If you've spent more than five minutes in a room with me, you know I love a good acronym and drop constantly (I should be tracking my APMs "Acronyms Per Minute").

MQL, ACV, NRR, CPQ, SPICED... the RevOps and GTM world is basically its own language, and half the time even the people using these terms are defining them differently.

We get questions about this stuff constantly—from our clients, from our team, from people in our community who just want a straight answer to "wait, what's the difference between ARR and MRR?" or "what exactly makes someone an MQL vs. a Marketing-Generated Lead vs. an SQL?"

Totally fair questions. And honestly, we got tired of explaining them one-off in Slack threads and onboarding calls.

So we built this. One massive, living dictionary of every GTM, RevOps, sales, marketing, CS, and finance term we could think of—organized by priority, written in plain English (with a little personality), and designed to be the link you bookmark and share the next time someone asks "what does that mean?"

Whether you're a seasoned GTM/RevOps leader brushing up on terminology or a new team member trying to decode your first QBR—this one's for you. Let's get into it. 🚀

1. 🚀 Journey & Lifecycle Concepts

These are the foundational frameworks and stages that define how buyers find you, engage with you, and (hopefully) stick around. If your team isn't aligned on these concepts, every metric downstream is built on shaky ground. Master these first—everything else flows from here.

1. Go-To-Market (GTM) Strategy: The master plan for how a company brings its product or service to market, acquires customers, and generates revenue. It encompasses positioning, messaging, channels, pricing, and the coordinated efforts of marketing, sales, and customer success. If revenue is the mission, GTM is the flight plan.

2. Revenue Operations (RevOps): The strategic function that unifies marketing, sales, and customer success operations under a single revenue-focused umbrella. RevOps owns the systems, processes, data, and reporting that enable predictable, scalable growth. Think of it as the mission control center for your entire GTM engine.

3. Buyer's Journey: The process a potential customer goes through from first becoming aware of a problem, to considering solutions, to making a purchase decision. Typically broken into three stages: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. Your GTM engine should map directly to this journey—meeting buyers where they are, not where you wish they were.

4. Customer Journey: The full end-to-end experience a person has with your company—from anonymous visitor to loyal advocate. It extends beyond the Buyer's Journey to include onboarding, adoption, renewal, and expansion. The best GTM teams obsess over every stage, not just the pre-sale funnel.

5. Bow-Tie Funnel (Bow-Tie Model): A revenue model that visualizes the full customer lifecycle as a bow-tie shape, with the "knot" at the point of sale. The left side represents acquisition (awareness → consideration → decision), and the right side represents expansion (onboarding → adoption → expansion → advocacy). It's the antidote to funnel-only thinking—because revenue doesn't stop when the deal closes.

6. Flywheel Model: A growth model (popularized by HubSpot) that replaces the traditional funnel with a circular, momentum-based framework. Energy from happy customers feeds back into attracting and engaging new prospects. The flywheel emphasizes reducing friction and delighting customers as growth levers, not just top-of-funnel acquisition.

7. AIDA Model: Stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. A classic marketing framework that maps the psychological stages a buyer moves through before converting. While older than most frameworks on this list, it's still the backbone of good ad copy, landing pages, and email sequences.

8. Lifecycle Stages: The defined phases a contact or company moves through in your CRM, representing their relationship with your business from first touch to closed customer and beyond. Common stages include Subscriber, Lead, MQL, SQL, Opportunity, Customer, Evangelist, and Other. Lifecycle stages are the backbone of RevOps reporting—if they're broken, your data is broken.

9. Subscriber: A contact who has opted in to hear from you—typically via a blog or newsletter signup. They've raised their hand for content but haven't expressed buying intent. Treat them like someone who just followed you on the first date: nurture, don't pounce.

10. Lead: A contact who has engaged beyond a simple subscription—usually by submitting a form, downloading content, or otherwise exchanging information for value. They've shown interest but haven't yet been qualified for fit or intent.

11. Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): A lead that has met predefined criteria (based on behavior, demographics, or firmographics) indicating they're likely a good fit and have shown enough engagement to warrant sales attention. The MQL is the handoff point from marketing to sales—and one of the most debated and misaligned definitions in all of B2B. Get your teams aligned on this one or suffer the consequences.

12. Product Qualified Lead (PQL): A lead who has demonstrated buying intent through actual product usage—typically in a freemium or free-trial model. PQLs are powerful because they're signaling with actions, not just form fills. If someone's actively using your product, that's a stronger buying signal than downloading your eBook.

13. Sales Accepted Lead (SAL): A lead that sales has reviewed and accepted as worth pursuing. The SAL stage exists as a checkpoint between MQL and SQL—confirming that the lead meets sales' threshold before they invest real time. It's the quality control layer that keeps the MQL-to-SQL handoff honest.

14. Sales Qualified Lead (SQL): A lead that sales has actively vetted and confirmed as a real, qualified opportunity worth working. The SQL represents a commitment from the sales team that this prospect has genuine potential to buy. No more "marketing gave us bad leads" excuses—the SQL stage forces accountability.

15. Sales Qualified Opportunity (SQO): An SQL that has been converted into a formal deal or opportunity in the CRM, typically with an associated value, close date, and pipeline stage. The SQO is where pipeline gets real—it's the first moment revenue is actually being forecasted.

16. Opportunity: A qualified deal in your CRM pipeline that has a realistic chance of closing. Opportunities have defined stages, an expected value, and a projected close date. This is where CRM hygiene matters most—garbage-in, garbage-out forecasting starts here.

17. Customer: A contact or company that has purchased your product or service. Seems simple, but how you define "Customer" in your CRM (and when you trigger that stage) matters enormously for reporting accuracy, lifecycle automation, and renewal workflows.

18. Evangelist / Advocate: A customer who actively promotes your brand—through referrals, reviews, case studies, or word-of-mouth. Evangelists are the rocket fuel of the Flywheel. They reduce your CAC, shorten sales cycles, and build trust you can't buy with ad spend.

19. Lead Scoring: A methodology for ranking leads based on their perceived value to the organization using points assigned to behaviors (email opens, page visits, content downloads) and attributes (job title, company size, industry). Good lead scoring separates the signal from the noise and helps sales focus on the leads most likely to convert.

