Sales and marketing glossary

20 Sales terms

BANT: An acronym used in sales for lead qualification that stands for Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline. It's a famous tool for sales reps and sales leaders to help them determine whether their prospects have the budget, authority, need, and right timeline to buy what they sell. B=Budget, A=Authority, N=Need, T=Timeline
BIMI: Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) is an emerging security technology that helps authenticate your email marketing and builds trust with your customers. BIMI works with DKIM, SPF, and DMARC protocols to protect your domain from being used by malicious actors to send fraudulent email. It causes your logo to appear right next to your messages in a user’s inbox, so that your contacts and their email service will know these emails are really from you or your business.
Black Hat SEO: Not a great idea. Black hat SEO is an approach to search engine optimization (SEO) that focuses on gaming the system and disregards the human experience. These practices don’t follow search engine rules, and search engines can exclude entire sites for using them. The colorful term “black hat” comes from old Western films in which the villains wore black hats and the heroes wore white hats so viewers could tell them apart in the days before Technicolor.
Bluebird Sales: A "bluebird" is a sale that came seemingly from nowhere or with unexpected ease. A sales rep might say, "Fortunately, a bluebird flew right in at the end of the quarter, helping me reach my goal."
Churn Rate: A metric that measures how many customers you retain and at what value. To calculate churn rate, take the number of customers you lost during a certain time frame, and divide that by the total number of customers you had at the very beginning of that time frame. (Don't include any new sales from that time frame.)
CPM: Cost per thousand impressions of an online ad. When an ad is served to a user, it’s counted as an impression. If an ad network charges you $1,000 for delivering 1 million impressions, your CPM is $1. A CPM model can be a good strategy if your campaign goal is to raise awareness of your brand. If your campaign goal is to increase user interaction with your brand or prompt users to take a specific action such as signing up for a loyalty program, a cost-per-click (CPC) model may be a better choice.
CSS: Cascading style sheet (CSS), a language that dictates how a web page looks. It covers layout, colors, fonts, font sizes, and more. The advantage of using CSS is that its rules can apply—cascade—across all of your web pages, reducing the time to code each page from scratch. CSS also enables responsive web design, which aims to reuse code across desktop and mobile devices and keep the user experience (UX) consistent.
DMARC: Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC) is a widely recognized email protocol that helps people and businesses protect their email addresses and domains from being misused by third parties. It helps identify that an email you send is from the real you. This method of email authentication protects both senders and recipients from activities like phishing, spamming, and spoofing.
Drip Campaign: A series of automated emails sent to people who take a specific action. For any given action, you can choose how many emails to send and the rate at which to send them. These emails can be personalized with data like the contact’s name, and specific references to the action they took. You might send a drip campaign to someone who signs up for your online course, for example. Or you could send a drip campaign to people who add an item to their online cart without buying it.
Flywheel: The flywheel is a new way of conceptualizing the sales process, replacing the funnel where customers are thought of as an output. The flywheel demonstrates that awareness, engagement, and delight can happen at any point during the customer journey and that the best way to achieve growth is to apply force and remove friction in each stage.
GPCTBA/C&I: Goals, Plans, Challenges, Timeline, Budget, Authority, Negative Consequences, Positive Implications. The lead qualification criteria sales reps should use to qualify prospects -- it's a better tool than BANT to help sales reps and sales leaders to determine whether their prospects have the goals, plans, challenges, and right timeline to buy what they sell. G = Goals: Determines the quantifiable goals your prospect wants or needs to hit. An opportunity for sales reps to establish themselves as an advisor by beginning to help prospects reset or quantify their goals. P = Plans: Determines the prospect's current plans that they'll implement in order to achieve those goals. C = Challenges: Determines whether the sales rep can help a prospect overcome their and their company's challenges; ones they're dealing with and ones they (or the sales rep) anticipate. T = Timeline: Determines the time frame for implementation of their goals and plans, and when they need to eliminate their challenges. B = Budget: Determines how much money a prospect has to spend. A = Authority: Determines who in the organization will help champion and/or decide to make a purchase. C = Negative Consequences: Discusses the negative things that'll happen if a prospect doesn't meet their goal. I = Positive Implications: Discusses the positive outcomes that'll happen if a prospect meets their goal.
Gross Rating Points: A math equation that multiplies the number of times an ad is run by the percentage of the target audience that sees it, multiplied by 100. Gross rating points (GRPs) are commonly used in television ad buying to help media planners decide when and where to place their ads. Though the math is a bit too complicated for this short description, GRPs can be calculated for online ads as well. Some planners find this helpful when determining their media mix of TV and online advertising.
LTV:CAC: The ratio of lifetime value to customer acquisition cost. Once you have the LTV and the CAC, compute the ratio of the two. If it costs you $100,000 to acquire a customer with an LTV of $437,500, then your LTV:CAC is 4.4 to 1.
Middle of the Funnel (MOFU): The stage that a lead enters after identifying a problem. Now they’re looking to conduct further research to find a solution to the problem. Typical middle of the funnel offers include case studies, product brochures, or anything that brings your business into the equation as a solution to the problem the lead is looking to solve.
MRR: Monthly Recurring Revenue. For recurring revenue companies, MRR provides a month-to-month look at how recurring revenue or subscription business is growing. Includes MRR gained by new accounts (net new), MRR gained from up-sells (net positive), MRR lost from down-sells (net negative), and MRR lost from cancellations (net loss). MRR may not be ideal for longer term subscription models since there will be natural fluctuation over shorter time periods, but it can be a better metric for recurring revenue companies that aren't ideal for long-term subscriptions. It's also great for short-term planning. See also: ARR.
Net Promoter Score (NPS): A customer satisfaction metric that measures, on a scale of 0-10, the degree to which people would recommend your company to others. The NPS is derived from a simple survey designed to help you determine how loyal your customers are to your business. To calculate NPS, subtract the percentage of customers who would not recommend you (detractors, or 0-6) from the percent of customers who would (promoters, or 9-10). Regularly determining your company’s NPS allows you to identify ways to improve your products and services so you can increase the loyalty of your customers. Learn more about how to use NPS surveys for marketing here.
Return on Ad Spend (ROAS): The ratio of the amount of revenue generated by an ad campaign to its cost. If you generated $10,000 from a campaign that cost $1,000, your return on ad spend (ROAS) would be 10:1. While similar to return on investment (ROI), ROAS is more focused on the hard cost of a campaign rather than on the overall value of running a campaign, which could include brand awareness or other marketing objectives.
RSS: Really simple syndication (RSS) takes the content of a website and packages it into a feed that can be easily displayed on other websites. Aggregators take multiple RSS feeds and combine them into a single interface, which can help people track updates to multiple websites at once. RSS also allows websites to syndicate content from third parties.
Service Level Agreement (SLA): For salespeople, an SLA is an agreement between a company's sales and marketing teams that defines the expectations Sales has for Marketing and vice versa. The Sales SLA defines the expectations Marketing has for Sales on how deeply and frequently Sales will pursue each qualified lead, while the Marketing SLA defines expectations Sales has for Marketing with regards to lead quantity and lead quality.
SSL: Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is a method of encryption that protects data being sent between websites. SSL is closely related to Transport Layer Security (TLS), another encryption method, and the two acronyms are often used interchangeably.