Glossary
Sales and CRM terms
24 terms
- Lead
- A person or company that might become a customer, before anyone has checked whether they fit.
- Prospect
- A lead that has been checked and fits what you sell.
- Ideal customer profile (ICP)
- A description of the kind of company that gets the most value from a product, by industry, size or need.
- Persona
- A description of a typical person in the buying decision, such as the head of finance.
- Qualification
- Checking whether a lead is worth pursuing. One common scheme is BANT: budget, authority, need and timeline.
- CRM
- Customer relationship management software that keeps contacts, companies, deals and conversations in one place.
- Pipeline
- All open deals, sorted by the stage they have reached.
- Deal stage
- A step in the pipeline, for example "qualified", "proposal sent" or "won".
- Sales cycle
- The time from the first contact to a signed deal.
- Conversion rate
- The share of items that move from one step to the next, for example from lead to meeting.
- Win rate
- The share of closed deals that were won rather than lost.
- Inbound
- Customers come to you, for example through a website form.
- Outbound
- The seller makes the first contact, for example by email or phone.
- Cold email
- A first email to someone with no earlier contact. Whether it is allowed depends on the country and on whether the recipient is a business or a consumer.
- Follow-up
- A later message to someone who has not answered yet.
- Bounce
- An email that could not be delivered. A hard bounce means the address does not exist; a soft bounce is temporary, such as a full mailbox.
- Deliverability
- How reliably emails reach the inbox instead of the spam folder.
- Opt-in
- Permission someone gives to receive messages. Double opt-in confirms it with a second step, usually a link in an email.
- Reply rate
- The share of sent emails that receive an answer.
- Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
- What it costs on average to win one new customer, including marketing and sales spending.
- Customer lifetime value (CLV)
- The revenue or profit a customer brings over the whole relationship.
- Churn
- The share of customers who leave in a period.
- Upsell
- Selling a customer a bigger or better version of what they already buy.
- Cross-sell
- Selling a customer an additional, related product.
Quiz
Check yourself
3 questions
1.A company fills in the contact form on your website. What is it?
2.Out of 40 deals that closed this quarter, 10 were won. What is the win rate?
3.When is a high customer acquisition cost a real problem?