A marketing-sales SLA is a short written agreement, signed off by the leaders of both functions, that states what marketing will deliver, what sales will do with it, and how fast. At the leadership level, a working SLA needs exactly four elements: a shared definition of a qualified lead, a volume commitment from marketing, a response-time commitment from sales, and a fixed cadence for reviewing whether both sides held up their end. Everything else — lead scoring formulas, CRM field mappings, routing rules — is implementation detail that belongs to the people running the day-to-day process, not the two leaders signing the agreement.
Most published guidance on this topic is written for the person building that implementation from scratch. This piece is about the shorter document that comes before any of that: the one a CRO and a CMO can read in five minutes and actually agree to.
We covered why this gap matters in why marketing-sales misalignment kills pipeline: most of the damage doesn't come from either team doing bad work. It comes from the two teams operating on different, unstated definitions of what "qualified" means and never noticing until a deal review goes badly. An SLA is the fix for that specific problem — not a general process document, a definitional one.
Why does this sit with leadership, not either team alone?
If marketing writes the SLA, it will optimize for volume and look generous on paper. If sales writes it, it will set the bar for "qualified" high enough that almost nothing marketing sends will clear it. Both outcomes are rational from inside each function, and both produce the same result: a document nobody actually uses six weeks later.
The agreement only holds if whoever owns pipeline generation and whoever owns closing it negotiate it together and both put their name on it — a CRO and a CMO at a larger company, or a founder wearing both hats negotiating honestly with themselves before a first sales hire arrives. That's what makes it different from a marketing ops playbook: it's a small negotiated contract between two peers (or two roles) who each have something the other needs and something the other can withhold.
This is also why it belongs in the broader alignment conversation, not as a standalone fix. See marketing-sales alignment at the leadership level for how this agreement fits alongside the other structural pieces — shared goals, shared reporting, and a shared definition of pipeline health.
The four things the agreement has to define
1. A shared definition of "qualified"
This is the part that actually prevents disputes. Write down, in plain language both sides would use on a call, what counts as a lead sales will work. Not a scoring formula — a description a salesperson could use to decide in ten seconds whether a lead in their queue belongs there.
A usable definition names what a lead actually has to show, not just where it came from. At the rep level, we use four fields for this — fit, role, intent, and context — laid out in full in why sales reps ignore the leads marketing sends them. The leadership SLA doesn't need to spell out all four to that level of detail — that's what the field-level document is for — but it should name the same four categories in plain language, plus who's disqualified regardless of the other three: students, competitors, job seekers, existing customers submitting support requests through the wrong form.
If your funnel has more than one lead source — inbound content, paid, outbound, events — state whether the definition is the same across all of them or varies by source. In most B2B funnels it should vary, because an inbound demo request and a cold outbound reply aren't the same buying signal even if both get labeled "qualified."
Write this definition once, put it in the agreement itself, and don't let it live only inside a lead-scoring tool that one team can quietly edit. If the SLA's definition and the field-level criteria the CRM actually checks for start to drift apart, that drift is usually the first sign the agreement needs revisiting before the scheduled review comes around.
2. What marketing commits to deliver
State a number and a time window — leads per month, or per quarter if volume is naturally lumpy — that meet the shared definition above. Attach a floor, not just a target: what happens if marketing misses the number two months running is a conversation the agreement should anticipate, not something invented in the moment.
If your pipeline mix includes marketing-sourced and marketing-influenced leads separately, say so explicitly. Sales leadership needs to know whether the committed number is "leads marketing generated from nothing" or "leads marketing touched somewhere in the journey," because those are different claims and get argued about differently in a pipeline review.
3. What sales commits to in return
Sales' side of the agreement is response time and disposition, not close rate — close rate depends on too many variables outside sales' control to belong in this document. What belongs here: how quickly a qualified lead gets a first touch (commonly stated in hours, not days, for inbound leads with an active buying signal), how many attempts happen before a lead is marked dead, and how quickly the outcome gets logged back into the CRM so marketing can see it.
That last point is the one most SLAs skip, and most alignment problems trace back to it. If sales works a lead but never marks the outcome, marketing has no way to know whether its definition of "qualified" is actually producing qualified leads: the CRM shows an open lead sitting untouched, and both sides draw their own conclusion about why.
4. What happens when either side misses?
An SLA without a stated consequence is a wish list. The consequence doesn't need to be punitive; it needs to exist and be agreed in advance. A reasonable version: if marketing misses volume two periods in a row, the two leaders review the definition and the channel mix before assuming the team underperformed. If sales' response time slips, the review looks at capacity and routing before assuming leads went cold from neglect. The point of naming this in advance is to keep the review conversation about the system, not about blaming a person in the room.
A starting structure
A first draft doesn't need to be long. A one-page version leadership can actually sign covers:
- Qualified lead definition — firmographic fit, buying signal, disqualifiers, by source if it varies
- Marketing's commitment — volume, time window, floor
- Sales' commitment — response time, attempt count, CRM logging turnaround
- Review cadence — when the two leaders sit down and look at both sides against the numbers
- Escalation path — what happens, and who's in the room, if either side misses
That review cadence is where most of these agreements actually live or die. A document reviewed once a year is a formality; the number itself and the definition behind it drift within a quarter as channel mix, pricing, or headcount changes. We go into what to actually track and how often in building the pipeline dashboard and reporting cadence leadership needs — an agreement is only as good as how you track it, and the two documents are meant to be read together.
FAQ
Does a marketing-sales SLA need to be a legal document?
No. It's an internal working agreement between two functional leaders, not a contract with legal standing. It should be written down and signed off in the sense of both leaders explicitly agreeing to it, but it doesn't need legal review or formal language.
Who should own the SLA once it's signed — marketing or sales?
Neither, on their own. The agreement should have a named owner from each side, and revisions should require sign-off from both. If one function can unilaterally edit the lead definition or the volume number, it stops being a shared agreement.
How often should the SLA be reviewed?
Quarterly is a reasonable default for most B2B companies: frequent enough to catch drift in lead quality or response time before it compounds, infrequent enough that both teams aren't spending review time on noise. Companies with a fast-changing channel mix or a recent go-to-market shift may need a monthly check for the first two or three cycles.
What's the difference between this SLA and a full demand-generation process document?
This SLA is the four commitments leadership agrees to and is accountable for. A process document — lead scoring rules, CRM automation, routing logic — implements those commitments day to day and belongs to marketing ops and sales ops, not to the CRO and CMO directly. Leadership should be able to read the SLA in five minutes; the process document underneath it can be as long as it needs to be.
How does this SLA relate to rep-level lead qualification (FRIC)?
The SLA states the leadership-level agreement in plain language: what counts as qualified, in general terms both leaders would recognize. Fit, role, intent, and context are the field-level version of the same idea, used day to day to actually tag and route leads. The SLA doesn't need to name those fields to work, but the two should describe the same thing. If a lead clears the field-level criteria in the CRM and a rep still doesn't think it's qualified, that's usually a sign the SLA's definition and the field-level implementation have drifted apart.
What if sales and marketing can't agree on the lead definition?
That disagreement is usually a sign the two functions are optimizing for different outcomes: marketing for pipeline volume, sales for close rate. It's worth surfacing before it gets written into a document either side will quietly ignore. If leadership can't reach a shared definition on the first attempt, it's more useful to agree on a narrower, testable version for one quarter and revisit it with real data than to leave the disagreement unresolved.
If you're not sure whether your current lead definitions and tracking would even support an agreement like this — whether you can actually tell where a lead came from and what happened to it — that's usually the first thing to check before drafting anything. Our free audit looks at what your tracking currently shows and what it's missing.