Sales & outreach glossary
Every term you need to know about AI video outreach, sales development, and modern prospecting.
A
AI SDR
An AI SDR (Artificial Intelligence Sales Development Representative) is a software system that automates the prospecting, outreach, and qualification tasks traditionally performed by human SDRs. It uses machine learning and generative AI to research leads, craft personalized messages, and engage prospects at scale.
AI Clone
An AI clone is an AI-generated replica of a real person that can synthesize their appearance, voice, and mannerisms into new video content without additional recording sessions. In sales and marketing, AI clones allow professionals to produce thousands of personalized video messages from a single source recording.
AI Avatar
An AI avatar is a digital representation of a real person, trained on video footage of that individual, which can be used to generate new video content where the avatar appears to speak any provided script. In sales, AI avatars allow professionals to create personalized video messages at scale without recording each one manually.
Account-Based Marketing (ABM)
Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a B2B strategy in which sales and marketing teams collaborate to create highly personalized campaigns targeting specific high-value accounts rather than broad audiences. Instead of casting a wide net, ABM treats each target account as an individual market with tailored messaging, content, and outreach.
AI Personalization
AI personalization is the use of machine learning and natural language processing to automatically customize sales and marketing content — including email copy, video scripts, subject lines, and call-to-action phrasing — to match the individual characteristics, context, and behavior of each recipient, without requiring manual customization for every contact.
Account-Based Selling (ABS)
Account-based selling (ABS) is a strategic sales approach in which resources, outreach, and effort are concentrated on a predefined list of high-value target accounts rather than distributed broadly across all potential prospects. ABS requires deep account research, multi-threaded relationship building across the buying committee, and personalized outreach that is specifically tailored to each account's business context and priorities.
Average Deal Size
Average deal size (also called average contract value or ACV) is the mean revenue value of all closed-won deals in a given time period, calculated by dividing total closed revenue by the number of deals. It is a fundamental metric for sales planning, capacity modeling, and go-to-market strategy.
B
Buyer Intent
Buyer intent refers to the likelihood that a prospect is currently in an active purchasing process for a product or service like yours. Intent is inferred from behavioral signals — research activity, content consumption, competitor comparisons, and review site visits — that indicate a prospect is evaluating solutions, not just browsing.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate in email outreach is the percentage of sent emails that are rejected by the recipient's mail server and not delivered to the inbox. High bounce rates damage sender reputation and can trigger spam filters, making list hygiene and email validation critical components of any outbound strategy.
BANT
BANT is a lead qualification framework developed by IBM that evaluates prospects across four dimensions: Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline. Sales reps use BANT to prioritize which leads are worth pursuing and to determine how close a prospect is to making a purchase decision.
Buying Committee
A buying committee is the group of stakeholders within an organization who are involved in evaluating, approving, and ultimately purchasing a B2B product or service. Modern enterprise deals typically involve 6-10 committee members across multiple functions, each with different priorities and criteria.
Buying Trigger
A buying trigger is a specific event in a prospect's company or role that creates a time-bound window of opportunity for outbound sales. Triggers signal that the prospect is more likely than usual to be receptive — a new role, fresh funding, a leadership change, a product launch, a tech migration. Outbound that references a real trigger feels relevant; outbound that ignores them feels like spam.
C
Cold Email Deliverability
Cold email deliverability refers to the ability of outreach emails sent to people who have not previously engaged with the sender to reach the recipient's primary inbox rather than being filtered into spam or promotions folders. High deliverability is the foundation of any successful cold outreach program.
Cold Outreach
Cold outreach is the practice of initiating contact with individuals or organizations who have no prior relationship with you or your company, with the goal of starting a sales conversation. Common cold outreach channels include email, phone calls, LinkedIn messages, and increasingly, personalized video.
Conversational AI
Conversational AI is a category of artificial intelligence that uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to understand, process, and generate human-like dialogue — enabling automated systems to have contextually relevant, back-and-forth conversations with users through text or voice interfaces. In sales, conversational AI powers chatbots, email reply assistants, and AI-driven qualification workflows.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the total sales and marketing spend required to acquire one new customer, calculated by dividing total sales and marketing expenditure in a period by the number of new customers acquired in that same period. It is one of the most fundamental unit economics metrics in B2B SaaS and a primary determinant of business model viability.
