes send a lead to the bin permanently. That ratio is deliberate, and it’s the single change that most improves the tone of the weekly meeting, because “rejected” stops meaning “your lead was bad”.

Section four: routing and recycling

Routing rules belong in the SLA because routing failures look exactly like SLA failures. A lead that sat for three days because the round robin skipped a rep on holiday will be blamed on sales effort.

State the rules explicitly: assignment method (round robin, territory, or account owner), holiday and out-of-office handling, what happens when a lead matches an existing account, and the reassignment trigger when a rep misses the response window. That last one has teeth. If a lead isn’t touched within the window, it reassigns automatically rather than waiting for someone to notice.

Recycled leads need a named destination. “Back to marketing” is not a destination. Name the nurture programme, the cadence, and the re-entry rule that promotes them back to MQL when the return date arrives or when new qualifying behaviour appears.

Section five: the dispute process

Two mechanisms, both lightweight. The goal is to stop disputes from becoming quarterly arguments.

First, per-lead disputes. Marketing can challenge a rejection within five business days. Challenged leads go to a shared queue, and the marketing ops owner and the sales manager review them together in the weekly meeting. Limit challenges to ten per week, which forces marketing to challenge the ones that matter rather than all of them.

Second, systemic disputes. If either side misses its commitment two months running, the issue escalates to whoever both functions report to, with a written diagnosis rather than a complaint. Write the escalation name into the document.

Section six: the reporting that makes it stick

This is the part that separates a working SLA from a document. One weekly report, both sides’ numbers, same page, distributed to everyone including leadership.

Symmetry is the whole design. Marketing’s numbers and sales’ numbers in the same table, reviewed by the same person, every week. It’s uncomfortable for about a month and then it simply becomes how the two teams talk about the pipeline.

Nothing changed when we signed the SLA. Everything changed when the first-touch median showed up in the CRO’s Monday report next to the MQL count.

The underlying alignment work this rests on is covered in sales and marketing alignment for SaaS, and once compliance reporting exists you’ll immediately want the attribution question settled too, which B2B SaaS marketing attribution handles honestly. If deal cycle length is the pressure behind all of this, the definition of pipeline velocity is the number to watch, and for named-account motions the SLA needs modifying in the ways account based marketing for SaaS describes.

Start with the report, not the document

Counterintuitive but correct: build the weekly report first, with whatever definitions you currently have, and run it for three weeks. The numbers will show you exactly which commitments need to be in the SLA and which are already fine.

Then write the document, because you’ll be negotiating over evidence rather than over impressions. Alternate versions of this template, including a shorter one-page variant, are at sales and marketing SLA template and the generator at sales and marketing SLA template. The wider programme context is at SaaS demand generation.