The four parts
- Event
- What starts the clock — record created, issue raised, milestone due.
- Standard
- The committed time, stated per severity or source.
- Measurement
- Where the clock is read, and what counts as satisfying it. Logging an unanswered call is not contact.
- Consequence
- What happens on breach: who is notified, and what they are expected to do.
Internal SLAs are the useful ones
Internal SLAs between teams — marketing to sales, sales to delivery, support to engineering — are where most operating value sits, because they make boundary failures visible before a customer experiences them. They also cost nothing contractually, so there is no reason not to define them.
Muhammad Sameed Abid
Muhammad Sameed Abid is a business operations, automation and growth systems professional with 9+ years across operations management, workflow and CRM automation, marketing operations and customer success. He is currently Head of Customer Success at GHA Marketing and writes here about the operating layer underneath growth.