Sales and marketing alignment: a one-page agreement you can sign this week

Marketing says the leads are good. Sales says they are rubbish. Neither can prove it, and the argument returns at the end of every bad month. A one-page agreement ends it by writing down three things: what counts as a qualified enquiry, how quickly sales answers it, and what sales tells marketing afterwards. Fill the blanks below, sign it, and pin it where both sides see it. It will not make people cooperate. It removes the one quarrel that starts with "your leads are rubbish" and ends with "your people never call back".

The argument, in one firm

Imagine, as an invented example, a school-furniture maker in Indore. Enquiries came from Meta forms and an IndiaMART listing, and marketing reported strong numbers. The seller said many were parents asking for one desk for a child at home. Both were right and neither had a record.

They wrote the page below. Its first block required a quantity or a school name before an enquiry counted as qualified. Its third block gave the seller five rejection reasons to tick. After a few rounds "single piece for home" led the list, which was the evidence marketing lacked. The form now asks "Is this for a school, hostel or office?" before it asks for the phone number.

The seller learned something too. Several enquiries had waited three days. Because the page had named the reply time, the slow ones showed up as dates on a sheet, not as anyone's opinion. The seller's first promise had been "within an hour", a number met on quiet days only. They changed it to the same working day, which was met more often, though not on the Mondays after a holiday. The stricter rule also cut the count of qualified enquiries by about a third, which marketing disliked until the orders per enquiry rose.

The page itself

Copy this, replace the brackets, and print it.

1. What marketing sends. A qualified enquiry has a name, a working phone number, what the person wants in their own words, where it came from, and one signal: [asked for a price], [asked for a visit or demo], [gave a quantity or date], or [replied to our first message]. Anything else is a contact, kept for marketing to nurture.

2. What sales does. Every qualified enquiry gets a first reply from [name or role] within [a number of working hours the seller can keep on their worst day], on [working days]. If the owner is away, [name] covers.

3. What comes back. Within [number] days of the first reply, sales writes one of three outcomes on the enquiry: accepted and being worked; wrong fit, with a reason; or no response after [number] tries. Reasons are limited to: wrong product, wrong place, no budget, just browsing, duplicate.

4. The review. [Name] and [name] read the rejected and unanswered enquiries together on [a date both keep]. If one reason repeats, marketing changes what it sends. If one seller's replies are slow, the owner speaks to that seller.

5. Signed, [date], by marketing, sales and the owner.

In Indore, block 2 read: "First reply from the sales desk on the same working day, Monday to Saturday. If the counter manager is away, the owner covers." Two notes on the blanks. Choose the signals from what your buyers actually do: a school-furniture buyer who names a school and a quantity is ready, a listing contact who only taps "call me" is not yet. And count the clock from the time the enquiry reached you, not from when someone opened it, otherwise a weekend's enquiries look punctual on Monday.

What each rejection reason tells marketing

The reasons are a map of what to correct upstream. Wrong product points at the advertisement or listing title that attracted it. Wrong place means narrowing the location settings or naming the cities you serve. No budget suggests asking for the order size on the first screen of the form. Just browsing says to raise the signal rules in block 1. Duplicate means merging the records and fixing the form that let the repeat through. Review them in the same room as the replies, so the seller hears marketing's reasoning first-hand. Keep the list at five. A list of fifteen is one nobody picks from honestly.

Make the reply time one you can keep

A brave number that collapses is a common failure. "Within thirty minutes" becomes "when I am back from the site". Choose a time your slowest day can meet, and measure it from the timestamp on the enquiry sheet, not from memory. A same-working-day reply that is always kept beats a one-hour promise broken on Mondays.

If one side will not sign

Usually the seller balks at block 2, because a deadline sounds like every bad Monday. Do not argue the principle. Take the last ten enquiries, write down when each arrived and when each was first answered, and read the times aloud. Then ask the seller to name the number they can keep, and write that one.

If marketing balks at block 3, the worry is blame. Say that the reasons are a map for the ads, not a score, and let marketing word the list. An agreement drafted by one side alone gets signed and then ignored.

Where the page stops helping

It will not rescue a source that simply produces the wrong people, and it will not make an owner read the rejection list who never reads it. If the whole team is two people and the owner, the agreement is a note to yourself. That is still worth one page. Where you need eight clauses and an escalation path, read the fuller marketing-to-sales handover agreement.

Test the page on last week's enquiries

Before anyone signs, run one real week of enquiries through block 1 and ask whether each would have passed. Marketing-to-sales SLA development is the service for drafting it across channels, who answers an enquiry and how is sales work, and to start, tell us what you need.