Churn Rate
Churn rate is the percentage of customers (or revenue) that a business loses over a defined time period — typically monthly or annually — due to cancellations, non-renewals, or downgrades. High churn erodes the compounding growth that subscription businesses depend on, making retention one of the most economically critical activities in any SaaS company.
Challenger Sale
The Challenger Sale is a sales methodology introduced by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson that identifies the most effective sales reps as those who teach prospects something new, tailor their message to the specific stakeholder, and take control of the sale rather than deferring to the customer's existing thinking.
Consultative Selling
Consultative selling is a sales approach in which the salesperson acts as a trusted advisor who invests deeply in understanding the prospect's business challenges, goals, and context before recommending any solution. The emphasis is on providing genuine value through expertise rather than pushing a product.
Conversation Intelligence
Conversation intelligence is a category of sales technology that uses AI and natural language processing to automatically record, transcribe, and analyze sales conversations — including calls, video meetings, and emails — to surface insights that improve rep coaching, messaging effectiveness, and deal outcomes.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of recipients who click on a link within an email, ad, or other digital content, calculated by dividing the number of clicks by the number of deliveries (or impressions) and multiplying by 100. It measures how effectively content drives action beyond passive viewing.
D
Drip Campaign
A drip campaign is a series of pre-written, automated messages sent to a prospect or lead at scheduled intervals, designed to progressively build awareness, establish credibility, and move the recipient toward a desired action such as booking a meeting or requesting a demo. Unlike broadcast emails, drip campaigns are triggered by time or behavior and are designed to feel like a natural, ongoing conversation.
Deal Velocity
Deal velocity is a sales metric that measures the speed at which opportunities progress through the sales pipeline from first contact to closed-won. It is calculated using the number of deals, average deal size, win rate, and average sales cycle length, and is a core indicator of revenue generation efficiency.
DKIM
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is an email authentication protocol that uses public-key cryptography to add a digital signature to outgoing emails, allowing receiving mail servers to verify that the message was sent by an authorized sender and that its content was not altered in transit.
DMARC
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) is an email authentication protocol that builds on SPF and DKIM by specifying what receiving mail servers should do when an email fails authentication checks — reject it, quarantine it, or allow it through — and by sending reports back to the domain owner about authentication outcomes.
E
Email Warm-up
Email warm-up is the process of gradually increasing the sending volume of a new email address or domain over several weeks while generating positive engagement signals, with the goal of establishing a trustworthy sender reputation before launching high-volume cold outreach campaigns.
Email Sequence
An email sequence is a predetermined series of emails sent to a prospect at planned intervals, designed to progressively engage them and move them toward a desired action — typically booking a meeting or responding to a conversation starter. Each email in the sequence builds on the previous one to tell a coherent story and address different aspects of the prospect's potential need.
Email Personalization
Email personalization is the practice of customizing email content — including the subject line, body copy, images, and calls to action — to match the specific characteristics, interests, or behaviors of each individual recipient. Effective personalization moves beyond name-merge fields to reference company-specific context, role-relevant pain points, and timely triggers that demonstrate genuine research.
Email Deliverability Score
An email deliverability score is a composite metric that estimates the likelihood that emails sent from a given domain or IP address will reach recipients' inboxes rather than being filtered into spam or blocked entirely. It is calculated by analyzing factors including domain reputation, IP reputation, authentication setup, bounce rate, spam complaint rate, and engagement history.
Email Authentication
Email authentication is a set of technical protocols — primarily SPF, DKIM, and DMARC — that verify that an email was legitimately sent from the domain it claims to come from. Proper authentication is required for reliable email deliverability and is a baseline requirement for any outbound sales or marketing email program.
G
Generative AI for Sales
Generative AI for sales refers to the application of large language models (LLMs), image generation models, and video synthesis models to automatically create sales content — including cold emails, personalized scripts, video messages, objection responses, and follow-up sequences — at a speed and scale that human sales teams cannot achieve manually.
Gap Selling
Gap Selling is a sales methodology developed by Keenan (Jim Keenan) that focuses on identifying and widening the gap between a prospect's current state (the problem state) and their desired future state (the solution state). The larger and more painful the gap, the stronger the motivation to buy.
