Service Level Agreement

Making a service level agreement is one of the most essential procedures for coordinating your sales and marketing operations (SLA). An SLA typically serves to specify the precise services that a customer will receive from a service provider. Sales and marketing agreements are among the most important SLAs because they serve internal operations as well.

Service Level Agreement (SLA)

A service level agreement (SLA) is a legal document that specifies the deliverables that each party has promised to produce for the other. This arrangement may occur between a company and its clients or between one department and another department inside the company that each receives a recurring service.

SLA Types

• Customer Service Level Agreement: An agreement by a vendor to provide a specific customer with a certain level of service is what a customer SLA is all about.
• Internal Service Level Agreement: An internal SLA only applies to parties within the organization. While a company may have open SLAs with all of its clients, it is also possible for it to maintain different SLAs between its sales and marketing divisions.
• Multilevel Service Level Agreement: Multilevel SLAs can serve both a company's clients and its many internal divisions. If there is more than one service provider and end user, the purpose of this sort of SLA is to specify what is expected of each side.

What does an SLA include?

• A Summary of the Agreement: An outline of the contract should be the first item on your SLA. Which kind of service have you committed to providing to the other party? Give a brief summary of the service, the audience it is being provided for, and the metrics used to determine its performance.
• The Objectives of Each Party: The objectives outlined in external SLAs, or those between a company and its clients, are essentially those of the client. If this is your goal, work with your customer to match their demands with the capabilities of your product and develop a measurable objective that your business can regularly achieve for the customer.
• Both parties' requirements: SLAs ought to specify what each party requires to fulfill its obligations. In agreements that service a customer, keep in mind that they may require more from you than just "the product" to help them achieve their objectives, such as weekly consulting, reporting, and technical maintenance.
• The Contact Points: Who is in charge of ensuring that the objectives of each party are met? In this portion of your SLA, determine which team handles certain tasks and who communicates with whom. Is a different employee than the one that submits performance reviews each week using the services? Make it clear who and how are participating in the SLA.
• A Plan if Goals Aren't Met: There should be official repercussions when a goal isn't achieved as part of a SLA, despite the fact that you might not want to think about it. But don't panic; these effects don't usually spell the demise of your company. Include a mechanism for compensating the service's end user when it falls short of their predetermined objectives.
• The Conditions of Cancellation: What conditions will your SLA be cancelled under? You'll frequently find yourself placing the SLA on the chopping board when it's simply not functioning, regardless of whether your contract services a client or two internal departments. Perhaps you haven't made much progress toward your goals in the last three months, or perhaps everyone isn't on board with the existing arrangement.

One further step in terms of SLAs

One further thing to consider when creating your service level agreement is to regularly review these metrics to track your success. Additionally, make sure that both Sales and Marketing have access to the data for both sides of the SLA.This phase promotes accountability and transparency and enables both teams to address problems or share congrats on successful outcomes.For a full 5 days training course in this topic, check our Service Level Agreement training courses