20. Lead Grading: Similar to lead scoring, but focused specifically on demographic and firmographic fit rather than behavioral engagement. Grading answers the question "Is this the right type of company/person?" while scoring answers "Are they showing buying intent?" The best systems use both.

21. Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): A detailed description of the type of company that gets the most value from your product and is most likely to buy, renew, and expand. ICPs are typically defined by firmographic attributes like industry, company size, revenue, tech stack, and pain points. If you're selling to everyone, you're selling to no one.

22. Buyer Persona: A semi-fictional representation of your ideal buyer as an individual—including their role, goals, challenges, decision-making process, and preferred communication channels. While ICPs define the company, personas define the human you're actually talking to.

23. Total Addressable Market (TAM): The total revenue opportunity available if you achieved 100% market share in your target market. TAM is the ceiling—useful for investors and strategic planning, but not a realistic sales target.

24. Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM): The portion of TAM that your product or service can realistically serve given your current capabilities, geography, and go-to-market model. SAM narrows the lens from "everyone who could buy" to "everyone we could actually reach."

25. Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM): The slice of SAM you can realistically capture in the near term given your current resources, brand awareness, and competitive position. SOM is the honest number—the one your revenue plan should actually be built around.

26. Dark Funnel: The invisible buying activity that happens outside your trackable channels—word-of-mouth, Slack communities, podcasts, social media DMs, private conversations, and content consumption that doesn't leave a cookie trail. The Dark Funnel is where a massive chunk of B2B buying decisions are influenced, and it's why attribution models never tell the full story.

27. Self-Reported Attribution (SRA): Asking prospects directly "How did you hear about us?" via a free-text form field. SRA shines a light into the Dark Funnel by capturing signals your analytics tools can't—like a friend's recommendation or a podcast mention. It's low-tech, high-signal, and criminally underused.

2. 📊 Core Revenue & Financial Metrics

This is the language your CFO speaks—and the language your board expects you to understand. These metrics define the financial health of your business and determine whether your growth is sustainable or just expensive. If you only learn one section, make it this one.

1. Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR): The total value of recurring revenue normalized to a one-year period. ARR is the north-star metric for SaaS and subscription businesses—it tells you the predictable, repeatable revenue your business generates. Growth rate in ARR is what investors obsess over.

2. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR): The total predictable revenue your business earns each month from active subscriptions. MRR is ARR's more granular sibling and is essential for tracking month-over-month momentum, churn impact, and expansion revenue in real time.

3. New MRR: The portion of MRR coming from brand-new customers acquired in a given period. This is your growth engine's output—the net-new revenue being added to the business.

4. Expansion MRR: Additional MRR generated from existing customers through upsells, cross-sells, or plan upgrades. Expansion MRR is the secret weapon of efficient growth—it's cheaper to earn than New MRR and signals strong product-market fit.

5. Churned MRR: The MRR lost due to customers canceling or downgrading their subscriptions. Churned MRR is the leak in your bucket. If it outpaces New + Expansion MRR, you've got a serious problem.

6. Net Revenue Retention (NRR): The percentage of recurring revenue retained from existing customers over a given period, including expansion and contraction. An NRR above 100% means your existing customer base is growing without any new logos. Elite SaaS companies target 110-130%+. This is the metric that separates good businesses from great ones.

7. Gross Revenue Retention (GRR): The percentage of recurring revenue retained from existing customers excluding any expansion revenue. GRR isolates pure retention—it tells you how much revenue you'd keep if you never upsold a single customer. It's the floor beneath your NRR.

8. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): The total cost of acquiring a new customer, calculated by dividing total sales and marketing spend by the number of new customers acquired in a given period. CAC is the price of admission to growth—and if it's out of control relative to what those customers are worth, you're buying revenue, not building it.

9. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV or CLV or CLTV): The total revenue a customer is expected to generate over the entire duration of their relationship with your company. LTV is the counterweight to CAC—it tells you how much a customer is worth so you can determine how much you should spend to acquire them.

10. LTV:CAC Ratio: The ratio of Customer Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost. A healthy benchmark is 3:1 or higher—meaning every dollar spent on acquisition returns three dollars in customer value. Below 1:1 and you're literally paying customers to leave. This ratio is one of the most important health indicators for any growth-stage business.

11. CAC Payback Period: The number of months it takes to recoup the cost of acquiring a customer through their subscription revenue. A shorter payback period means faster cash flow recovery and less risk. Most healthy SaaS businesses target 12-18 months or less.

12. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): The average revenue generated per customer account over a given period. ARPA helps you understand the value density of your customer base and is critical for segmentation, pricing analysis, and forecasting.

13. Average Revenue Per User (ARPU): Similar to ARPA but calculated at the individual user level rather than the account level. Most relevant for product-led or per-seat pricing models.

14. Average Contract Value (ACV): The average annualized revenue per contract, typically used in enterprise or annual-deal contexts. ACV helps normalize deal sizes across different contract lengths for apples-to-apples comparison.

15. Total Contract Value (TCV): The total value of a contract over its entire duration, including any one-time fees. A 3-year deal worth $50K/year with a $10K implementation fee = $160K TCV.

16. Revenue Per Employee: Total revenue divided by headcount. A key efficiency metric that reveals how productively your team generates revenue. Investors use this to benchmark operational efficiency—especially at growth stage.

17. Gross Margin: Revenue minus the cost of goods sold (COGS), expressed as a percentage of revenue. In SaaS, gross margin reflects how efficiently you deliver your product. High gross margins (70-85%+) mean more dollars available to invest in growth.

18. Burn Rate: The rate at which a company spends cash, typically expressed monthly. Burn rate is the ticking clock for startups—it determines your runway and how urgently you need to reach profitability or raise capital.

19. Runway: The amount of time a company can continue operating at its current burn rate before running out of cash. Runway = Cash on Hand ÷ Monthly Burn Rate. If your runway is under 12 months and you're not fundraising, it's time to panic (productively).

20. Rule of 40: A SaaS health benchmark stating that a company's combined revenue growth rate and profit margin should equal or exceed 40%. For example, 30% growth + 10% profit margin = 40%. It forces a balance between growth and efficiency—you can grow fast or be profitable, but the best companies find a way to do both.

