Making your Service-Level Agreement (SLA) convincing to your sales team is important to their productivity and overall performance. One way of making your SLA speak to the sales team is to base it in units a sales person is most familiar with – dollars.
To calculate an SLA in dollars, take the percentage of the sales quota that marketing is responsible for each month – e.g., $200,000. Then, calculate the value of each Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) to determine how many leads marketing must deliver to reach that total.
Here is how to calculate the value of an MQL:
- Create a list of all the different campaigns or offers that have generated leads in your pipeline – such as white paper registrations, demo sign-ups and trade shows. You also can segment your leads by type of customer, such as enterprise vs. mid-sized and small business.
- Pull a list of recent customers and match them to the campaign or offer that generated their first visit or conversion. Then, calculate the average revenue per customer for each lead source. (If you’re segmenting by type of customer, you also can calculate the average revenue per large vs. mid-sized or small customer.)
- Look at the average close rate for each campaign or offer. Then, multiply the average revenue-per-customer for those campaigns/offers against the close rate to determine the average MQL value.
For example, if the average revenue per customer from a lead that converted on a whitepaper is $160,000 and the average close rate on those leads is 1%, the value for each whitepaper MQL is $1,600.
Based on those figures, you can establish an SLA that might look like this:
Marketing Will Deliver XYZ Worth of MQLS per Month
To set up the SLA for the sales team, start by figuring out how quickly a sales rep should follow-up on a new MQL.
Ask yourself, "How many contact attempts should the sales team make for every MQL of a certain type? How many follow-up attempts per lead should the sales team be able to complete each month?"