I
Intent Signal
An intent signal is a behavioral data point indicating that a prospect or account is actively researching a problem, solution, or vendor — suggesting they may be in a buying cycle. Sales and marketing teams use intent signals to prioritize outreach to accounts that are most likely to convert in the near term.
Inbound vs Outbound Sales
Inbound sales is the process of converting prospects who have self-identified interest by engaging with your marketing content, website, or ads — while outbound sales is the proactive process of identifying and initiating contact with target prospects regardless of whether they have expressed prior interest. The two approaches represent fundamentally different demand capture versus demand creation strategies.
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a detailed description of the type of company that would derive the most value from your product or service, and in return provide the greatest value to your business through fast sales cycles, high retention, and expansion revenue.
L
Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is the process of assigning numerical values to prospects based on attributes and behaviors that indicate their likelihood of becoming a customer. By ranking leads from highest to lowest potential, sales teams can focus their most personalized outreach on the accounts most likely to convert.
Lead Qualification
Lead qualification is the process of evaluating whether a prospect has sufficient budget, authority, need, and readiness to become a customer, and determining whether they are worth investing sales resources to pursue. Qualified leads are more likely to convert and tend to close faster and at higher values than unqualified opportunities.
Lip-Sync Technology
Lip-sync technology is an industry term covering early-generation AI video systems that take a reference video of a person and adjust the on-screen mouth movements to match a new audio track. It is one of the underlying techniques that made personalized video at scale possible. The category has since evolved into broader AI clone training, where the entire delivery — not just the mouth — is generated for each new script.
Lifetime Value (LTV)
Lifetime value (LTV), also called customer lifetime value (CLV or CLTV), is the total net revenue a business expects to generate from a single customer account over the entire duration of that customer relationship. It is a fundamental metric for evaluating how much it makes sense to invest in acquiring and retaining each customer.
M
Multi-channel Outreach
Multi-channel outreach is a sales strategy that coordinates prospect engagement across two or more communication channels — such as email, phone, LinkedIn, and video — in a structured sequence designed to maximize the likelihood of reaching and engaging a target prospect.
MEDDIC
MEDDIC is a rigorous enterprise sales qualification methodology that evaluates opportunities across six dimensions: Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, and Champion. It is designed for complex B2B sales cycles with multiple stakeholders and high deal values.
Mid-Market Outbound
Mid-market outbound is the discipline of cold outbound sales targeting mid-market companies — typically 100 to 1,000 employees with deal sizes in the $20K to $500K ACV range. Mid-market sits between SMB outbound (high-volume, low-ACV, templated) and enterprise outbound (low-volume, high-ACV, deeply personalized). Mid-market wins on the middle ground: curated lists, research-driven personalization, and reply rate over send volume.
O
Outbound Sales
Outbound sales is the proactive practice of identifying and initiating contact with potential customers who have not previously expressed interest in your product or service. Rather than waiting for leads to come to you, outbound teams research target accounts and reach out through channels like email, phone, LinkedIn, and video.
Open Rate
Open rate is the percentage of delivered email messages that are opened by recipients. In cold sales outreach, it is a primary indicator of whether your subject lines and sender identity are compelling enough to earn attention in a crowded inbox, and a prerequisite metric before reply rate or meeting rate can improve.
P
Personalized Video
Personalized video is video content that is customized for a specific individual viewer, typically incorporating their name, company, role, or other unique data points to make the experience feel directly relevant to them. In sales outreach, personalized videos dramatically outperform generic video messages because they signal genuine attention and effort.
Prospect Engagement
Prospect engagement refers to the measurable interactions a potential customer has with your sales outreach — including opening emails, clicking links, watching videos, replying to messages, or taking meetings. High engagement rates signal that your outreach is resonating and that a prospect is moving toward a buying decision.
Prospecting
Prospecting is the process of identifying, researching, and initiating contact with individuals or organizations that have the potential to become customers. It is the first stage of the sales funnel, occurring before qualification, and forms the foundation of all outbound pipeline generation.
Pipeline Velocity
Pipeline velocity measures the speed at which sales opportunities progress through the pipeline and convert to closed revenue, typically expressed as revenue per unit of time. It captures both the efficiency of the sales process and the quality of the opportunities in the pipeline, making it a comprehensive measure of revenue momentum.
