Sales and Marketing glossary

20 Business and management terms

My name is Julien, and I am studying in business and management at College Ahuntsic. This glossary will help me understand more words and have a better vocabulary when I speak with my clients.

Backlinks

Links on websites other than your own that go back to a page on your website. Backlinks are also called inbound links because they represent traffic coming to your website from somewhere else.

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.

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

Breadcrumbs

Digital breadcrumbs serve the same purpose. They’re a form of website navigation that shows users the sections they’ve visited in the order they visited them so they can retrace their steps easily.

Canonical URL

The "master version" of a page on your website that you want search engine crawlers to find. As you launch marketing campaigns and track users, information gets added to the end of your unique page URLs. From the crawlers’ point of view, this means you have multiple versions of the same page without a clear indication of which one is "right." When you set up a canonical URL in the page's HTML, you tell search engines which version of the page you want visitors to see.

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.

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 spends + salaries + commissions + bonuses + overhead. Divide by the number of new customers in that time period.

Featured Snippet

A section of Google’s search engine results page that tries to answer a question without a person having to click through to another web page. They include Google’s best guess at an answer, the title of the page the answer comes from, the page’s URL, and an image from the page. While featured snippets are designed to save time for the person searching, they’re mostly machine generated and aren’t fact checked.

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.

FTC

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is tasked with promoting competition in the United States marketplace and protecting consumers. In the world of e-commerce and digital marketing, the FTC is responsible for providing rules and guidance around online advertising, which it refers to as the “rules of the road.” It enforces the CAN-SPAM Act to ensure email marketing isn’t misleading or harassing.

Lifetime Value (LTV)

A prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer. To calculate LTV, follow these steps for a given time period: Take the revenue the customer paid you in that time period. Subtract from that number the gross margin. Divide by the estimated churn rate (aka cancellation rate) for that customer.

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.

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)

Robots.txt

A file placed on a web server that gives instructions to search engine crawlers, which are the robots that index web pages for search engines. Robots.txt files tell web crawlers what they should include in their index—and what they should ignore. Pages such as form results pages (“thank you” pages that are triggered when users submit a form, for example) can be hidden from search engines.

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 in regard to lead quantity and lead quality.

Sitemap XML

A list of pages on a website that search engines should index. Written in extensible markup language (XML), both humans and computers can understand a sitemap XML. In addition to page URLs, they include modification dates so search engines can tell whether or not a page has been crawled since it was updated. Sitemap XML- and robots.txt-related search engine optimization (SEO) tactics approach indexing from different sides of the same coin. Sitemap XML says “yes” while robots.txt says “no.”

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.

Sound Bite

A series of words or phrases sales reps use to respond to and overcome a customer objection.