I've sat through a lot of alignment workshops. Everyone agrees to communicate better, someone builds a shared dashboard, and within six weeks sales is complaining about lead quality and marketing is complaining that nobody calls the leads. The problem was never the relationship. It's that nobody wrote down what each side owes the other, so every disagreement restarts from first principles.
Agree the definitions first, in writing
What is a qualified lead? Ask marketing and sales separately and you'll usually get two different answers, which explains most of the friction. Write one definition, with specific criteria, and put it somewhere both teams see. Do the same for every stage. This sounds administrative and it's the single highest-return hour I spend in most engagements — because until the definitions are shared, the two teams are arguing about different things while using identical words.
The commitments that matter
An SLA is a two-way promise. Marketing commits to a volume of leads meeting the agreed definition and to rejecting the ones that don't. Sales commits to contacting each one within a defined window, a defined number of times, and to logging a reason when they reject one. That last clause is the important one — without a rejection reason, marketing has no feedback loop and will keep producing the same leads forever.
- Marketing: agreed volume, agreed definition, no padding to hit the number
- Sales: first contact within a defined window, a minimum number of attempts
- Both: a rejection reason logged every time, from a short fixed list
- Both: one meeting a month with the numbers open and both leads present
The meeting that makes it real
Monthly, one hour, the pipeline open on the screen, both team leads present. Walk the rejected leads specifically. This is uncomfortable at first because it surfaces real disagreements, which is the point. Within a couple of months the rejection reasons cluster into two or three patterns and you'll know exactly what to fix — usually a form field, a targeting mistake, or a definition that was too loose.
When the SLA reveals something worse
Sometimes the process reveals that marketing is hitting its number and revenue still isn't moving, which means the definition itself is wrong — you've agreed a standard for qualification that doesn't predict closing. That's a genuinely useful discovery and it's why this exercise is worth doing even when both teams get along. Alignment isn't the goal. Finding the broken assumption is.
Better relationships don't survive a bad quarter. Written definitions and a monthly meeting with the numbers open do.
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