The SLA That Isn't: Teardown of a Marketing-Sales Agreement
Objective: Review a draft marketing-sales SLA (service level agreement) against the lesson's three pillars of RevOps, and correctly separate the clauses that are genuine governance defects from the clauses that only sound weak but are actually fine.
You're the incoming RevOps lead at Snowflake, the cloud data warehousing company (customers including Capital One, Sony, and Adobe). Someone drafted a marketing-sales SLA eighteen months ago and nobody has touched it since. Leadership wants it signed off at the next ELT (executive leadership team) meeting, and you've been asked to red-team it first.
Read the specimen SLA clause by clause against the lesson's people alignment, process standardization, and technology integration pillars. Not every awkward-sounding clause is actually broken, some are deliberately vague on purpose and that's fine, so back every defect you flag with the specific pillar it violates.
Before you start
What you'll need
Free path (everything below is enough to finish)
A simple two-column tracker is enough to force a verdict on every clause instead of skimming past the vague ones.
The process
Specimens to review
Which of these 8 clauses are real RevOps governance defects, which pillar (people, process, or technology) does each violate, and which clauses are actually fine even though they read as informal?
SNOWFLAKE MARKETING-SALES SERVICE LEVEL AGREEMENT (Draft v3, unchanged since last review) 1. Marketing will deliver a strong volume of high-quality leads each month. 2. Sales will make a reasonable effort to follow up on leads in a timely manner. 3. An MQL (marketing qualified lead) is any contact who fills out a form on the website. 4. Success is measured by total MQLs delivered per quarter. 5. If sales disputes a lead's quality, the deal is removed from the count with no further review. 6. CRM fields for lead source and campaign are optional at the rep's discretion. 7. When an SLA target is missed two quarters running, marketing and sales leadership hold a joint review to adjust the definition or process. 8. Renewal and expansion data from customer success is not currently connected to this SLA.
Specimen: synthetic, realistic
Final deliverable
A clause-by-clause verdict table naming each real defect, the RevOps pillar it violates, and a one-line fix, plus a short note on which clauses were correctly left alone.
See a reference example
MapmyIndia, SLA teardown verdict table (excerpt) Clause 3 (MQL = any form fill): DEFECT, process pillar. Fix: define MQL with a minimum qualification (job title, company size, or intent signal), not form completion alone. Clause 7 (two-quarter joint review trigger): NOT A DEFECT. A two-miss threshold before triggering review is a reasonable damping mechanism, not a governance gap, flagging it would be over-correcting.
Success criteria
You're done when you can:
- Correctly flags all 6 real defects from the 8-clause specimen
- Names the specific RevOps pillar (people, process, or technology) each defect violates, not just 'this is bad'
- Does not flag any of the 3 distractors as defects