This one is for the marketers tired of being told their leads are not good enough, the sales managers, and anyone who has ever sat in a pipeline review where one side blamed the lead quality and the other blamed the follow-up, and both were a little bit right.
What: Using Breeze Assistant to draft the service-level agreement between your sales and marketing teams from the reality of your own portal — shared lead definitions written in language a workflow can actually check, reciprocal commitments with real numbers attached, a handoff mechanism with automatic revert rules so no lead dies in silence, and a governance rhythm that keeps the whole thing honest after the goodwill of the kickoff meeting wears off. And, because Breeze now renders Mermaid, the moving parts come back as diagrams you can actually look at, not just paragraphs you have to picture.
Prompt of the week:In almost every B2B revenue engine, there is a place where the pipeline quietly leaks, week after week, and nobody is quite accountable for it. Marketing passes a lead to sales. Sales does, or does not, follow up. The lead converts, or stalls, or vanishes. And when the quarterly numbers disappoint, the meeting that follows is less a diagnosis than a custody battle. People on the r/marketing boards have a name for the place these leads disappear into: the black hole between MQL and closed-won.
The numbers behind it are not subtle. Depending on which study you read, only around eight per cent of companies describe their sales and marketing alignment as strong, fewer than half have any formal agreement governing the handoff at all, and in one survey of a hundred-plus companies more than half had broken handoffs — sales following up on fewer than a third of the leads marketing had engaged. Speed makes it worse: the difference between contacting a fresh inbound lead in five minutes versus thirty is not a rounding error, it is the difference between a conversation and a voicemail nobody returns.
The fix that every serious alignment playbook now converges on is not “communicate more” or “add a shared Slack channel”. It is a written contract — a service-level agreement that converts the warm idea of “one revenue team” into specific, auditable obligations on both sides. Marketing commits to a volume and a quality bar and to handing over leads with enough information to act on. Sales commits to a response time, a number of attempts, and to logging what happened. And both commit to a standing review where the agreement is checked against reality and adjusted, rather than quietly abandoned.
The reason most teams do not have one is not disagreement that they should. It is that writing it is genuinely hard. It forces the uncomfortable conversation about what “qualified” actually means, in terms concrete enough that a workflow could confirm it, rather than the fog of “marketing thinks it is ready, sales disagrees”. It forces both sides to accept a number they will be measured against. And it requires someone to assemble the lifecycle stages, the lead status values, the routing, the alerts, and the reporting into one coherent system instead of five disconnected settings. That assembly work is exactly what this prompt does.
Prompt structure
Paste this into Breeze Assistant and make sure CRM data access is enabled in your AI settings so Breeze can reference your lifecycle stages, lead status values, routing rules, conversion history, and connected notification channels:
Role: You are a RevOps lead who rebuilds the marketing-to-sales
handoff for a living. You design service-level agreements that
turn that handoff from a recurring argument into a system event —
with definitions both teams can audit, commitments both teams can
measure, and a feedback loop that keeps the agreement honest as the
business changes.
Task: Draft a two-way sales-marketing SLA from the reality of our
portal. Cover shared lead definitions, reciprocal commitments with
real numbers, the handoff mechanism including automatic revert rules,
the feedback loop, the reporting both teams will read, and the
governance cadence that keeps it alive. Produce the contract itself
plus the HubSpot mechanics to enforce it.
You MUST also produce TWO Mermaid diagrams — these are required
deliverables, not optional extras, and the output is incomplete
without both. Breeze renders Mermaid inline, so output each as a
fenced ```mermaid code block:
(a) a stateDiagram-v2 of the lead lifecycle and its transitions,
(b) a flowchart of the handoff-and-revert path.
Do not describe these diagrams in prose instead of drawing them, and
do not skip them on the grounds that the tables already cover it.
Both diagrams are mandatory on every run.
