Sales and marketing vocabulary
Sales and marketing vocabulary
20 Business and marketing terms
I have been a college student in business and marketing for 3 years now. In my glossary, there will be 20 different terms that I will be using to enrich my vocabulary, make cold calls, write emails, etc.
- A/B tests
- Creating 2 versions of a digital asset to see which one users respond to better. Examples of assets include a landing page, display ad, marketing email, and social post. In an A/B test, half of your audience automatically receives “version A” and half receives “version B.” The performance of each version is based on conversion rate goals such as the percentage of people who click on a link, complete a form, or make a purchase.
- 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.
- fr: publirédactionnel
- Aida
- Attention, Interedt, Desire, Action
- fr: Attention, Intérêt, Désir, Action
- Alt text
- Text that shows in place of images or pops up when you hover your mouse over an image. Alt text, or alternative text, is written into the HTML code of a web page to describe an image in case the image doesn’t show. This can happen for a few different reasons. Some users may have images turned off so web pages load faster. Other users may have low vision or blindness, so they use special screen readers that translate web page text into an audio or a Braille-like touch format. Alt text also helps search engines "understand" images better.
- Anchor text
- The wording of a link on a website, in an email, or within another digital asset. One example of anchor text is “read more.” Anchor text is an important part of the user experience. You want your users to be clear on where your links are going and be satisfied that the destination is what they expected. Search engines also take your anchor text into account when they rank your site pages for relevance.
- Arr
- Annual Recurring Revenue. For recurring revenue companies, ARR provides a high-level look at how recurring revenue or subscription business is growing over time. It's a good metric for models that have longer term subscription durations. It's also great for long-term planning. See also MRR.
- fr: Revenu Annuel Récurrent
- Bant
- Budget, authority, Need, Timeline
- fr: Budget, Autorité, Besoin, et Temporalité
- 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.
- Bottom of the Funnel
- 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.
- Bounce rate
- The percentage of visits to your website where only 1 page was viewed. When we say users "bounce," we mean they viewed a page of your site or a landing page but didn’t engage further. They didn’t click on links or view more pages. There are many methods for improving your pages so more users stick around. An offer, call to action (CTA), ad copy, and design can all be optimized through A/B testing.
- Breadcrumbs
- If you’re thinking "Hansel and Gretel," you’re right. This fairy tale duo left a trail of breadcrumbs as they ventured into the forest so they could find their way back home. 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.
- 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
- Conversion rate optimization
- The process of increasing the percentage of users who take the actions you want them to, such as clicking on a website link or purchasing a product online. Two key conversion rate optimization (CRO) strategies are A/B testing and personalized marketing. Both use analytics to uncover customer insights to help you craft the right message to the right person at the right moment for better results.
- fr: Optimisation du taux de conversion
- 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.
- fr: feuille de style en cascade
- 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.
- Middle of the funnel
- 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.
- fr: revenu mensuel récurrent
- 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.