GTM & B2B Sales Glossary
Every essential term in modern B2B go-to-market — defined by the GTM engineers who build these systems every day.
GTM Strategy 5 terms
GTM Engineering
The discipline of building technical systems that power scalable go-to-market execution.
GTM Motion
The specific, repeatable approach a company uses to bring its product to market and acquire customers.
ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
A detailed description of the company type most likely to buy your product and become a successful long-term customer.
TAM SAM SOM
A market sizing framework: Total Addressable Market, Serviceable Addressable Market, and Serviceable Obtainable Market.
Value Proposition
A clear statement of the specific value a product delivers to a defined customer segment.
Sales Development 20 terms
SDR (Sales Development Representative)
A sales professional focused on outbound prospecting and qualifying leads before passing to Account Executives.
BDR (Business Development Representative)
Similar to an SDR but often focused on outbound prospecting to net-new accounts rather than inbound leads.
AE (Account Executive)
A quota-carrying sales professional responsible for closing new business and managing active opportunities.
Outbound Sequence
A structured series of multi-channel touches designed to engage a prospect and generate a response.
Multi-Channel Outreach
A prospecting approach that engages prospects across multiple channels simultaneously.
Sales Cadence
The timing, frequency, and channel mix of a structured outreach sequence.
Decision Maker
The person who has the authority to approve a purchase decision.
Champion
An internal advocate at the prospect company who actively promotes your solution to other stakeholders.
Economic Buyer
The person who controls the budget and can authorize spending for a purchase.
SPIN Selling
A consultative sales methodology using Situation, Problem, Implication, and Need-Payoff questions.
MEDDIC
A B2B sales qualification framework: Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, Champion.
BANT
A sales qualification framework: Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline.
Challenger Sale
A sales methodology where reps teach, tailor, and take control rather than building relationships or solving stated problems.
Solution Selling
A sales approach focused on identifying the buyer's pain and presenting a tailored solution rather than pitching features.
Sales Enablement
The process of equipping sales teams with content, training, and tools to have more effective buyer conversations.
Prospecting
The process of identifying and qualifying potential customers for outreach.
Cold Outreach
Initiating contact with a prospect who has no prior relationship with your company.
Warm Introduction
An introduction to a prospect facilitated by a mutual connection who vouches for the person seeking the meeting.
Social Selling
Using social media platforms, primarily LinkedIn, to build relationships and generate pipeline.
LinkedIn Outreach
Using LinkedIn to initiate contact and build relationships with B2B prospects.
Revenue Operations 29 terms
RevOps (Revenue Operations)
The operational discipline that aligns sales, marketing, and customer success around unified data and processes.
Sales Velocity
A metric measuring how quickly a company generates revenue from its pipeline.
Pipeline Coverage
The ratio of pipeline value to revenue quota, indicating whether there is enough opportunity to hit targets.
Opportunity
A qualified prospect who has entered the formal sales process and represents a potential deal.
Pipeline
The collection of active sales opportunities being worked by a sales team at any given time.
ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue)
The annualized value of all active subscription contracts.
MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue)
The monthly value of all active subscription contracts.
ACV (Annual Contract Value)
The annualized revenue value of a single customer contract.
CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
The total cost of acquiring a single new customer.
LTV (Customer Lifetime Value)
The total revenue expected from a customer over the entire duration of their relationship with the company.
Churn Rate
The percentage of customers or revenue lost in a given period through cancellations.
NRR (Net Revenue Retention)
The percentage of revenue retained from existing customers, including expansion, after accounting for churn and contraction.
Expansion Revenue
Additional revenue generated from existing customers through upsells, cross-sells, or seat expansion.
Upsell
Expanding a customer to a higher-tier or higher-value plan within the same product.
Cross-sell
Selling additional, complementary products or modules to an existing customer.
Win/Loss Analysis
A systematic review of won and lost deals to identify patterns and improve future sales performance.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
A system for managing company relationships and interactions with customers and prospects.
Sales Stack
The collection of technology tools a sales team uses to manage their workflow and pipeline.
Conversion Rate
The percentage of prospects that advance from one stage of the funnel to the next.
Close Rate
The percentage of qualified sales opportunities that result in a closed-won deal.
Quota
A revenue target assigned to a salesperson or team for a defined period.
Ramp Time
The time it takes for a newly hired salesperson to reach full productivity.
Sales Cycle
The length of time from first contact to a closed deal.
Deal Velocity
How quickly individual deals progress through the sales pipeline.
Forecast
A prediction of expected revenue for a defined future period based on pipeline analysis.
Pipeline Hygiene
The practice of keeping CRM pipeline data accurate, current, and actionable.
CRM Hygiene
The practice of maintaining clean, accurate, and complete data in your CRM system.
HubSpot
An all-in-one CRM, marketing automation, and sales platform popular with SMB and mid-market companies.
Salesforce
The world's leading enterprise CRM platform used by mid-market and large companies.
Sales Automation 12 terms
Email Deliverability
The ability of email messages to successfully reach the recipient's inbox rather than spam filters.
SPF / DKIM / DMARC
Email authentication protocols that verify sender identity and protect against email spoofing.
Open Rate
The percentage of sent emails that are opened by recipients.
Reply Rate
The percentage of sent emails or messages that receive a response from the recipient.
Meeting Rate
The percentage of outreach contacts who book a meeting or discovery call.
Data Enrichment
The process of supplementing existing prospect data with additional information from external sources.
Waterfall Enrichment
A multi-source enrichment strategy that queries multiple data providers in sequence to maximize contact coverage.
Clay
A GTM data and automation platform used to build prospect lists, enrich data, and power AI personalization at scale.
Apollo
A B2B sales intelligence and engagement platform combining a large contact database with email sequencing.
Outreach
An enterprise sales engagement platform for managing sequences, calls, and pipeline workflows.
Salesloft
A sales engagement platform for managing multi-channel outbound cadences and pipeline workflows.
ZoomInfo
A comprehensive B2B data and sales intelligence platform with extensive firmographic and contact data.
AI Sales 1 terms
Demand Generation 8 terms
Intent Data
Data signals indicating that a prospect or account is actively researching a specific topic or solution category.
Lead Scoring
A system for ranking prospects based on their likelihood to buy and fit with your ICP.
MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead)
A lead that marketing has deemed ready to pass to sales based on engagement and fit criteria.
SQL (Sales Qualified Lead)
A prospect that sales has validated as having genuine need, budget, and near-term buying intent.
ABM (Account-Based Marketing)
A strategy that treats individual high-value accounts as markets of one, with personalized, coordinated outreach.
TOFU MOFU BOFU
Top of Funnel / Middle of Funnel / Bottom of Funnel — stages of the B2B buyer journey.
Sales Funnel
The visual representation of the stages a prospect passes through from awareness to closed customer.
Buyer Journey
The process a B2B buyer goes through from recognizing a problem to making a purchase decision.
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