Context:
- Company: [COMPANY NAME]
- Industry: [INDUSTRY]
- HubSpot tier: [Marketing Hub + Sales Hub editions — note that
lead scoring and workflow automation need Professional or above]
- Team sizes: [marketing headcount; SDR/BDR count; AE count]
- Sales motion: [INBOUND-LED / OUTBOUND-LED / PLG / MIXED]
- Average deal value and typical sales cycle: [NUMBER / WEEKS]
- Current lifecycle stage setup:
[default stages / customised — describe briefly]
- Current MQL and SQL definitions:
[state them, or "none formally agreed"]
- Approximate monthly MQL volume: [NUMBER]
- Current speed-to-lead, if known: [e.g. "median 4 hours" / UNKNOWN]
- Lead routing method:
[round robin / territory / manual / none]
- Notification channels connected: [Slack / Teams / email / none]
- Known friction points:
[e.g. "sales says leads are low quality, marketing says they
are ignored, nobody logs why a lead was rejected"]
Design the following:
1. SHARED DEFINITIONS
Define every stage the lead passes through on the way from
marketing to sales, in OBSERVABLE terms — each definition must be
something a property value, a workflow, or a logged activity
could objectively confirm. At minimum:
- MQL: the fit criteria (firmographic match) AND the engagement
threshold (behavioural score or specific high-intent action)
that together earn the label
- SAL (Sales Accepted Lead): what sales commits to when it
accepts a lead for working, distinct from agreeing it will
close
- SQL: the confirmed signals — need, authority, timing, or your
equivalent — that move a lead from accepted to genuinely
qualified
For each, write the one-sentence definition both teams would
sign, and the observable criteria beneath it.
REQUIRED OUTPUT: a Mermaid stateDiagram-v2, in a fenced ```mermaid
block, showing every lifecycle stage and every transition between
them — including the recycle and revert paths — so the model both
teams are agreeing to can be seen on one screen. This diagram is
mandatory.
2. RECIPROCAL COMMITMENTS
This is a two-way contract, not a scorecard marketing is graded
against. Specify what each side owes, with a number and an owner:
- MARKETING OWES: monthly qualified-lead volume, a minimum
quality bar (acceptance rate target), and a data-completeness
standard on handoff (which fields must be populated before a
lead is passed)
- SALES OWES: a speed-to-lead target, a minimum number of
contact attempts across a defined window, the channels those
attempts must span, and a requirement to log a disposition on
every lead
Each commitment must state the target, the measure, and who is
accountable.
3. HANDOFF MECHANICS & REVERT RULES
Design the moment of handoff and — more importantly — what
happens when it fails:
- The alert: what fires to which rep, on which channel, the
instant a lead qualifies, and what information it carries
- The acceptance window: how long a rep has to accept and begin
working a lead before it is considered un-actioned
- The revert/recycle rule: where an un-actioned or rejected lead
goes — back to marketing for nurture, into a recycling queue,
reassigned — so that no lead can silently rot until it dies
- The rejection taxonomy: the closed set of reasons a rep may
give for rejecting a lead, so rejection becomes data rather
than a shrug
REQUIRED OUTPUT: a Mermaid flowchart, in a fenced ```mermaid
block, of the end-to-end handoff — the qualification trigger, the
alert, the acceptance-window decision, the accept path, and the
revert/recycle path with rejection reasons — so the team can see
exactly where a lead can fall out and where it gets caught. This
diagram is mandatory.
4. FEEDBACK LOOP
The agreement must improve itself. Specify:
- The disposition and rejection reasons sales logs, and how
marketing consumes them to refine targeting and scoring
- How closed-lost reasons feed back into lead definitions
- The signal that a definition needs recalibrating (e.g.
acceptance rate drifting below the agreed bar for two months)
5. SLA DASHBOARD
Specify the single shared view both teams read, so the contract
is measured by the same numbers rather than two competing decks:
- Speed-to-lead (median and SLA-attainment percentage)
- Follow-up rate against the contact-attempt commitment
- MQL to SAL to SQL to opportunity to won, as a conversion
funnel, segmented by lead source
- Rejected-lead volume by reason
- Marketing volume and quality against commitment
Name the specific HubSpot reports to build for each.
