How To: Create your first Sales SLA Report

Note: This post was originally published in 2018 but has been updated for relevancy and new information on the topic.

In parts 1 and 2 of the sales and marketing alignment series, we talked about mapping the buyer’s journey to the funnel and defining lead stages and statuses. For the third and final part of the series, we’ll be discussing SLAs (service level agreements).

Having clear and measurable SLAs is necessary to ensure sales and marketing teams drive the same actions. On a recent episode of Marketing Ops Confessions, Maria Velasquez, Director of Demand Gen at Feroot shared the importance of SLAs and how to drive alignment with effective SLAs.

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Let’s dive into SLA frameworks and how to get started building an SLA report today.

SLA framework 

When developing or iterating on sales SLAs consider organizing by lead stage to determine the goal, engagement focus, and follow-up timing. For example, hand-raisers (who are much closer to revenue) require much faster follow-up than MQLs who may be interested in content but not necessarily as ready for a sales conversation. While follow-up time can vary based on the lead stage, the name of the game is moving quickly. Faster follow-up yields higher conversion rates. The goal and type of content delivered will also depend on the lead stage. 

Here’s what we suggest from working with hundreds of marketing and sales teams.

Marketing SLAs

But wait, there’s more! Don’t stop at sales SLAs. 

Marketing SLAs are often overlooked but are a critical piece in the alignment puzzle. 

Having both sales and marketing SLAs in place ensures accountability on both sides.

Important components to track from a marketing perspective include: 

• The acceptance rate of leads
• Conversion rate to SAL
• Conversion rate to pipeline 

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Here’s another example of how to think about your sales and marketing service-level agreements. 

Check out the full playbook on sales and marketing alignment here. 

Now that we’ve discussed the importance of SLAs and frameworks to help you get started, here is a step-by-step guide to building an SLA in Salesforce today. 

Pre-requisites

While other CRM will soon be documented (such as HubSpot), the focus of this "how to" is really on setting up Salesforce and building Sales SLA reports to measure the consistency of your SDR team's follow up.

General considerations

To create the SLA Report, you'll need to have the right information available at the Lead level. The overall idea is to create a “Time to Touch” field on the Lead object. Whenever that field's value is 0, the lead was never touched. This means that your reps never got to reaching out to that lead (or that it wasn't tracked). Whenever the field value is greater than 0, the lead was touched and the field value will is the time difference between the lead creation date and the date of the first touch. We’ll be considering activity completion dates to achieve this. Activities can either be Calls, Emails or Meetings (but you can easily customize this list). This tutorial leverages Rollup Helper, which is a free app on the AppExchange marketplace and a great way to get started without building custom computations or ETL.

Steps to create your Sales SLA

Enable Aggregations in Salesforce

Install Rollup Helper from the AppExchange

Customize Salesforce fields

Create the following custom fields at the Lead Level:

• Number of Touches is a number field with 0 decimal

• Date of First Touch is a Date/Time field

Create aggregated fields with Rollup helper

• Open Rollup Helper by opening the “App Launcher”

• Create a new “Date of First Touch” Rollup
• Child Object = Task
• Relationship Field = Name ID

• Rollup Type = Minimum
• Field = Created Date

Create a Custom Filter

Create a custom filter with the following criteria: Name = Sales Touches

• Filter Criteria
• You’ll need to click on “Show More” at the bottom of the Field List
• Type = Call, Email, Meeting

• Status = Completed

• Here is what the filter should look like

• Click on the “Save” button at the bottom of the page

• Click on the “Save and Run” button at the bottom of the page

1. Create a custom filter with the following criteria: Name =Number of First Touch

• Create a “Number of First Touch” Rollup
• Child Object = Task
• Relationship Field = Name ID

• Rollup Type = Count

• Select the “Sales Touches” filter that we created earlier

• Click on “Save” at the bottom of the page
• Create a Formula Field at the Lead Level
• Field Type = Formula
• Field Name = Time to First Touch
• Formula Return Type = Number
• Decimal Place = 0
• Formula: IF ( Number_of_Touches__c > 0,( Date_of_First_Touch__c - CreatedDate)*24, NULL )
• Blank Field Handling: Treat blank fields as blanks

• Create the report
• Create a Bucket field on the “Time to First Touch” that looks like this

• Group rows by “MK Customer Fit Segment” to look at your SLA based on the quality of leads
• Group columns by “SLA”

• Uncheck “Detail Rows” at the bottom of the report to hide the details
• “Save & Run” and you’re all set

There you have it, you can now start measuring your average, min/max time to contact leads based on channels, reps... This is the first step to being able to identify the biggest areas of improvement for your SDR team.

For sales and marketing alignment plays from mapping the buyer’s journey to the funnel through SLAs, get the complete playbook here.