A sales SLA is a documented agreement setting the response and follow-up commitments a sales team owes, usually to marketing on inbound leads. It converts an expectation people assume is shared into a specific, measurable one.
What Goes Into a Sales SLA?
Four commitments cover most agreements.
Speed to first touch is the headline: how quickly a new lead gets contacted, often measured in minutes for inbound demo requests. Attempt count and duration set how many times a rep tries and over how long before the lead is closed or returned.
Disposition requirements specify that every worked lead gets an outcome recorded, since an unlogged lead can’t be audited either way. And the return path defines what happens to a lead judged unqualified, so it goes back to nurture rather than dying in someone’s queue.
The obligations run in both directions. Marketing typically commits to lead quality criteria and volume, which is what makes it an agreement rather than a demand.
Why Do Sales SLAs Exist?
Because inbound leads decay fast, and without a stated commitment, “quickly” means whatever each rep’s day allows. An SLA turns lead response time into a number someone is accountable for rather than an aspiration.
The second reason is arbitration. Most sales and marketing friction is a disagreement about whether leads were bad or follow-up was slow, and both sides argue from anecdote. An SLA with recorded compliance replaces that argument with data.
Why Do Most Sales SLAs Stop Working?
They’re written and then never measured. An SLA nobody reports on is a document, and the commitment quietly reverts to whatever was happening before.
Measurement usually fails for a mechanical reason, not a political one. Compliance needs two timestamps, lead arrival and first real attempt, and the second one sits in a dialer or an inbox rather than on the lead record. Once it can’t be measured cleanly, reporting stops and the SLA becomes something people cite rather than something that runs.
The other failure is setting terms nobody can hit. A five-minute SLA on a team of three reps covering a national territory will be breached daily until everyone learns to ignore it. Better a slower commitment that holds.
How Conquer Makes a Sales SLA Enforceable
An SLA needs two timestamps on one record: when the lead arrived, and when someone genuinely tried to reach it.
Salesforce already has the first. Conquer supplies the second on the same object, because calls and texts are placed from the lead record and logged as they happen, with dispositions recording what the attempt produced.
Compliance becomes a standard Salesforce report rather than a reconciliation project across two systems, and cadences enforce the attempt count and spacing the SLA specifies instead of leaving it to memory.
Could you pull last month’s leads right now and report which ones met your SLA?