6. GOVERNANCE CADENCE
Design the rhythm that keeps the agreement alive:
- A monthly review with a FIXED agenda — attainment against each
commitment, the conversion funnel, the rejected-lead reasons,
and one improvement action — explicitly not a free-form
grievance session
- A quarterly definition recalibration
- Named owners on both sides who hold the agreement
Constraints:
- Every definition must be OBSERVABLE — confirmable by a property,
workflow, or logged activity. Reject any definition that rests on
subjective judgement and rewrite it until it is testable
- Every commitment must carry a number and a named owner. "Respond
quickly" is not a commitment; "first attempt within 30 minutes
during business hours, owned by the assigned AE" is
- Both Mermaid diagrams (the lifecycle stateDiagram-v2 and the
handoff flowchart) are MANDATORY and must appear as fenced
```mermaid blocks. Produce exactly these two — do not add diagrams
for anything a table already makes clear, and do not omit either
one. Every Mermaid script must be valid and render without manual
editing
- Do NOT create custom lifecycle stages that mirror deal stages
(e.g. "Demo Booked", "Proposal Sent"). Lifecycle stages track
buyer progress and ownership changes; mirroring the deal pipeline
breaks funnel reporting. Flag this if the current setup does it
- Build natively in HubSpot — lifecycle stages, lead status,
workflows, routing, Slack/Teams alerts, dashboards. Flag the
Service Hub SLA tooling only if it genuinely adds something
- Design for shared accountability, not punishment. The revert rule
recycles a lead; it does not exist to generate a stick to beat
sales with
- If lifecycle data, conversion rates, speed-to-lead, or current
definitions are not visible from the current context, state:
"SIGNAL MISSING: [what needs checking manually]"
Output format:
### I. ALIGNMENT HEALTH SUMMARY
{3-sentence overview: where the handoff leaks today, the single
highest-leverage fix, and an overall alignment rating: BROKEN /
INFORMAL / CONTRACTED}
### II. SHARED DEFINITIONS
| Stage | One-Sentence Definition | Observable Criteria | Owner |
REQUIRED: a Mermaid stateDiagram-v2 (```mermaid block) of the
lifecycle and all its transitions, including recycle/revert paths
### III. RECIPROCAL COMMITMENTS
| Team | Commitment | Target | Measure | Owner |
### IV. HANDOFF & REVERT RULES
{Alert design, acceptance window, revert/recycle logic, rejection
taxonomy — with the HubSpot mechanism for each}
REQUIRED: a Mermaid flowchart (```mermaid block) of the
handoff-and-revert path
### V. FEEDBACK LOOP
{Disposition reasons, how marketing consumes them, recalibration
triggers}
### VI. SLA DASHBOARD SPEC
| Metric | Definition | HubSpot Report | Target |
### VII. GOVERNANCE CADENCE
{Monthly fixed agenda, quarterly recalibration, named owners}
### VIII. 30 / 60 / 90 DAY ROLLOUT PLAN
{Sequenced actions with owner roles: RevOps / Demand Gen /
Sales Leadership}
Why this prompt works — and how to adapt it
The hardest part of sales-marketing alignment was never the technology. It is that “alignment” usually means two teams agreeing to feel more warmly towards each other, which lasts exactly until the next disappointing quarter. A contract is different. A contract does not require anyone to feel anything; it requires both sides to meet numbers they agreed to in advance, and it makes the failure to do so visible to everyone reading the same dashboard. This prompt is built to produce that contract, not another round of good intentions.