21. Bookings: The total value of all new contracts signed in a given period, regardless of when revenue will be recognized. Bookings are a forward-looking indicator of future revenue—they tell you what the sales team committed to bringing in.

22. Billings: The total amount invoiced to customers in a given period. Billings bridge the gap between bookings (what was signed) and revenue (what was recognized)—and they drive actual cash flow.

23. Revenue Recognition: The accounting principle governing when revenue is officially recorded. In SaaS, revenue is typically recognized ratably over the life of the contract (not when the check is signed). This is why bookings ≠ revenue, and why your CFO cares deeply about this distinction.

24. Deferred Revenue: Revenue that has been billed or collected but not yet recognized because the service hasn't been fully delivered. It sits as a liability on the balance sheet. If you bill annually but recognize monthly, 11 months of that annual payment starts as deferred revenue.

3. 📈 Marketing Metrics & Concepts

Marketing without measurement is just expensive guessing. These are the metrics and strategies that tell you whether your demand gen engine is actually working—from the cost of filling the funnel to the models that explain why someone converted. Know these, and you'll never lose a budget conversation again.

1. Cost Per Lead (CPL): The total marketing spend on a campaign or channel divided by the number of leads generated. CPL tells you how efficiently your marketing is filling the top of funnel—but it means nothing without understanding lead quality. A $5 CPL that converts at 0.1% is worse than a $50 CPL that converts at 10%.

2. Cost Per Acquisition (CPA): The total cost to acquire a paying customer through a specific campaign or channel. CPA goes deeper than CPL by tracking all the way to the close—giving you a true picture of channel-level ROI.

3. Cost Per Click (CPC): The amount paid each time someone clicks on a paid advertisement. CPC is a foundational paid media metric, but it's a vanity number in isolation—always pair it with conversion rate and CPA to understand true efficiency.

4. Click-Through Rate (CTR): The percentage of people who click on a link, ad, or CTA (Call to Action) out of the total who viewed it. CTR = Clicks ÷ Impressions × 100. It's a signal of how compelling your message is—but clicks without conversions are just expensive traffic.

5. Conversion Rate: The percentage of people who take a desired action (form fill, signup, purchase) out of the total who had the opportunity. Conversion rate is the universal translator of marketing performance—it tells you how effectively each stage of your funnel turns intent into action.

6. Marketing Qualified Lead Conversion Rate: The percentage of total leads that reach MQL status. This metric reveals how well your top-of-funnel efforts are attracting the right audience, not just any audience.

7. MQL-to-SQL Conversion Rate: The percentage of MQLs that sales accepts and qualifies as SQLs. This is the alignment metric—a low rate means marketing and sales disagree on what "qualified" means. Fix this definition first, or everything downstream suffers.

8. SQL-to-Close Rate (Win Rate): The percentage of SQLs that ultimately become paying customers. This is the bottom-line efficiency metric for your sales team and a direct reflection of qualification quality, sales execution, and product-market fit.

9. Return on Investment (ROI): The net gain or loss from an investment relative to its cost, expressed as a percentage. ROI = (Revenue Generated - Cost) ÷ Cost × 100. The ultimate "was it worth it?" metric for any marketing spend, campaign, or initiative.

10. Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): The revenue generated for every dollar spent on advertising. ROAS = Revenue from Ads ÷ Ad Spend. A ROAS of 5:1 means every $1 in ad spend generates $5 in revenue. It's the performance marketer's report card.

11. Marketing Influenced Revenue: The total revenue from deals where marketing touchpoints played a role at any point in the buyer's journey—even if marketing didn't source the original lead. This metric gives marketing credit for assisting deals, not just creating them, and is a more complete picture than "marketing sourced" alone.

12. Marketing Sourced Revenue: Revenue from deals where marketing generated the original lead or first touch. This is the stricter, more conservative attribution metric—it only counts deals marketing can take full credit for originating.

13. Pipeline Coverage Ratio: The ratio of total pipeline value to revenue target for a given period. A 3:1 ratio means you have $3 in pipeline for every $1 in quota. Most B2B teams target 3-4x coverage to account for win rates and deal slippage.

14. Attribution Model: The methodology used to assign credit for a conversion or deal to specific marketing touchpoints. Common models include First Touch, Last Touch, Linear, Time-Decay, U-Shaped, and W-Shaped. No model is perfect—the best RevOps teams use multi-touch attribution alongside self-reported attribution for a blended view.

15. First Touch Attribution: An attribution model that gives 100% of the credit to the first interaction a prospect had with your brand. Useful for understanding what channels drive initial awareness, but blind to everything that happened between first click and closed deal.

16. Last Touch Attribution: An attribution model that gives 100% of the credit to the final interaction before a conversion. Great for understanding what closes deals, terrible for understanding what fills the funnel.

17. Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA): An attribution model that distributes credit across multiple touchpoints throughout the buyer's journey. Models like Linear, U-Shaped, and W-Shaped each weight touchpoints differently. MTA is more accurate than single-touch models but harder to implement and explain.

18. Demand Generation (Demand Gen): The umbrella strategy focused on creating awareness and interest in your product or service across your target market. Demand gen includes content marketing, events, paid media, SEO, social, ABM, and more. It's the engine that feeds your pipeline.

19. Lead Generation (Lead Gen): The specific tactics and campaigns designed to capture contact information from interested prospects. Lead gen is a subset of demand gen—it's the conversion layer where anonymous interest becomes known contacts in your CRM.

20. Inbound Marketing: A methodology that attracts prospects through valuable content, SEO, and experiences rather than interruptive outbound tactics. Inbound pulls buyers toward you by helping them solve problems before you ever pitch a product.

21. Outbound Marketing: Proactive outreach to potential buyers through channels like cold email, cold calling, direct mail, and paid ads. Outbound pushes your message to prospects rather than waiting for them to find you. The best GTM strategies combine both inbound and outbound.

22. Account-Based Marketing (ABM): A focused growth strategy where marketing and sales collaborate to target and engage specific high-value accounts with personalized campaigns. ABM flips the funnel—instead of casting a wide net, you fish with a spear aimed at named accounts.