Product-Led Growth (PLG)
Product-led growth (PLG) is a go-to-market strategy in which the product itself — rather than sales or marketing activities — is the primary driver of user acquisition, conversion, retention, and expansion. PLG companies typically offer a free trial or freemium tier that allows users to experience product value before any sales interaction, with revenue conversion happening when users hit usage limits or need enterprise features.
R
Response Rate
Response rate is the percentage of outreach recipients who reply to a sales message — whether by email, phone, LinkedIn, or video. It is one of the most important metrics in outbound sales because it directly measures how effective your outreach is at starting conversations with prospects.
Revenue Intelligence
Revenue intelligence is the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to automatically capture, analyze, and surface insights from sales activity data — emails, calls, meetings, and CRM records — to help revenue teams improve forecast accuracy, identify at-risk deals, and coach reps more effectively.
Recruitment Video Outreach
Recruitment video outreach is the practice of sending personalized video messages to prospective candidates as part of a talent acquisition strategy. Instead of relying on text-based InMails or templated emails, recruiters record or generate short videos that address each candidate by name and reference their specific background, making the outreach feel personal and worth responding to.
Research-Driven Outreach
Research-driven outreach is the practice of running deep, per-prospect research before generating a cold outreach message — and anchoring the message in real intelligence about the prospect's role, company, recent triggers, and public work. It is the opposite of templated personalization, which inserts variables (`{{firstName}}`, `{{company}}`) into a generic message template. Research-driven outreach generates a unique message per prospect that could not have been mass-produced.
S
Sales Development Representative (SDR)
A Sales Development Representative (SDR) is a sales professional focused on the early stages of the sales funnel — identifying target accounts, conducting outreach, and qualifying prospects before passing them to an Account Executive (AE) for demos and closing. SDRs are the engine of outbound pipeline generation.
Sales Automation
Sales automation refers to the use of software to execute repetitive, rules-based sales tasks — such as sending follow-up emails, logging CRM activity, scheduling meetings, and managing outreach sequences — without manual intervention. Automation frees sales professionals to focus on high-judgment activities like discovery, objection handling, and relationship building.
Sales Engagement Platform
A sales engagement platform (SEP) is a software tool that helps revenue teams plan, execute, and measure multi-channel outreach to prospects and customers by orchestrating coordinated sequences of emails, calls, LinkedIn messages, and other touchpoints in an automated cadence.
Sales Cadence
A sales cadence is a predetermined sequence of outreach activities — emails, calls, LinkedIn messages, and video — structured across specific time intervals to systematically engage a prospect until they respond or the sequence concludes. Cadences bring consistency and repeatability to outbound sales by eliminating the guesswork of when and how to follow up.
Sender Reputation
Sender reputation is a score assigned by email service providers to a sending email address and domain based on historical sending behavior, recipient engagement, and spam complaint rates. A high sender reputation means emails are reliably delivered to the inbox; a low reputation results in spam filtering or outright blocking.
Sales Trigger
A sales trigger is a specific, observable event or change at a target company that signals a potential buying opportunity and creates a natural, timely reason to reach out. Common triggers include funding rounds, executive hires, product launches, geographic expansion, and technology changes.
Sales Velocity
Sales velocity is a metric that measures how quickly your sales organization converts pipeline into revenue, calculated by multiplying the number of opportunities, average deal value, and win rate, then dividing by the average sales cycle length. It quantifies the overall efficiency and health of your revenue engine in a single number.
Social Selling
Social selling is the practice of using social media platforms — primarily LinkedIn for B2B — to find, engage, and build relationships with potential customers by sharing relevant content, participating in conversations, and making personalized connection requests rather than launching into a direct sales pitch.
Synthetic Media
Synthetic media refers to content — including video, audio, images, and text — that is generated or significantly manipulated by artificial intelligence rather than captured through traditional recording or photography. In sales and marketing, synthetic media most commonly refers to AI-generated video avatars that can deliver scripted messages in the voice and likeness of a real person without requiring a live recording session.
Signal-Based Selling
Signal-based selling is a prospecting methodology that triggers outreach to prospects based on specific behavioral or event-based signals that indicate heightened buying intent or readiness, such as a new job posting, a funding announcement, a technology installation, a key hire, or engagement with relevant content. Rather than prospecting on a fixed schedule, signal-based selling ensures outreach arrives at the moment of highest relevance.