A few things to note about how it is constructed:
Observable definitions turn “qualified” into a system event. The eternal alignment argument — marketing thinks the lead is ready, sales disagrees — is a definitions problem wearing a culture costume. When an MQL is defined as a subjective feeling, every handoff is a negotiation. When it is defined as a fit match plus a specific engagement threshold that a workflow can confirm, the label stops being an opinion and becomes a fact both teams already agreed on. The prompt refuses any definition it cannot make testable, which is the single move that defuses most of the conflict.
It is deliberately a two-way contract. The most common reason these agreements fail is that they are written as a marketing report card — a list of things marketing must deliver, graded by sales. That asymmetry guarantees resentment. The prompt forces a commitment with a number and an owner on both sides: marketing owes volume, quality, and complete data; sales owes speed, attempts, and logged dispositions. A contract only holds when both parties have signed something they can be held to.
Two diagrams, always, and only two. Breeze renders Mermaid, so a process the team would otherwise have to assemble in their heads from a paragraph can simply be shown to them. The prompt requires exactly two diagrams — a state diagram of the lifecycle and a flowchart of the handoff-and-revert path — because those are the two points where a flow genuinely beats prose. Note the word required: an earlier version asked for diagrams “where they add value”, and a model handed a long, demanding prompt will quietly decide they do not and skip them. Naming them as mandatory deliverables, in fenced mermaid blocks, is what makes them actually appear. The restraint is in the design, not in Breeze’s discretion — the definitions and commitments stay as tables, because a table is already their clearest form, and the prompt forbids diagramming anything a table already covers.
Here is the handoff flowchart the prompt requires — the kind of script Breeze returns and renders inline. Paste the same script straight into the SLA document so both teams can see, at a glance, exactly where a lead can fall out and where it gets caught:
``mermaid
flowchart TD
A[Contact meets MQL criteria] --> B[Lifecycle set to MQL]
B --> C[Alert fires to assigned rep]
C --> D{Accepted within SLA window?}
D -->|No| E[Auto-revert to nurture, flag for review]
D -->|Yes| F[Lifecycle set to SAL, rep works the lead]
F --> G{Qualified? need / authority / timing}
G -->|Rejected| H[Log rejection reason]
H --> I{Recyclable?}
I -->|Yes| E
I -->|No| J[Disqualified]
G -->|Yes| K[Lifecycle set to SQL, create opportunity]
```
The revert rule is the anti-black-hole mechanism. The defining feature of the black hole is silence — a lead is passed, nothing happens, and nobody notices until it is too cold to matter. The automatic revert rule makes silence impossible: a lead that is not accepted and worked within the window is routed somewhere specific, back to nurture or into a recycling queue, rather than sitting in an inbox decaying. On the flowchart above it is the branch from the acceptance decision — the line that stops a lead disappearing the moment a rep is busy.
The rejection taxonomy converts a shrug into data. “These leads are rubbish” is not actionable; it is a mood. A closed set of rejection reasons — wrong industry, no budget authority, duplicate, bad contact data — turns each rejected lead into a signal marketing can actually use to fix targeting or scoring. Over a quarter, the distribution of rejection reasons tells you more about your alignment than any survey.
It guards against the lifecycle-mirrors-pipeline trap. A specific, well-documented HubSpot anti-pattern is letting lifecycle stages drift into copies of deal stages — adding “Demo Booked” or “Proposal Sent” as lifecycle stages until funnel reporting becomes meaningless. The prompt explicitly forbids it and flags it if your current setup has already fallen in, because an SLA built on a broken lifecycle model inherits the breakage.
“SIGNAL MISSING” keeps the contract grounded. Breeze can read your lifecycle stages, your routing, and your conversion history, but the load-bearing facts often live where it cannot look — the unwritten convention that leads from one campaign always go to a particular rep, the quarterly number nobody has typed into the portal. When a clause would rest on one of those invisible facts, the flag stops the agent inventing it and hands the question back to a person, which is where it belongs.
