The Sales-Marketing SLA Nobody Actually Enforces

Every company I've worked with in the last few years has had a sales-marketing SLA document somewhere — marketing commits to lead volume and quality, sales commits to response time and follow-up. I'd estimate maybe one in five of those documents is actually checked against reality on any regular basis. The rest exist as a comfort object that gets referenced in slide decks and ignored everywhere else.

Why enforcement quietly dies

Enforcing an SLA means someone has to be willing to tell a sales leader their team is missing response-time targets, or tell a marketing leader their lead quality has slipped. Both of those conversations are uncomfortable enough that they get deprioritized in favor of whatever's urgent that week, and an SLA with no automated measurement requires someone to manually surface the breach before the uncomfortable conversation can even happen.

An SLA that requires a human to manually notice a breach before anyone acts on it isn't an SLA, it's an aspiration with a due date.

What makes an SLA survive contact with reality

• Automated breach detection, not a manual quarterly review — if it requires someone remembering to check, it won't get checked.
• A named owner on each side accountable specifically for their half of the SLA, not a shared team responsibility that nobody individually owns.
• A visible, shared dashboard both teams see without asking for it, so breaches are ambient knowledge rather than a surprise in a quarterly meeting.
• A consequence attached to repeated breaches that isn't just "we'll discuss it" — even something as simple as an escalation to both leaders' managers changes behavior.

The SLA document itself was never the missing piece at any of these companies. The missing piece was a mechanism that made ignoring it harder than honoring it, and almost nobody builds that mechanism at the same time they write the document.