23. Content Syndication: Distributing your content (whitepapers, eBooks, reports) through third-party platforms to reach a broader audience and generate leads. Syndicated leads often require heavier nurturing since the prospect may not have been explicitly seeking your brand.

24. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The practice of optimizing your website and content to rank higher in organic search engine results. SEO is a long game—it compounds over time and generates "free" traffic, but it requires consistent investment in content quality, technical performance, and backlinks.

25. Search Engine Marketing (SEM): Paid advertising on search engines (Google Ads, Bing Ads) to appear in sponsored results for targeted keywords. SEM delivers immediate visibility but requires ongoing budget—when you stop paying, you stop showing up.

26. Marketing Automation: The use of software to automate repetitive marketing tasks like email nurturing, lead scoring, social posting, and campaign workflows. Marketing automation is the backbone of scalable demand gen—it lets small teams operate like big ones by putting the right message in front of the right person at the right time without manual effort.

27. Email Deliverability: The ability of your marketing emails to successfully reach recipients' inboxes (rather than spam folders or bouncing). Deliverability depends on sender reputation, authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), list hygiene, and content quality. None of your email strategy matters if your emails never get seen.

28. Bounce Rate (Email): The percentage of sent emails that couldn't be delivered. Hard bounces (invalid addresses) damage your sender reputation; soft bounces (full inboxes, server issues) are temporary. Keep bounce rates below 2% to stay healthy.

29. Bounce Rate (Web): The percentage of website visitors who leave after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate on landing pages may signal a messaging mismatch between the ad/link and the page content.

30. Net Promoter Score (NPS): A customer satisfaction metric based on a single question: "How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?" on a 0-10 scale. Promoters (9-10) minus Detractors (0-6) = NPS. It's simple, widely benchmarked, and a strong leading indicator of organic growth.

4. 💰 Sales Metrics & Concepts

Pipeline doesn't close itself—and neither do deals without the right frameworks, roles, and metrics in place. This section covers everything from how fast your team generates revenue to the methodologies that separate consultative sellers from order-takers. If you manage or support a sales team, this is your playbook vocabulary.

1. Sales Velocity: A formula that measures how quickly your sales team generates revenue: (Number of Opportunities × Average Deal Value × Win Rate) ÷ Average Sales Cycle Length. Sales velocity is the compound metric—improving any single variable accelerates the whole engine.

2. Average Deal Size (ADS): The average revenue value of closed-won deals over a given period. Tracking ADS over time reveals whether you're moving upmarket, downmarket, or staying flat—and it directly impacts your pipeline coverage needs and capacity planning.

3. Average Sales Cycle Length: The average number of days from opportunity creation to closed-won. Shorter cycles mean faster cash flow and higher rep productivity. If your sales cycle is creeping upward, something in your qualification, demo, or negotiation process needs attention.

4. Win Rate: The percentage of opportunities that result in a closed-won deal. Win Rate = Closed-Won ÷ (Closed-Won + Closed-Lost). This is the single most important efficiency metric for your sales team. A declining win rate is a flashing red light.

5. Pipeline: The total collection of active deals or opportunities currently being worked by your sales team, organized by stage. Pipeline is the lifeblood of revenue forecasting—without a healthy, well-managed pipeline, your forecast is just fiction.

6. Pipeline Generation (Pipe Gen): The process and total amount of new pipeline created in a given period. Pipe gen is a leading indicator of future revenue. If pipeline creation slows, closed-won revenue will follow 1-2 quarters later. Track it obsessively.

7. Pipeline Velocity: The speed at which deals move through your pipeline stages from creation to close. Slow pipeline velocity signals bottlenecks—deals getting stuck in specific stages that need process intervention.

8. Weighted Pipeline: Pipeline value adjusted by the probability of closing at each stage. A $100K deal at a stage with a 50% historical close rate = $50K weighted pipeline. Weighted pipeline gives you a more realistic view of expected revenue than raw pipeline alone.

9. Quota: The revenue or activity target assigned to a sales rep or team for a given period (monthly, quarterly, annually). Quota is the benchmark against which performance is measured and compensation is calculated.

10. Quota Attainment: The percentage of their assigned quota a rep or team has achieved. Quota Attainment = Actual Revenue ÷ Quota × 100. Healthy organizations see 60-70% of reps hitting quota—if everyone is hitting 100%+, your quotas may be too low.

11. On-Target Earnings (OTE): The total expected compensation for a sales rep who hits 100% of their quota, including base salary plus variable/commission. OTE is the promise you make to reps—and the number that determines whether you attract top talent.

12. Sales Capacity: The total revenue-generating potential of your sales team, calculated by multiplying the number of fully ramped reps by their individual quota. Sales capacity planning ensures you have enough headcount to cover your revenue target with appropriate buffer.

13. Ramp Time: The time it takes for a new sales hire to reach full productivity (typically measured as the time to first closed-won deal or consistent quota attainment). Shorter ramp times mean faster ROI on headcount investment and are a direct function of onboarding quality.

14. Activity Metrics: The quantitative measurement of a sales rep's daily/weekly actions—calls made, emails sent, meetings booked, demos completed. Activity metrics are leading indicators of pipeline and revenue. Low activity almost always predicts low results.

15. BANT: A classic sales qualification framework: Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline. Does the prospect have the money, decision-making power, a genuine problem to solve, and urgency to act? BANT is simple but effective—though many modern sales teams have evolved to more nuanced frameworks.

16. SPICED Framework: A deal qualification and discovery framework standing for Situation, Pain, Impact, Critical Event, and Decision. SPICED goes beyond surface-level qualification by forcing reps to understand the prospect's current state (Situation), the core problem they're experiencing (Pain), the business consequences of that pain (Impact), the time-bound trigger creating urgency (Critical Event), and the people, process, and criteria involved in making a buying decision (Decision). It's particularly powerful because it connects the emotional and financial weight of inaction to a real deadline—making it harder for deals to stall in no-man's-land.

17. SPIN Selling: A consultative sales methodology based on four types of questions: Situation, Problem, Implication, Need-Payoff. SPIN shifts the conversation from pitching features to uncovering pain and building urgency through discovery.

