The SLA and the JBP - Tools for Alignment

If you have been following this blog, you will remember that we last left off discussing the “crisis of trust and confidence” that many times happens between sales and marketing groups. As we all finalize our strategic planning for the New Year, it’s important that sales and marketing teams take this planning time as an opportunity to collaborate and work together as one “demand generation” group.

In the previous installment to this blog, it was recommended that sales and marketing alignment begin with a Service Level Agreement (SLA). Take a quick read of that blog to get the back story and then continue on with this one.

Once you have your SLA in place. You need a plan – how you are going to implement the SLA. A best practice that I’ve employed over the years is called the “Joint Business Plan”. Just like the SLA, it also has an acronym – the JBP.

The JBP puts the SLA in motion. It’s the implementation and how the marketing and sales teams create their synergy. The JBP is a series of meetings with resulting actionable plans that are managed in a planning document.

Starting with the “annual planning session”, where the teams jointly develop the annual sales and marketing plans – how your company is going to generate demand and close the resulting opportunities. It ensures agreed upon direction (product, message, and revenue) and outlines tasks to reach the KPIs – usually by quarterly goals.

Hold bi-annual meetings to review first half and then full year performance – this allows for mid-year changes to the plan and roll-up reporting of your joint performance to the executive level. Every quarter, the management teams should come together and hold a quarterly business review. This meeting is to ensure that agreed upon KPI, tactics and action plans are being delivered and each one should be scored in a way that allows for the teams to measure themselves on how they have (or have not) been delivering on their promises. If modifications or tweaks to the plan need to be made, it’s in this meeting that those changes are approved.

Some companies decide to hold monthly meetings. Typically, if you have short sales cycles and your business is dynamic enough to require monthly meetings, then definitely meet that often. Otherwise, a monthly recap of historical performance and upcoming planned actions should be delivered to the team via email or posting to a collaboration site on your intranet.

The point here is that the JBP is a living and breathing document and process. It never stops. It keeps the teams aligned and communicating. The SLA is just a piece of paper without the JBP – it’s only as good as the implementation!!

A Crisis of Trust and Confidence

Recently, I was working with a large company to help them understand early stage pipeline performance. An overwhelmingly large number of their opportunities were not moving in the early stages of their pipeline – going no place – and the vast majority never made it past the first stage in the pipeline. On the other hand, the opportunities that converted the best through the pipeline and concluded in 90% of the revenue were the ones that came directly from the sales team.

Why were these two things happening simultaneously? No one really knew – we just knew that we had to fix it because:

• They were wasting valuable marketing investments
• Countless hours of sales people’s time were focused on the wrong tasks and
• They were having a hard time forecasting the pipeline – finance was going crazy

When we started digging in to the issue, we started to hear all sorts of rationals as to why this might be happening. Are any of the following statements made by sales and marketing professionals familiar to you

Sales does not follow-up effectively on leads?
Most of the leads that marketing sends to us are not any good.
It’s the sales team's fault that leads don’t turn into revenue.
Why does marketing not consult with sales about where to invest in order to generate the right type of demand?

So who is right? Everyone? No one? The fact is, many companies don’t really know – but what we do know is the result - blame.

Worse, blame further erods pipeline results because it creates a CRISIS of trust and confidence between sales and marketing. The result of all of this continued pipeline leakage – lost revenue. If this cycle of pipeline performance issues and crisis of trust and confidence sounds familiar to you, it's time to do something about it.

Here's where to start - get alignment between sales and marketing! Sales and marketing alignment needs to start with a shared vision and direction – from the CEO down. Without this support, your success will be short-lived and ultimately limited in its impact. Start with agreements on problems. What’s most important and what are we trying to do as a company? Always support your position with quantitative data (crazy idea - leverage the data in your CRM) - anecdotal statements without merit are worthless.

After you have agreements on what Sales and Marketing should achieve together, ask for accountability on deliverables. No accountability means no action – puts you back to the crisis of blame. Align agreements and accountabilities all the way to be bottom of sales and marketing. Team members need to know you are serious and that the message comes from the top. At the top, keep it simple – stay out of the details like processes, performance indicators, compensation plans. Leave those to the implementation team members. Your goal is to get a common direction!

Once you have alignment at the top, it now needs to be fostered in the field. A best practice is to have a Service Level Agreement. Fondly known as the “SLA”. The SLA creates a partnership – it’s a teamwork document. It is a contract that Marketing and Sales develop together that holds each other accountable. Get’s everyone on the same page. It defines key actions like team communication, nurture processes, sales processes, lead scoring and opportunity definitions, key performance indicators and reporting.

If I was to point out one tactic that should not be skipped under any circumstances – it would be the SLA. Would you go in to business with a partner without having a contract? Always have an SLA. Sales and Marketing should review it together every quarter to ensure alignment and KPI performance. Make ongoing changes as necessary to restore or sustain alignment.

If you can accomplish top-down agreements and the creation of an SLA, you have made a giant leap to gaining alignment and setting the stage for improving your pipeline performance.

In my next blog, we will advance this discussion in to the topic of Joint Business Planning.

A sales pipeline – what’s alfalfa got to do with it?

I learned about having a sales pipeline at a very early age. But I did not know it at the time. It was back in the 70’s on the family farm in Southern Wisconsin. You see, my dad grew and sold alfalfa (aka hay) for a living. He raised it on the family farm and sold it to large dairies and horse farms all across the Midwest and Southeast. Harvesting alfalfa was a very labor intensive process back in those days and I have a bad back to prove it. But so was his accounting process. He actually had this big ledger book. It was always open on his desk. He seemed to manage his entire business from this one book. I had no idea of its importance.


His list of clients and prospects were in the book. He posted all orders with full detail of purchase price, cost of goods, trucking, and profit margin. When demand was slow, he would page through the book and look for farmers to call. He would log the calls with a simple check mark next to the name. When he made a sale, it would go in a special section where he would track the order until it arrived at the client's farm. Does this process sound familiar? Folks, this simple log book was a CRM system.


My dad had a pipeline. Rudimentary to be sure, but he had one – to sell alfalfa. He knew what went in to the top of the pipeline, what got stuck, what leaked, what was discontinued, and what concluded in a sale. He had a full understanding of his bid-to-close ratio and his conversion rates. He focused on his pipeline daily, kept accurate records and used the information to forecast how much money he needed to raise to pay the bills and make a small profit.


He never used any of those fancy words like bid-to-close, balance or conversion rates. If I called him right now and asked him what his late stage conversion rates are, he would ask me if I’ve been drinking. Business has certainly changed and become much more complex. I would say that the required nuts-n-bolts of managing a pipeline are the same today, as when I first experienced them in the 70’s. The moral of this story is get back to the basics. Take a look at how you manage your pipeline. Are you using a sound process? Are you collecting and keeping quality data for forecasting? Are you focused on the entire pipeline and looking for leakage and stagnant areas? Do you know your conversion rates down to the rep level? Are you coaching to the pipeline? These are just a few, but big areas, you should be focusing on.


This past June, my family and I visited the farm, as we do every year. During that visit, I took a minute to peek in my dad’s office. Guess what? There on his big desk was the ledger. Sound business fundamentals never go out of style.