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Rebuilding the sales–marketing SLA

Problem

Marketing celebrated rising MQLs. Sales ignored half and complained the rest were “students and competitors.” Quarterly business reviews devolved into attribution debates. Leadership withheld budget increases because “the machine is broken,” even as inbound grew.

Constraints

CRM could not support hyper-granular scoring without a six-month IT project. SDR team size was fixed for the year. Product had three distinct buyers with different urgency curves.

Approach

We retired the word MQL in internal meetings and replaced it with three measurable objects: meeting held, qualified opportunity created, and reactivated conversation in a target account list. Marketing’s SLA became “speed and quality of stories and signals,” not lead count. Sales’ SLA became documented follow-up windows by tier—with escalation when broken.

Rollout

Executive workshop to align on definitions—painful but short. RevOps implemented minimal field changes and dashboards. Marketing ran a thirty-day “no volume targets” experiment to prove behavior change before tying incentives to new metrics.

Risks mitigated

• Gaming: paired metrics (meetings + opp rate) instead of a single number
• SDR burnout: caps on recycled leads per rep per week
• Backsliding: monthly SLA review with named executives in the room

Outcomes (illustrative)

Lead volume dropped; pipeline quality improved. Marketing stopped defending junk and started publishing what reps used on calls.

Lessons

SLAs fail when they optimize the wrong variable. Meetings held is imperfect but harder to fake than form fills.