18. MEDDIC / MEDDPICC: An advanced enterprise sales qualification framework: Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, Champion (and in MEDDPICC: Paper Process, Competition). MEDDPICC is the gold standard for complex, multi-stakeholder B2B deals and forces reps to deeply understand the buying process.

19. Challenger Sale: A sales methodology where the rep takes control of the conversation by teaching the prospect something new, tailoring the message to their specific situation, and taking control of the sale. The Challenger model is built on the insight that the best reps don't just respond to needs—they reshape how buyers think about their problem.

20. Discovery Call: The initial sales conversation focused on understanding the prospect's pain points, goals, current state, budget, timeline, and decision-making process. Discovery is the foundation of consultative selling—a weak discovery leads to weak proposals, longer cycles, and lower win rates.

21. Sales Enablement: The function, content, tools, and training that empower sales reps to sell more effectively. Sales enablement bridges the gap between strategy and execution by ensuring reps have what they need—when they need it—to engage buyers with confidence.

22. Sales Development Representative (SDR) / Business Development Representative (BDR): A role focused on outbound prospecting and qualifying inbound leads to generate pipeline for Account Executives. SDRs/BDRs are the pipeline engine—they do the upfront work so closers can focus on closing.

23. Account Executive (AE): A sales role responsible for managing qualified opportunities through the pipeline to close. AEs typically own the relationship from demo/discovery through negotiation and contract signing.

24. Closed-Won: A CRM deal status indicating the prospect has signed and the deal is officially booked as revenue. This is the finish line for the sales cycle and the starting line for customer success.

25. Closed-Lost: A CRM deal status indicating the deal did not result in a purchase. Tracking and analyzing closed-lost reasons (competitor, timing, budget, no decision) is essential for improving win rates and refining your GTM strategy.

26. Clawback: A compensation provision that requires a sales rep to return commissions if a customer cancels or churns within a specified period after the deal closes. Clawbacks align rep incentives with long-term customer success, not just short-term bookings.

27. Sales Forecast: A projection of expected revenue for a future period based on current pipeline, historical trends, and rep-level input. Forecasting accuracy is a core RevOps responsibility—and it's built on CRM hygiene, consistent stage definitions, and honest rep input.

28. Commit vs. Best Case vs. Upside: Forecast categories used to tier pipeline confidence. Commit = deals the rep is highly confident will close. Best Case = deals that are likely but have remaining risk. Upside = deals that could close but depend on variables outside the rep's control. Good forecasting requires honest categorization across all three.

5. 🤝 Customer Success & Retention Metrics

Acquiring customers is expensive. Keeping them is where the real money is made. These metrics measure how well you retain, grow, and delight your existing customer base—and they're the difference between a leaky bucket and a compounding growth engine.

1. Churn Rate (Customer Churn): The percentage of customers who cancel or don't renew their subscription in a given period. Churn is the silent killer of growth—even a small increase can compound dramatically over time and completely offset new customer acquisition.

2. Revenue Churn (Gross Revenue Churn): The percentage of MRR lost from cancellations and downgrades in a given period, excluding expansion revenue. Revenue churn isolates the damage—showing you the actual dollars walking out the door.

3. Net Revenue Churn: Revenue churn offset by expansion revenue from existing customers. If your expansion MRR exceeds your churned MRR, you achieve negative net revenue churn—the holy grail. It means your existing customer base grows even without adding new logos.

4. Logo Churn: The percentage of customer accounts (logos) lost in a given period, regardless of their revenue contribution. Logo churn tells a different story than revenue churn—losing 10 small accounts may be less impactful than losing 1 whale, but it can signal a systemic problem.

5. Customer Retention Rate: The percentage of customers retained over a given period. Retention Rate = (Customers at End of Period - New Customers) ÷ Customers at Start of Period × 100. The inverse of churn, and the foundation of sustainable growth.

6. Customer Health Score: A composite score that predicts a customer's likelihood to renew, expand, or churn based on weighted signals like product usage, support ticket volume, NPS responses, engagement frequency, and payment history. Health scores turn gut feelings into data-driven action.

7. Time to Value (TTV): The time it takes for a new customer to achieve their first meaningful outcome or "aha moment" with your product after purchase. Shorter TTV = faster adoption, higher satisfaction, and lower early-stage churn. Onboarding quality directly drives TTV.

8. Onboarding Completion Rate: The percentage of new customers who successfully complete your defined onboarding process within the expected timeframe. Incomplete onboarding is one of the strongest predictors of churn—if they don't launch, they don't stay.

9. Product Adoption Rate: The percentage of customers actively using key features or reaching defined usage thresholds. Adoption goes beyond login frequency—it measures whether customers are getting actual value from the product capabilities that matter most.

10. Daily Active Users (DAU) / Monthly Active Users (MAU): The number of unique users engaging with your product on a daily or monthly basis. The DAU/MAU ratio reveals stickiness—a high ratio means users are coming back consistently, not just logging in once a month.

11. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): A metric measuring customer satisfaction with a specific interaction, experience, or overall relationship, typically via a survey (e.g., "How satisfied were you?" on a 1-5 scale). CSAT is more granular than NPS—useful for measuring specific touchpoints like support tickets or onboarding.

12. Customer Effort Score (CES): A metric measuring how much effort a customer had to exert to resolve an issue or accomplish a task. Lower effort = higher satisfaction and retention. CES is a sleeper metric—research shows it's a stronger predictor of loyalty than CSAT in many contexts.

13. Renewal Rate: The percentage of customers or revenue that successfully renews at the end of their contract term. Renewal rate is the single most important metric for CS teams—everything they do ultimately ladders up to this number.

14. Upsell: Selling a higher-tier plan or more expensive version of the product to an existing customer. Upsells increase ARPA and expansion MRR while leveraging the existing relationship—making them far more cost-efficient than new logo acquisition.

15. Cross-Sell: Selling an additional, complementary product or service to an existing customer. Cross-selling expands the value footprint within an account and increases switching costs—both of which improve retention.

16. Net Dollar Retention (NDR): Another term for Net Revenue Retention (NRR). The percentage of recurring revenue retained from existing customers after accounting for expansion, contraction, and churn. Used interchangeably with NRR in most contexts.

