Are SLAs the Answer?
Bridging the Sales-Marketing Divide, Part 2
In Part 1 of “Bridging the Sales-Marketing Divide”, I discussed the two most common causes of conflict between Sales and Marketing teams. While some conflict is due to unclear company goals or strategy, tension may also arise from the different roles and incentives that Sales and Marketing teams have. Many companies address potential friction between these teams through a contract or service level agreement (SLA) that establishes goals, creates shared definitions, and holds stakeholders accountable.
What SLAs Do Well
Organizations like Hubspot recommend service level agreements as a way to agree on goals, procedure, and accountability. When carefully considered and enforced, an SLA can strengthen collaboration between Sales and Marketing in several ways.
Source: www.aliciafontaine.com
SLAs establish goals. An agreement helps Sales and Marketing set appropriate goals based on company strategy. Marketing goals might include website traffic, net-new contacts, and leads. Sales goals can include opportunities, demos, deals, and revenue. Both sets of goals should drive toward pipeline and revenue, taking into account the length of the sales cycle and average deal size.
SLAs define lead stages. SLAs can help Sales and Marketing create a shared understanding of what qualifies as a lead, and how leads are scored. The teams work together to define both marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) and sales-qualified leads (SQLs) and to determine a process for handing off leads between teams. Once leads meet specific criteria, Marketing will pass these MQLs to Sales, who will then further qualify the leads and pursue the resulting SQLs, while passing those leads that don't meet SQL criteria back to Marketing for further nurturing.
SLAs promote accountability. Formalizing goals and responsibilities for each team increases transparency and accountability, which are important to any working relationship. A good SLA might also suggest actions that Marketing and Sales will take should they not meet their goals, or how the teams will address potential disruptions caused by changes in market conditions.
How SLAs Fall Short
While there are many advantages to creating an SLA, there are a few points of potential conflict between Sales and Marketing that it does not address. So while it’s a good idea to develop an SLA, the agreement should be part of a comprehensive approach to collaboration rather than a one-and-done exercise.
Source: www.aliciafontaine.com
SLAs aren’t customer-focused. SLAs are designed to optimize internal business operations. They define the relationship between two discrete processes–the lead generation process and the sales process–rather than the way customers actually buy. Failure to address the full buyer’s journey and understand how, and who, makes purchasing decisions may lead to gaps between the Marketing- and Sales-owned parts of the journey.
SLAs don’t account for different buyer personas. B2B purchasing decisions are complex, involving multiple stakeholders, each with their own challenges and motivations. When qualifying and scoring leads, Marketing may prioritize contacts with purchasing authority and overlook those buyers who, while not holding the purse strings, experience greater urgency to solve their problem. Sales may then not be prepared to engage with functional or technical buyers involved in the decision process, and who could serve as champions in closing the deal.
SLAs don’t address sales enablement. SLAs provide a framework for collaboration, but when it comes to handing off qualified leads, they do not always provide clear next steps. Sales may be less likely to follow up on an MQL if they are missing context on the lead source, the content the contact engaged in, or recommendations of what to say or show when following up with the lead. The SLA does not usually account for marketing support or sales enablement needed after handoff.
What Else Is Needed
While SLAs can improve collaboration between Sales and Marketing teams by defining lead and sales stages, they are focused on internal business operations. In addition to establishing goals, processes, and accountability, Sales and Marketing should also have regular conversations about their buyers and how they make decisions. Because while advances in marketing technology and CRMs have made it easier to capture and measure leads as they progress through the marketing funnel, purchasing decisions are still made by humans–and humans are complicated.
To that end, I propose several customer-centric strategies to improve internal collaboration, which I will cover in Part 3 of “Bridging the Sales-Marketing Divide.”