Lead Handoff & SLA Checker

The Lead Handoff & SLA Checker tests the marketing-to-sales handoff against the SLA your two teams agreed. You paste a CSV export of your leads and enter your scoring model and SLA terms. It then reports how many MQLs got a first sales touch within your target, which MQLs were never touched, how many sales accepted or rejected, how many accepted MQLs converted, whether the MQL threshold sits in the right place, and whether marketing delivered the MQL volume it promised. It ends with a verdict and three fixes, most important first.

What it checks

• Response time. The share of due MQLs touched within your target, the median time to first touch with the number of leads behind it, and the slowest lead. An MQL is due once it has been touched, or once it is older than the target with no touch.
• Never-touched MQLs. These are listed by ID and kept out of the median, so they can't make it look better.
• Acceptance. MQLs sales accepted out of those it decided on, decisions made inside your window, MQLs still open past the window, and rejection reasons.
• Conversion. Accepted MQLs that reached your next stage, such as SQL or opportunity.
• The threshold. Conversion by score band. If MQLs just above the line convert clearly worse than higher scorers, the line may be too low. If leads below it that sales worked anyway convert as well, it may be too high. "Clearly" means the 90% ranges do not overlap. Anything less is reported as a hint, not proof.
• The volume promise. MQLs per week over the period, compared with the number marketing promised, and how many full weeks fell short.

The method and its limits

The scoring model is the one in the AAJ Lead Scoring and SLA Sheet. A fit score from your ideal-customer criteria is added to a behavior score from buying signals, and a total at or above the MQL threshold makes an MQL. Every rate shows its count and a 90% range (a Wilson interval). Any rate built on fewer than 30 leads is marked directional. That cutoff is my rule of thumb for AAJ's tools, not a statistical law. Below it, I would treat a rate as a question to take to sales, not as a reason to move the threshold.

The clock is calendar hours. A lead that becomes an MQL on Friday evening and is called on Monday morning shows as about 60 hours. If your SLA is written in business hours, say so, and the checker counts how many late leads became MQLs outside Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 17:00, so you can judge which misses are real. The tool does not tell you what a good response time is. It checks the target your team signed. I would rather hold a team to its own written promise than to an average nobody in the room agreed to.

The check runs in your browser. A draft is kept in this browser only. The same engine runs as an agent skill, lead-handoff-sla, so an AI assistant can run it on a CRM export. To agree the definition the check depends on, read How to Align Sales and Marketing at a Startup. To build fit criteria, use the ICP Fit Scorer.

Run this in your agent

The free AAJ agent skill Lead Handoff & SLA Check does this job inside a coding agent, on your own data. Install it with npx skills add sarojkjha/aaj-marketing-skills --skill lead-handoff-sla.

Using Claude or ChatGPT instead? Add the AAJ engines as a custom connector, with no install: https://aaj-engines-mcp.sarojkjha10.workers.dev/mcp