6. ⚙️ RevOps Infrastructure & Processes

This is the plumbing. It's not glamorous, but without clean data, smart automation, and well-connected systems, nothing else on this list works the way it should. These are the tools, processes, and practices that keep your GTM engine running smoothly behind the scenes.

1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM): The software platform (e.g., HubSpot, Salesforce) used to manage all interactions, data, and relationships with prospects and customers. Your CRM is the single source of truth for your GTM engine—when it's healthy, decisions are data-driven. When it's not, you're flying blind.

2. Single Source of Truth (SSOT): The practice of structuring your data architecture so that every piece of business-critical data originates from and is managed in one authoritative system. SSOT eliminates conflicting reports, duplicate records, and the "my spreadsheet says different" problem.

3. CRM Hygiene: The ongoing practice of keeping CRM data clean, accurate, complete, and up-to-date. This includes deduplication, enrichment, standardizing field formats, archiving stale records, and enforcing data entry standards. Bad CRM hygiene is the root cause of bad reporting, bad automation, and bad decisions.

4. Data Enrichment: The process of enhancing existing CRM records with additional data from third-party sources (e.g., Clearbit, ZoomInfo, Apollo). Enrichment fills in the gaps—adding firmographics, technographics, contact details, and intent signals that your forms didn't capture.

5. Data Governance: The policies, standards, and processes that ensure data quality, consistency, security, and proper usage across your organization. Data governance is the unsexy foundation that makes everything else—reporting, automation, AI—actually work.

6. Service Level Agreement (SLA): A formal agreement defining the expected response times and standards between teams or between a company and its customers. In RevOps, internal SLAs (e.g., "Sales must follow up on MQLs within 4 hours") are critical for maintaining speed-to-lead and cross-functional accountability.

7. Speed to Lead: The time it takes for a sales rep to make first contact with a new lead after they convert. Research consistently shows that responding within 5 minutes dramatically increases contact and qualification rates. Every minute of delay is lost revenue potential.

8. Lead Routing: The rules and automation that determine which sales rep receives a new lead based on criteria like geography, company size, industry, product interest, or round-robin assignment. Smart lead routing ensures speed, fairness, and that the right rep gets the right lead.

9. Deal Desk: A cross-functional team or process that manages non-standard deal approvals, custom pricing, legal terms, and complex contract structures. Deal Desk exists to accelerate (not slow down) complex deals while maintaining margin discipline and compliance.

10. Quote-to-Cash (QTC): The end-to-end process from generating a quote to collecting payment. QTC encompasses CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote), contract execution, invoicing, and revenue recognition. A broken QTC process creates friction at the exact moment a buyer is ready to say yes.

11. Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ): Software that automates the configuration of product/service offerings, applies correct pricing rules, and generates professional quotes. CPQ eliminates manual quoting errors, enforces discount guardrails, and dramatically speeds up the proposal process.

12. Handoff / Handover: The process of transitioning a lead or customer from one team to another (e.g., Marketing → Sales, Sales → CS). Handoffs are where leads die and customers churn. Documented, automated handoff processes with clear ownership and context transfer are non-negotiable.

13. Workflow Automation: Using CRM and connected tools to automate repetitive operational tasks like lead assignment, lifecycle stage updates, task creation, internal notifications, and data syncing. Workflow automation is how RevOps scales—it removes manual toil and ensures process consistency.

14. Integration: The connection between two or more software systems that allows data to flow between them. Integrations (native, API-based, or via tools like Zapier, Make, or custom middleware) are the connective tissue of your tech stack—and broken integrations are a top source of data quality issues.

15. Tech Stack: The collection of software tools and platforms used across your GTM organization—CRM, marketing automation, sales engagement, analytics, CS platforms, billing, etc. A bloated or disconnected tech stack creates data silos and complexity. RevOps should ruthlessly audit and optimize the stack.

16. ETL (Extract, Transform, Load): The data pipeline process of extracting data from source systems, transforming it into a usable format, and loading it into a destination (data warehouse, BI tool, etc.). ETL is the plumbing behind cross-system reporting and advanced analytics.

17. Business Intelligence (BI): Tools and practices used to analyze data and present actionable insights through dashboards, reports, and visualizations (e.g., Looker, Tableau, Power BI). BI turns raw CRM data into strategic decisions—but only if the underlying data is clean.

18. Operational Reporting: Day-to-day reports that track tactical metrics like activity volume, pipeline movement, lead response times, and deal stage progression. Operational reports help frontline managers keep their teams on track in real time.

19. Strategic Reporting: Higher-level reports and dashboards focused on trends, forecasting, and executive decision-making—ARR trajectory, CAC trends, cohort analysis, funnel conversion over time. Strategic reporting answers "where is the business headed?" rather than "what happened today?"

20. Cohort Analysis: The practice of grouping customers by a shared characteristic or time period (e.g., all customers acquired in Q1 2025) and analyzing their behavior over time. Cohort analysis reveals whether your business is improving—are newer cohorts retaining better, expanding faster, or churning less than older ones?

21. Funnel Analysis: The process of measuring conversion rates between each stage of your marketing and sales funnel to identify where prospects drop off, where they convert, and where bottlenecks exist. Funnel analysis is RevOps 101—you can't fix what you can't see.

22. Waterfall Analysis: A reporting methodology that shows how a starting value (like beginning-of-quarter pipeline) changes over time through additions, removals, stage progressions, and value changes. Waterfall charts are essential for understanding pipeline movement and forecast changes.

7. 🧠 Advanced GTM & Revenue Concepts

Once you've nailed the basics, these are the concepts that separate scaling teams from stalling ones. From growth motions and data-driven selling to predictive intelligence and competitive positioning—this is the advanced playbook for teams ready to operate at the next level.

1. Product-Led Growth (PLG): A go-to-market strategy where the product itself is the primary driver of customer acquisition, conversion, and expansion. In PLG, users experience value before ever talking to sales (think free trials, freemium models, self-serve onboarding). PLG doesn't replace sales—it supercharges it with warmer, more qualified pipeline.

2. Sales-Led Growth (SLG): A traditional go-to-market motion where the sales team drives customer acquisition through outbound prospecting, demos, and direct engagement. SLG dominates in enterprise and complex B2B selling where high-touch relationships and customized solutions are required.

