The sales and marketing alignment conversation has been happening at B2B companies for decades. The standard recommendations — more meetings, shared OKRs, better communication — address the symptom. The root cause is definitional. When sales says "marketing sends us bad leads," they mean leads that do not match their mental model of a good prospect. When marketing says "sales does not follow up on our leads," they mean contacts who met marketing's qualification criteria but were not followed up on. Both statements can be simultaneously true because neither team is working from the same definition of what a qualified lead looks like.
A Service Level Agreement (SLA) between sales and marketing solves this by making the definitions explicit and shared in HubSpot — encoded in lifecycle stages, lead scores, and workflow logic rather than sitting in a document no one reads after the first month.
The Five Elements of a Functional Sales and Marketing SLA
1. A shared MQL definition
An MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) is a contact that meets a combination of demographic fit and behavioral engagement criteria. The definition must be specific enough to be enforceable: not "shows interest" but "has a lead score above 45 AND works in a company with 50-500 employees AND holds a Director or above title." In HubSpot, this definition is encoded in lead scoring criteria and the workflow that changes a contact's lifecycle stage to MQL when those criteria are met. Both teams must agree on the criteria before the workflow is built.
| Criteria type | Example | Points |
|---|---|---|
| Job title (fit) | VP, Director, Head of, C-level | +15 |
| Company size (fit) | 50-500 employees | +10 |
| Industry (fit) | ICP industries | +10 |
| Pricing page visit (intent) | Visited /pricing | +20 |
| Demo request form (intent) | Submitted demo form | +30 |
| Guide download (intent) | Downloaded implementation guide | +10 |
| Email engagement (intent) | Opened 3+ emails in 30 days | +5 |
| Wrong industry (negative) | Not in ICP industry list | -15 |
2. Marketing's commitments
Marketing commits to a monthly MQL volume target, broken down by channel where possible. The target should be calibrated from historical data: how many MQLs per month are required to produce the pipeline sales needs to hit quota, given the current MQL-to-opportunity conversion rate? Marketing also commits to lead quality: the percentage of MQLs that sales accepts (does not immediately reject as a mismatch) should be tracked and held to a minimum threshold.
3. Sales' commitments
Sales commits to speed-to-lead and follow-up frequency. Speed-to-lead: first contact attempt within a defined window after MQL trigger (2 business hours is a common target for high-intent leads). Follow-up frequency: a minimum number of contact attempts before a lead is recycled back to marketing as "not yet ready." In HubSpot, a workflow enforces the follow-up cadence by creating tasks at defined intervals and escalating to the manager if the tasks are not completed within the window.
Sales + Marketing Alignment
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Book a Free Call4. The feedback loop
The feedback loop is the mechanism that lets sales communicate lead quality back to marketing in a structured way. In HubSpot, this is typically a contact property called "Lead Disqualification Reason" with a defined dropdown of options: Not in ICP, No Budget, Wrong Timing, Already Using a Competitor, Unresponsive After 5 Attempts, Duplicate. When a sales rep disqualifies a lead, they select the reason from the dropdown. Marketing pulls this report monthly. If a specific disqualification reason is consistently above 20% of disqualified leads, it signals a targeting or messaging problem that marketing can address at the source.
5. The monthly SLA review
The SLA review is a monthly meeting with both teams present, using a shared HubSpot dashboard that shows: MQLs generated vs. target (marketing accountability), speed-to-lead performance (sales accountability), MQL-to-opportunity conversion rate (shared), and disqualification reasons by category (mutual learning). The dashboard should be visible to both teams at all times, not only during the review meeting. When both teams see the same data continuously, the dynamic shifts from a monthly blame session to an ongoing collaborative effort to improve the numbers.