A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a document that defines what the sales and marketing teams will commit to accomplishing in order support each other in reaching a shared revenue goal. The purpose of an SLA is to formalize the measurement and monitoring of marketing and sales activities in order to ensure progress and results.

The first step in instituting an SLA is determining the marketing team’s accountability. This requires identifying how many marketing qualified leads (MQLs) the marketing team must deliver to sales in order to meet quota.

The next step in the process is determining how quickly sales needs to follow up with MQLs as well as how many attempts your sales team should make when attempting to contact a MQL. This information should help define how many of those attempts should be converted to sales.

Learn: what is sales qualified lead?

The final step is monetizing the SLA by determining the sales quota your sales team is responsible for every month. After this is defined, you will need to calculate the value of an MQL, which will determine how many MQLs your marketing team needs to deliver each month in order to reach your monthly sales quota.

Expert Tip:

Once you have an SLA in place, it isn’t set in stone. The SLA should be reviewed quarterly, or at least bi annually, to make necessary adjustments in order keep both marketing and sales on track to reaching stated revenue goals.

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