3. Community-Led Growth (CLG): A GTM approach where community engagement, peer advocacy, and user-generated content drive awareness, trust, and conversion. CLG builds a moat of authentic brand equity that competitors can't easily replicate.

4. Land and Expand: A sales strategy where you close an initial deal (the "land")—often smaller in scope—and then grow revenue within that account over time through upsells, cross-sells, and broader adoption (the "expand"). Land-and-expand is the playbook for building enterprise relationships from the inside out.

5. Net New Business: Revenue or customers acquired from entirely new accounts that have never purchased before. Net-new is the purest measure of market expansion and new logo acquisition—distinct from expansion revenue generated within the existing customer base.

6. Whitespace Analysis: The process of analyzing your existing customer base to identify untapped revenue potential—products they haven't purchased, teams that haven't adopted, or use cases not yet activated. Whitespace analysis fuels the "expand" in land-and-expand.

7. Customer Segmentation: The practice of dividing your customer base into distinct groups based on shared attributes like industry, company size, plan tier, usage behavior, or revenue contribution. Segmentation enables tailored GTM motions—you shouldn't talk to a $500/mo startup the same way you talk to a $500K/yr enterprise.

8. Revenue Segmentation: Categorizing revenue by source, type, or customer segment—e.g., new business vs. renewal vs. expansion, or by product line, geography, or ICP segment. Revenue segmentation reveals where growth is actually coming from and where it's at risk.

9. Propensity Modeling: Using historical data and predictive analytics to score the likelihood that a prospect will convert, a customer will churn, or an account will expand. Propensity models let you proactively allocate resources to the highest-impact opportunities and risks.

10. Intent Data: Behavioral signals from third-party sources (e.g., Bombora, G2, TrustRadius) indicating that a company or individual is actively researching topics related to your product or category. Intent data lets you identify and prioritize prospects who are in-market before they raise their hand.

11. Technographic Data: Information about the technology tools and platforms a company currently uses. Technographics help you identify prospects whose tech stack makes them a natural fit—or whose current tools are competitors you can displace.

12. Firmographic Data: Descriptive attributes of a company—industry, employee count, revenue, location, funding stage, etc. Firmographics are the building blocks of ICP definition and account targeting.

13. Signal-Based Selling: A sales approach that prioritizes outreach and engagement based on real-time buying signals—website visits, intent data spikes, job changes, funding announcements, product usage patterns—rather than static lists or sequences. Signal-based selling means reaching out at the right moment with the right context.

14. Revenue Intelligence: The practice of using AI, conversation intelligence, and data analytics to capture, analyze, and surface revenue-relevant insights from customer interactions (calls, emails, meetings). Revenue intelligence platforms (Gong, Chorus, Clari) turn qualitative selling behavior into quantitative coaching and forecasting data.

15. Conversation Intelligence: Technology that records, transcribes, and analyzes sales and customer success conversations to surface insights on talk patterns, competitor mentions, objection handling, and deal risk. Conversation intelligence turns every call into a coaching opportunity and every deal into a data point.

16. Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) Fit Score: A score assigned to accounts or leads based on how closely they match your defined Ideal Customer Profile criteria. ICP Fit Scores help sales and marketing prioritize high-fit accounts and deprioritize long-shots before precious selling time is wasted.

8. 💳 Pricing & Packaging Concepts

How you package and price your product is one of the highest-leverage decisions in your entire GTM strategy. Get it right and you accelerate expansion, simplify the sales process, and protect margins. Get it wrong and you create friction at every stage of the customer lifecycle.

1. Annual Contract Value (ACV): The normalized annual revenue from a single customer contract. ACV standardizes deal comparisons regardless of contract length—a 3-year, $150K deal and a 1-year, $50K deal both have a $50K ACV.

2. Monthly Contract Value (MCV): The monthly revenue from a customer contract. Most commonly used in month-to-month or short-term agreements where annual normalization isn't applicable.

3. Freemium: A pricing model where a basic version of the product is offered for free, with premium features or higher usage limits available for a fee. Freemium is the entry drug for PLG—it gets users hooked on value before asking them to pay.

4. Free Trial: A time-limited offer that gives prospects full (or near-full) access to your product for a set period (typically 7-30 days). Free trials create urgency and let prospects experience the full value prop before committing.

5. Per-Seat / Per-User Pricing: A pricing model that charges based on the number of individual users or seats on the platform. Simple to understand but can create friction at expansion—customers may limit seat count to control costs.

6. Usage-Based Pricing (Consumption Pricing): A model where customers pay based on how much they use the product (API calls, data processed, messages sent, etc.). Usage-based pricing aligns cost with value but introduces revenue variability and forecasting complexity.

7. Tiered Pricing: A pricing structure with defined plan levels (e.g., Starter, Professional, Enterprise) that offer progressively more features, capacity, or support at higher price points. Tiered pricing makes upsell paths clear and gives buyers a natural ladder to climb.

8. Price Anchoring: A psychological pricing strategy where a higher-priced option is presented first to make subsequent options seem more reasonable by comparison. Anchoring is why the Enterprise plan exists on your pricing page—even if most people buy Professional.

9. Discount Governance: The policies and approval processes that control when, how, and how much reps can discount. Without discount governance, margins erode, deal values compress, and you train your market to always ask for a deal.

9. 🔄 Alignment & Organizational Concepts

Revenue is a team sport—and these are the concepts that keep marketing, sales, CS, and RevOps rowing in the same direction. From goal-setting frameworks to planning processes and incentive design, this section is about the people and alignment side of the revenue equation.

1. Revenue Team: The collective group spanning marketing, sales, customer success, and RevOps that shares responsibility for the full revenue lifecycle. The term "revenue team" intentionally breaks down silos—when every department owns revenue, alignment follows.

2. Smarketing: The alignment (and ideally, unification) of sales and marketing around shared goals, definitions, SLAs, and metrics. Smarketing isn't a buzzword—it's a survival strategy. Misaligned sales and marketing teams waste pipeline, create friction, and blame each other while revenue suffers.

3. OKRs (Objectives and Key Results): A goal-setting framework where each Objective (qualitative goal) is paired with measurable Key Results that define success. OKRs create clarity, focus, and cross-functional alignment—especially when revenue teams share OKRs across departments.

