What is an SLA (Service Level Agreement)?

An SLA (service level agreement) is a written commitment that says what one team or vendor will deliver, by when and how it’s measured. Between revenue teams it usually covers lead volume, follow-up speed and handoffs.

At a glance

• Externally, an SLA is part of a customer contract: uptime, support response times and what happens if they’re missed.
• Internally, the most common one is between marketing and sales: marketing commits to a volume of qualified leads, sales commits to how fast and how often it follows up.
• A second common one covers the handoff from sales to customer success after a deal closes.
• An SLA only works if the CRM records the timestamps it’s measured on.

How a sales and marketing SLA works

Both sides get a number. Marketing agrees to deliver a set number of leads that meet the agreed lead score or MQL definition. Sales agrees to a first-touch time and a minimum number of attempts before a lead can be disqualified, and to record why.

The speed half has real research behind it. In “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads” (Harvard Business Review, 2011), the authors audited 2,241 US companies: 37% responded to a web lead within an hour and 23% never responded. Firms that made contact within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as those that responded an hour later.

An SLA example

Example (illustrative): marketing commits to 80 MQLs a month that score 60 or higher. Sales commits to a first call within one business hour and four attempts over six business days. A weekly report shows both sides’ compliance, and a lead closed without the attempts goes back to the queue.

The sales to success version works the same way: a handoff note within a set time of closed-won, and a kickoff call booked within a set time after that, so onboarding starts while the buyer still remembers why they signed.

Common SLA mistakes

• One-sided agreements. If only sales has a target, it reads as blame. Give each side a number it controls.
• No baseline. Measure current response times and lead volume for a month before setting targets, or the numbers are guesses.
• Measuring what the CRM can’t see. If calls and emails aren’t logged against the lead, compliance can’t be reported.
• Never revisiting it. When lead sources or the team change, the targets need to change too.
• No consequence for a miss. Decide in advance what happens when a lead isn’t worked in time, such as reassignment through lead routing.

How SLAs show up in a revenue system

In the teams we run, the numbers are agreed in writing before day one and the partner sees them every week, which is the same idea as an SLA applied to the whole engagement. Internal SLAs, routing and the reports behind them are set up in the partner’s CRM as part of our RevOps work.

Terms that sit next to an SLA

An SLA usually defines the handoff from MQL to SQL, and it’s typically owned by RevOps. Approval times at a deal desk are often written as an SLA too. For customer-facing teams, the customer health score and CSAT show whether service levels are being met.