SLA: MQL - SAL - SQL

There are three basic types of SLAs: customer, internal, and multilevel service-level agreements.

A marketing-sales service-level agreement (SLA) is a cross-team commitment that establishes a shared set of expectations around each team's responsibilities. A marketing-sales SLA will include: Goals for marketing about the quality and quantity of leads that should be produced at each lifecycle stage.

For a formal write up of an SLA, one should include:

1. Summary of Agreement

2. Goals of Both Parties

3. What's Needed by Both Parties

4. Points of Contact

5. If Goals Are Not Met

6. Conditions of Cancellation

Marketing and Sales SLAs set the terms for what constitutes as a MQL, SAL, and SQL; along with who is responsible for what, plus any quotas or other conditions to be met.

A marketing qualified lead is a lead who has engaged with your company and could become a customer if nurtured correctly.

A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a lead that the marketing team has deemed more likely to become a customer compared to others. This determination is based on criteria such as which: web pages were visited, content offers were downloaded, CTAs were clicked, and social posts were interacted with.

The marketing team determines whether or not they believe sales would have a good chance at successfully nurturing and converting a specific lead into a customer.

Methods of identifying MQLs include contact engaging with content, activity from them inputting information into a contact entry point, contacting you for marketing, or otherwise sending signals that they want to purchase (without necessarily confirming that they are ready to buy a specific service).

If the sales team does agree with the marketing team — and believes they have a good chance of converting an MQL into a customer — then that MQL becomes a sales qualified lead (SQL).

While a sales qualified lead has been researched and vetted by your marketing department and is ready to talk to your sales department, a marketing qualified lead is a lead who has engaged with your company and could become a customer if nurtured correctly. An MQL becomes an SQL once they're ready to talk to the sales team.

After a lead has been qualified by the marketing team, and the sales team is qualifying the lead, they become a sales accepted lead.

A sales accepted lead is the bridge between marketing and sales in the buyer’s funnel.

A sales accepted lead (SAL) is a marketing qualified lead (MQL) that is passed along to the sales team. When a prospect demonstrates all the positive signs to become a lead and the marketing team measures the qualification score based on the upon-agreed criteria, that lead becomes a marketing qualified lead (MQL). As per the journey in the sales funnel, MQL should go through the SAL stage before becoming a SQL.

Purposes of Sales Accepted Leads include:

A lead becomes qualified after sales acceptance via observation, prequalification scripts, and honest communication.

Sales-qualified lead definition

A sales qualified lead is a prospective customer that is ready to talk to a sales team. Typically, this lead has expressed enough interest in your product or service, that they're ready to move into your sales process. Usually, they've been researched and vetted by your marketing department and then handed off to your sales team.

A sales-qualified lead (SQL) is a prospective customer that has been researched and vetted -- first by an organization's marketing department and then by its sales team – and is deemed ready for the next stage in the sales process. An SQL has displayed intent to buy a company's products and has met an organization's lead qualification criteria that determine whether a buyer is a right fit. The label is applied to a prospect that has gone past the engagement stage and is ready to be pursued for conversion into a full-fledged customer.

At this point, consultations have been booked, pitches made, proposals sent, deals on the table, decision makers brought in, etc with intent for specific purchases.