Holding Your Teams Accountable With an SLA
What an SLA is
A service-level agreement in RevOps is a documented, measurable commitment between revenue teams-most often marketing and sales, but also sales and service. It defines what each team will deliver, within what timeframe, and how performance will be reviewed. The exam tests whether you can design a two-way SLA, operationalize it, and use it to hold teams accountable without blame.
Core rules and concepts
- Marketing commitments: lead volume, qualification criteria, data completeness, routing readiness.
- Sales commitments: follow-up time, acceptance or rejection with reason, disposition updates, feedback quality.
- Service commitments: onboarding time, response time, escalation paths, renewal signals.
- Make it measurable: define the metric, owner, target, data source, and review cadence.
- Review regularly; an SLA is a living operating agreement, not a signed PDF.
Worked example
Marketing agrees to deliver 200 MQLs per month that meet a fit-and-intent definition. Sales agrees to touch each accepted lead within 24 business hours and log a disposition within two days. RevOps builds a dashboard showing MQL acceptance rate and time-to-first-touch. If sales misses the response target, the review asks why-routing, capacity, or definition-rather than assigning blame.
Traps
- A one-sided SLA that only constrains sales or only marketing.
- Commitments with no metric, owner, or review date.
- Confusing an SLA with a customer-facing service contract.
Key takeaways
An SLA is a two-way, measurable operating agreement. Accountability comes from shared metrics and regular review.