What is a lead SLA?
Every sales team agrees that leads should be answered quickly. Without a written rule, quickly means different things to different people, and nobody notices the lead that waited until the next morning.
What a lead SLA contains
- When the clock starts: the moment the lead arrives in your system, not when someone first opens it.
- What counts as a response: a call attempt, a personal message or a reply by email. An automatic confirmation usually does not count.
- The target time, for example 15 minutes or one hour.
- Working hours: what happens to leads that arrive at night or at the weekend.
- The owner: who is responsible for each lead, so the deadline belongs to a person.
- Escalation: who is alerted when the target is missed, and after how long.
The term is also used for an agreement between marketing and sales: marketing commits to delivering a certain number of qualified leads, and sales commits to working each one within a set time. The response-time part is the same.
An example (illustrative)
A company that sells installation services writes its lead SLA like this: leads that arrive on weekdays between 9:00 and 19:00 get a first call attempt within 15 minutes. Leads that arrive outside those hours are called by 9:30 the next working day. If a lead has no reaction after 30 minutes, the sales lead is notified. Every Monday the team looks at how many leads met the target last week and why the others did not.
How to keep it realistic
Set a target the team can meet on a normal day, measure it for a few weeks and tighten it later. A target missed every day is ignored. Make sure every lead has an owner the moment it arrives, otherwise the SLA belongs to nobody.
Lead SLA in OrgLines
In the OrgLines Lead Center you set a response threshold and quiet hours for each workspace. When a lead waits longer than the threshold without a reaction, the responsible person gets a ping; quiet hours keep the alerts out of the night. With auto-routing on, every new lead is assigned by your rules the moment it arrives, so the deadline always has an owner. New leads can also be delivered to Telegram, and the AI assistant can list the leads that are going stale.