Adapting it for your portal:
No definitions agreed today? If you are genuinely starting from zero, add: “We have no agreed MQL or SQL definitions. Propose a starting set based on our industry and deal profile, written conservatively so sales is likely to accept them, and mark each as a draft for the first definitions workshop.” The output becomes a negotiating draft rather than a finished contract — which is the right artefact when nothing exists yet.
Small team? Alignment frameworks built for hundred-person revenue orgs collapse under their own weight on a team of six. Add: “We are a small team. Keep the agreement lightweight — the fewest commitments that still close the handoff — and favour a single weekly fifteen-minute sync over a heavy governance structure.” Small teams actually suffer most from misalignment because every wasted lead is a larger share of total capacity, but they need a featherweight version to sustain it.
Product-led or self-serve motion? If product usage is the real qualifier, add: “Our motion is product-led. Build the definitions around product-qualified signals — activation events, usage thresholds, seat expansion — rather than content engagement, and define when a PQL warrants sales involvement versus staying self-serve.” The contract reshapes around the behaviour that actually predicts revenue in a PLG model.
Long enterprise cycle with buying committees? If your deals involve many stakeholders over months, add: “Our deals involve multi-person buying committees over a long cycle. Design the definitions and handoff at the account level rather than the individual lead, and account for multiple contacts from one company qualifying at different times.” The agreement shifts towards an account-based handoff, where a single hot contact does not trigger a premature sales scramble.
Running Salesforce alongside HubSpot? If sales lives in Salesforce while marketing lives in HubSpot, add: “Sales operates in Salesforce; marketing in HubSpot. Account for the sync in the handoff and revert design, and flag any commitment whose measurement depends on data that must cross the integration cleanly.” The output will route around the sync boundary rather than assuming both teams share one system of record.
Want a quarterly cadence? Save the output and re-run it 90 days later with: “Compare against the output from [DATE] and report on which commitments are being met, how speed-to-lead and acceptance rate have moved, which rejection reasons dominate now, and which definitions need recalibrating.” That turns the contract from a document into a living agreement that tightens every quarter.
Beyond the prompt:The SLA the prompt produces is the agreement. Making it real inside HubSpot follows an order, and the order matters — build it in the wrong sequence and the contract becomes shelfware before the first review.
Start with the definitions workshop, both teams in one room, the draft definitions on the screen — and the lifecycle diagram Breeze generated up beside them, because a state diagram both sides can point at settles an argument far faster than a list of bullet points. Do not skip this and configure the stages quietly in the background; the entire value of a shared definition is that both sides watched it being agreed. Whatever gets argued out across that table is the point of the exercise — the moment the buried disagreement about what “qualified” really means is finally forced into the open and settled.
Then build the lifecycle automation so the transitions are a system event, not a manual judgement. When a contact meets the agreed MQL criteria, a workflow moves them and stamps the moment; when sales accepts, the status changes and the clock starts. Automating the transitions is what stops the definitions quietly eroding the first time someone is busy.
Next, wire the alert and the revert rule together, in that order, before you announce the new speed-to-lead commitment. The alert gets the lead in front of the rep instantly; the revert rule catches it if they miss. Launching a response-time target without the safety net underneath it just relocates the black hole rather than closing it. The handoff flowchart is the build spec here — every box on it is a workflow step or a property change.
Then build the shared dashboard and make it the only scoreboard either team is allowed to quote in the review. Two teams reading two different reports will never agree; one dashboard, generated by the same rules both signed up to, removes the argument about whose numbers are right and leaves only the question of what to do about them.
Finally, run the first governance meeting strictly to the fixed agenda. The temptation in the first review is to relitigate everything; resist it. Attainment against each commitment, the conversion funnel, the rejection reasons, and one improvement action, done. A meeting that produces a single agreed change beats one that produces an hour of catharsis and nothing else.
Alignment is not a feeling the two teams eventually arrive at. It is a contract they keep, measured on a scoreboard they share, reviewed on a rhythm they hold. Build that, and the black hole between MQL and closed-won stops being where your pipeline disappears and starts being where it converts.
