Marketing / Sales Vocabulary

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ABC: "Always Be Closing." An antiquated sales strategy that basically says everything a sales rep does throughout the sales process is in pursuit toward the singular goal of closing a deal. The implication is that, if a sales rep doesn't close the deal, then everything they did regarding that opportunity was a failure. In the inbound methodology, the preferred ABCs of selling are: Always Be Connecting. Even better, "Always Be Helping."; Example: A good salespersom always looks for opportunities to close the sale instead of just talking to the customer.; fr: Toujours conclure la vente
Advertorial: Advertising and editorial content combined. If you think of a traditional printed magazine or newspaper, the line between ads and editorial articles is distinct—and often literal. An advertorial brings the 2 formats together to educate readers about a product through an editorial-esque storytelling experience. They’ve become a popular online advertising tactic that is typically labeled "sponsored" or "paid" so as not to mislead users about the source of the information.; Example: The magazine published an advertorial about a new skincare product, making it look like an informative article while promoting the brand.; fr: Publireportage
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: Determines whether your prospect has a budget for what you're selling. A = Authority: Determines whether your prospect has the authority to make a purchasing decision. N = Need: Determines whether there's a business need for what you're selling. T = Timeline: Determines the time frame for implementation. The BANT formula was originally developed by IBM several decades ago. We don't think BANT is good enough anymore, though: Learn more here about the better qualifying formula, GPCTBA/C&I.
BIMI Brand Indicators for Message Identification: 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.; Example: A company uses BIMI so that its logo appears next to its emails in the customer's inbox, helping customers recognize that the email is really from the company.; fr: Indicateurs de marque pour l'identification des messages Recherche
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.
Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU): A stage of the buying process leads reach when they're just about to close into new customers. They've identified a problem, have shopped around for possible solutions, and are very close to buying.; fr: le marketing du bas du tunnel
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.) For example, if a company had 500 customers at the beginning of October and only 450 customers at the end of October (discounting any customers that were closed in October), their customer churn rate would be: (500-450)/500 = 50/500 = 10%. Churn rate is a significant metric primarily for recurring revenue companies. Regardless of your monthly revenue, if your average customer does not stick around long enough for you to at least break even on your customer acquisition costs, you’re in trouble.; fr: Taux d'attrition
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.
Cross-Selling: When a sales rep has more than one type of product to offer consumers that could be beneficial, and s/he successfully sells a consumer more than one item either at the time of purchase or later on. An example is when Apple sells you an iPhone and then successfully sells you an Apple iPhone case or a pair of Apple headphones. In this case, a sales rep identifies a need the customer has, and fulfills that need by recommending an additional product. (Cross-selling differs from up-selling; see up-selling.)
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.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): This is your total Sales and Marketing cost. To calculate, follow these steps for a given time period (month, quarter, or year): Add up program or advertising spend + salaries + commissions + bonuses + overhead. Divide by the number of new customers in that time period. For example, if you spend $500,000 on Sales and Marketing in a given month and added 50 customers that same month, then your CAC was $10,000 that month. (Learn more here.) Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
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.
DNS: A domain name system (DNS) takes a human-friendly internet address, such as Website.com, and translates it into a computer-friendly IP address a web browser can use to find and display a website. DNS is often described as the “phone book” of the internet that does the heavy lifting of remembering the “phone number” of a website so humans only have to know the name.
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.
End User: The person who uses a product or service. If you make T-shirts, a person wearing your shirt is the end user. If you make websites, the person who hires you is your client or customer and the person using the website is the end user. Either way, do your best to avoid referring to people as “users” in your marketing materials. It’s accurate but not ideal.
FCC: The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is a United States government agency that regulates communication devices and systems, which includes the internet. They ensure all citizens have fair access to these communication platforms and that they’re safely performing in the interest of the public and national security. In most cases, the FCC is the agency responsible for crafting consumer protection rules such as privacy protections, while the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) enforces these rules.
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.
Hard Bounce: An email that is rejected by an email server for a permanent reason. An email may hard bounce if a recipient email address or domain name doesn't exist—or the recipient email server has completely blocked the delivery. There are, however, occasionally times when a valid email address will hard bounce.
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.
Smarketing: Used to refer to the practice of aligning Sales and Marketing efforts. In a perfect world, marketing would pass off tons of fully qualified leads to the sales team, who would then subsequently work every one of those leads enough times to close them 100% of the time. But since this isn't always how the cookie crumbles, it’s important for Marketing and Sales to align efforts to impact the bottom line the best they can through coordinated communication.