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Tips For Creating A Successful Marketing And Sales SLA

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Can you think of important tips for creating a successful marketing and sales SLA? A service level agreement for your marketing and sales department might sound like a complicated concept, yet it's essential in today's business climate. The reason is it helps everyone stay on equal footing so you get a better vision of what you need to do to move your company forward.Tips for Creating a Successful Marketing and Sales SLA

With business competition becoming more intense than it ever has, you need your marketing and sales team to know what's going on and not take guesses. While it's sometimes complicated writing up an SLA, you can still whittle things down to the most essential elements to get things started.

It's worth every effort because statistics show companies with an actionable SLA have a 34% annual ROI increase compared to others. The way to get started is to bring everyone involved in a business project together in a meeting so you can discuss your main goals and responsibilities.

As you create an SLA as a group, discuss these particular points as the crux of your agreement, then work out more complex details later.

Determining What Your Buyer Personas Are

You've possibly worked with buyer personas before, though perhaps didn't have your entire team involved. Personas are similar to creating fictional characters, except they're based on the traits of your existing customers. With research done through your database and working with big data, does your marketing and sales team really know what your personas are?

Having this as a starting place on your SLA gets everyone on the same page about what type of client you want to target. Without personas, your marketing and sales team may start extrapolating based on the limited information they have.

Once this happens, you start to lose any sense of vision on how to create marketing content that resonates with the right demographic. When you start targeting a demographic you're not sure about, marketing efforts become painful time and money wasters.

Setting Goals on How You Approach Your Leads

Determining how your marketing funnel works is a major subject for your marketing team. They need to know the exact steps it takes to nurture leads through the process of content marketing on through to conversion. Losing focus on this can create a lack of cohesion with you and your marketing team midway into the funnel process.

The same applies to your sales team and how they handle sales-qualified leads. Finding answers on how to approach these situations should get based on real-life situations rather than just making up scenarios. It's one reason meeting regularly at least once a week can help you share what's been done to live up to your SLA.

SEE ALSO: How to See Explosive Success with Inbound Marketing

How to Nurture Sales Leads

If your SLA gives details on how to attract leads, you should do the same on the sales approach methods. For more detail, you want to get into how leads get managed and how many times your marketing and sales team contact prospective customers with marketing content.

You need everyone on the same page here, or it could lead to leads being contacted at the wrong times, which can quickly ruin any conversions.

Studying Metrics on a Regular Basis

The studying of metrics can feel overwhelming when you have so much to keep up on. Nevertheless, an SLA gets everyone on board to discuss the analytics of your marketing and sales goals. This should occur by studying the metrics of each individual involved in a project so you can determine who's doing well and who needs to improve.

In your SLA, though, clearly delineate your metric goals in advance so you can all work together to achieve the results you need.

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