How to define the handoff SLA between marketing, SDR and sales

A handoff SLA is a written commercial service-level agreement that fixes three things per handoff: the owner who receives the lead, the maximum time to act, and the quality criteria the lead meets to advance. It is the difference between a loop that spins and a funnel that leaks.

Leads go cold without an SLA because the handoff is no-man's-land. Marketing assumes sales already called. Sales assumes the lead was not ready. Nobody holds the clock. In the SwitchON method, responding to a hot lead in under 5 minutes instead of an hour can multiply the odds of connecting with the person by up to 9, because you catch them while your brand is still top of mind. Every hour that passes, that intent evaporates.

The SLA turns good intentions into a measurable promise. It is not bureaucracy: it is the minimum that keeps the money you spent generating the lead from burning in the handoff. If your lead-to-meeting conversion rate is low, before spending more on attraction, check whether the problem is in the handoff. It almost always is.

Three handoffs need an SLA, one for each border between lanes of the loop. First, Marketing to SDR: when a lead raises their hand (Hand-Raise) or qualifies as an MQL, marketing passes it to the SDR for contact. Second, SDR to Sales: when the SDR confirms it is a real buyer and not a tire-kicker, they book the meeting and hand the lead to the account executive. Third, Sales to Post-sale: when the deal closes, sales passes the customer to the team that activates and grows them.

Each handoff has its own clock and its own standard because each one protects something different. The first protects response speed. The second protects the quality of the meeting that reaches the executive, your most expensive resource. The third protects retention and expansion, where most of the customer's lifetime value lives.

Most companies only think about the first handoff and forget the other two. But an SDR who passes junk meetings burns the executive's time just like marketing burns leads. And a sale that closes and is handed badly to post-sale turns into churn. The loop only spins without leaks when all three handoffs have a contract.

For a hot lead that raises their hand, the Marketing-to-SDR SLA should be 5 minutes during business hours. For an MQL that arrived through content but did not request contact, 1 hour at most. The SDR, once they book, hands the meeting to the executive at least 24 hours before it happens, with full context. And Sales, on closing, hands off to post-sale within 24 hours of the signature.

The minutes matter because buying intent has a short life. In the SwitchON method, contact within the first 5 minutes versus waiting 30 can multiply the connection rate by 9 with a lead who just raised their hand. The reason is simple: you catch them in the window where they are still thinking about your solution, not once they have moved on.

A quick comparison worth keeping on the wall. Hand-Raise lead: respond in 5 minutes. Content MQL: 1 hour. SDR-to-executive meeting: 24 hours of lead time. Close to post-sale: 24 hours. These numbers are not aspirational, they are the minimum viable for the loop not to leak. If you cannot always hit 5 minutes, define a realistic coverage window and promise it for real.

A lead only advances if it meets a written quality criterion, not just because it arrived. From Marketing to SDR, the criterion is fitting the 4-quadrant ICP and showing an intent signal (raised their hand or consumed bottom-of-funnel content). From SDR to Sales, the criterion is having passed a check-up with SPICED: the SDR confirms situation, pain, impact, decision and critical events, distinguishing a real buyer from a curious one. From Sales to Post-sale, the criterion is a signed deal with documented expectations and scope.

The second handoff's filter saves the most money. An SDR applies the check-up with SPICED before passing the meeting to the executive: if the lead has no real pain, no quantifiable impact, and no access to the decision-maker, it is not a meeting, it is a waste of your machine's most expensive resource. Qualifying well here means the executive only enters conversations that can close.

Write these criteria as a checklist, not a vague idea. A lead that fails the criterion does not bounce to the trash: it returns to the previous lane with a reason. Marketing learns why an MQL did not qualify and adjusts. The SDR learns why a meeting did not advance. That feedback loop is what makes the loop improve month over month instead of repeating the same mistakes.

A one-page handoff SLA has six blocks. One: the three handoffs named (Marketing to SDR, SDR to Sales, Sales to Post-sale). Two: the owner who receives at each. Three: the maximum response time per lane. Four: the written quality criterion to advance. Five: what happens when a lead does not qualify (it returns to the previous lane with a reason). Six: the review cadence and the owner of the number. It fits on one sheet on purpose: if it does not fit, nobody reads it.

The key is that both teams sign it, literally. An SLA written only by marketing is a wish list. An SLA that sales also signed is a commitment. Get both leaders in a room, agree on each number out loud, and record who commits to what. The signature is not ceremony: it is the moment they stop blaming each other and start measuring.

Keep it alive. The SLA is not a document you file, it is a dashboard you review. Define where it lives (the CRM, a shared doc) and what compliance looks like each week. If you want an objective starting point to know what to fix first before writing the agreement, a scorecard of your sales machine tells you which lane holds the biggest leak so the SLA attacks the real problem, not the one you think you have.

The SLA and the qualification stages are two sides of the same coin: the stages define what a lead is, the SLA defines what gets done with it and how fast. An MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) fits the ICP and showed content interest: it triggers the 1-hour Marketing-to-SDR SLA. A Hand-Raise (HR) actively requested contact: it triggers the 5-minute SLA, the most urgent of all. A PQL (Product Qualified Lead) used the product or tool and showed usage intent: it enters the SDR lane with priority. An SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) already passed the check-up with SPICED and is ready for the executive: it triggers the SDR-to-Sales handoff.

This equivalence table is what makes the SLA actionable. When a lead changes stage, the SLA clock starts on its own. There is no case-by-case decision: the stage determines the lane, the owner and the time. MQL and HR live in the first handoff. SQL lives in the second. PQL accelerates the first because it already showed behavior, not just interest.

If your qualification stages are still blurry, the SLA has nothing to grab onto. First define what separates an MQL from a Hand-Raise and a PQL from an SQL with concrete criteria. Once the stages are clear, the SLA becomes nearly automatic: each stage transition is a trigger with an associated clock, and the loop starts to spin on its own.