4. KPIs (Key Performance Indicators): The specific, quantifiable metrics used to evaluate performance against strategic objectives. KPIs are the numbers that matter most—and the best RevOps teams keep the list short, visible, and directly tied to revenue outcomes.

5. North Star Metric: The single metric that best captures the core value your product delivers to customers. For Slack, it might be messages sent; for Zoom, minutes of meetings. Your North Star Metric should correlate with long-term revenue growth and guide decision-making across every team.

6. Voice of the Customer (VoC): Programs and processes designed to systematically capture, analyze, and act on customer feedback. VoC insights should directly inform product roadmap, CS strategy, and marketing messaging—not just live in a survey results doc nobody reads.

7. Win/Loss Analysis: A structured post-mortem process for analyzing why deals were won or lost. Win/loss analysis—especially through buyer interviews—reveals competitive gaps, messaging weaknesses, and process breakdowns that pipeline metrics alone can't surface.

8. Quarterly Business Review (QBR): A strategic meeting (internal or with customers) held quarterly to review performance, progress against goals, and plan for the upcoming period. Internal QBRs align revenue teams; customer QBRs reinforce value realization and surface expansion opportunities.

9. Annual Planning: The process of setting revenue targets, budgets, headcount plans, and strategic initiatives for the upcoming fiscal year. Annual planning is where GTM strategy meets financial reality—and where RevOps earns its seat at the table by providing data-backed recommendations.

10. Capacity Planning: The process of determining how many reps, CSMs, or other GTM resources are needed to hit revenue targets based on historical productivity, ramp times, and expected attrition. Capacity planning prevents the dual disasters of overhiring (burning cash) and underhiring (missing targets).

11. Territory Planning: The process of dividing your market into defined segments (by geography, industry, company size, or named accounts) and assigning them to specific reps. Good territory design balances opportunity fairly, maximizes coverage, and minimizes conflict.

12. Compensation Planning (Comp Planning): Designing the incentive structures (base, variable, accelerators, SPIFs) that motivate and reward your revenue team. Comp plans should drive the behaviors you want—and if they're misaligned with strategy, expect your team to optimize for the wrong things.

13. SPIF (Sales Performance Incentive Fund): A short-term bonus or incentive offered to sales reps for achieving specific goals (e.g., booking demos in a new vertical, closing multi-year deals). SPIFs create targeted urgency and can shift rep behavior quickly when a strategic push is needed.

10. 🤖 Technology & Enablement Concepts

Your strategy is only as good as the tools and systems that execute it. This section covers the tech stack categories and enablement concepts that power modern GTM teams—from the platforms your reps use daily to the optimization tactics that squeeze more performance out of every touchpoint.

1. Martech (Marketing Technology): The ecosystem of software tools used by marketing teams—CRM, email platforms, analytics, SEO tools, ad platforms, ABM software, and more. The average B2B marketing team uses 12+ tools, and half of them probably aren't configured correctly.

2. Sales Tech (Sales Technology): The tools used by sales teams to prospect, engage, manage pipeline, and close deals—including sales engagement platforms (Outreach, SalesLoft), CPQ, conversation intelligence, and CRM. The right sales tech removes friction; too much of it creates a different kind of friction.

3. Customer Success Platform: Software specifically designed to help CS teams manage health scores, track adoption, automate playbooks, and proactively identify churn risk (e.g., Gainsight, Vitally, Totango, ChurnZero). CS platforms turn reactive firefighting into proactive customer management.

4. Sales Engagement Platform: Tools that enable multi-channel outreach sequences (email, phone, social, video) at scale while tracking engagement and automating follow-ups (e.g., Outreach, SalesLoft, Apollo, HubSpot Sequences). These platforms are the engine behind modern SDR/BDR outreach.

5. Chatbot / Conversational Marketing: AI-powered or rule-based chat tools (e.g., Drift, Intercom, HubSpot Chatbot) that engage website visitors in real time to qualify leads, answer questions, and book meetings. Conversational marketing captures buyer intent at peak interest—when they're on your site and actively engaged.

6. Call to Action (CTA): A specific prompt encouraging the audience to take a desired action—"Book a Demo," "Download the Guide," "Start Free Trial." Every piece of content, every page, and every email should have a clear, compelling CTA. No CTA = no conversion.

7. Landing Page: A standalone web page designed for a single, focused conversion goal—usually tied to a specific campaign, ad, or content offer. Great landing pages eliminate distractions, match ad messaging, and make the CTA irresistible.

8. A/B Testing (Split Testing): The practice of comparing two versions of a page, email, ad, or CTA to determine which performs better based on a defined metric. A/B testing removes opinion from optimization and replaces it with data. Test one variable at a time for clean results.

9. Personalization: Tailoring content, messaging, and experiences to individual users or segments based on their behavior, attributes, or preferences. Personalization ranges from simple (first-name tokens in emails) to sophisticated (dynamic website content based on ICP segment and buying stage).

10. Predictive Analytics: Using historical data, machine learning, and statistical modeling to forecast future outcomes—lead conversion likelihood, churn probability, deal close dates, etc. Predictive analytics gives RevOps a crystal ball (an imperfect one, but better than gut feel).
    
    

🎤 Final Thoughts

If you made it this far—first of all, respect. That's 150+ terms and you're still here. Gold star. ⭐

But here's the thing: knowing these terms isn't the goal. Using them is. The best revenue teams don't just speak the same language—they operationalize it. They align on definitions, build systems around them, and hold each other accountable to the metrics that actually matter.

Every single term in this dictionary exists because someone, somewhere, needed a better way to measure, communicate, or improve how their business grows. That's what RevOps is really about—not dashboards and workflows (although we love those too)—but building the connective tissue between great people, smart strategy, and the right systems so that growth isn't a mystery. It's a machine.

So bookmark this. Share it with your team. Pull it up in your next QBR when someone drops an acronym nobody wants to admit they don't know. And most importantly—go build something incredible with it.

The companies that win aren't the ones with the biggest budgets or the flashiest tools. They're the ones where every person on the revenue team understands the mission, speaks the same language, and operates with clarity and confidence.

Now go get that #ExitVelocity. 🚀🔥

- Scott "HubScott" 🫡