Sales Territory Mapping
Sales territory mapping is the process of dividing a company's total addressable market into distinct segments — typically assigned to individual sales representatives or teams — to ensure organized, conflict-free market coverage, equitable quota distribution, and efficient use of sales resources. Territories can be defined by geography, industry vertical, company size, named account lists, or any combination of these dimensions.
Sales Forecasting
Sales forecasting is the process of estimating the amount of revenue a sales team will generate over a future time period — typically the current quarter or next quarter — based on the current pipeline, historical close rates, deal stage probabilities, and sales activity levels. An accurate sales forecast is essential for business planning, resource allocation, hiring decisions, and investor communication.
SPIN Selling
SPIN Selling is a sales methodology developed by Neil Rackham based on research across 35,000 sales calls. It structures discovery conversations around four question types — Situation, Problem, Implication, and Need-Payoff — to help prospects articulate their own need and the value of solving it.
Solution Selling
Solution selling is a sales methodology that shifts the focus from product features to diagnosing the prospect's unique business problem and positioning the seller's offering as the tailored solution to that specific pain. Rather than leading with what a product does, solution selling starts with what the customer needs.
Sandler Selling System
The Sandler Selling System is a sales methodology developed by David Sandler in 1967 that emphasizes qualifying out poor-fit prospects early, building equal business stature with buyers, and structuring every interaction through a systematic seven-step process rather than relying on traditional high-pressure closing tactics.
Sales Champion
A sales champion is a stakeholder within a prospect's organization who believes in your solution, has internal influence, and actively advocates for your product to the decision-makers and buying committee on your behalf. Champions are distinct from economic buyers — they may not hold budget authority but are essential to navigating complex deals.
Sales Enablement
Sales enablement is the ongoing process of providing sales teams with the resources, content, training, and technology they need to effectively engage buyers at every stage of the sales cycle and close more deals. It bridges the gap between product, marketing, and sales to ensure reps are equipped to have the right conversation at the right time.
Sales Pipeline
A sales pipeline is a structured visual representation of all active sales opportunities, organized by the stages of the sales process from initial contact to closed deal. It gives sales teams and leadership a real-time view of revenue in progress and helps prioritize where to focus effort.
Sales Funnel
A sales funnel is a conceptual framework that models the progressive stages a prospect moves through on the journey from initial awareness of your product to becoming a paying customer, with the population narrowing at each stage as some prospects drop out and others advance.
SPF Record
An SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record is a DNS TXT record that specifies which mail servers and IP addresses are authorized to send email on behalf of a domain. When a receiving mail server gets an email, it checks the sending domain's SPF record to verify the email came from an authorized source.
T
Text-to-Speech (TTS)
Text-to-speech (TTS) is a type of speech synthesis technology that converts written text into natural-sounding spoken audio using artificial intelligence and neural network models. In the context of sales and video personalization, TTS enables AI avatars to speak any script in a cloned human voice without the original person needing to re-record for each new message.
Target Account List (TAL)
A target account list (TAL) is a curated, prioritized list of specific companies that a sales team has determined are the best-fit prospects for their product or service, based on firmographic criteria, intent signals, technographic data, and strategic value. The TAL serves as the operational foundation for account-based selling and marketing programs, defining where concentrated resources are directed.
Total Addressable Market (TAM)
Total Addressable Market (TAM) is the total revenue opportunity that exists for a product or service if it achieved 100% market share across all potential customers in its target market. TAM is used to communicate market size, prioritize segments, and justify growth investment.
V
Video Prospecting
Video prospecting is the practice of sending short, personalized video messages to potential customers as part of a sales outreach strategy. Instead of a text-only email, reps record a brief video addressing the prospect by name and referencing their specific situation to capture attention and drive replies.
Video Email
Video email is an outreach approach in which a short video — typically featuring a person speaking directly to the recipient — is embedded as a clickable thumbnail in an email message. When the recipient clicks the thumbnail, they are taken to a hosted video page where the full video plays, creating a more personal and engaging experience than text alone.
Frequently asked questions
What is a sales glossary?
A sales glossary is a reference guide that defines key terminology used in sales, outreach, and revenue operations. It helps teams speak the same language and onboard new reps faster.
Why should sales teams learn these terms?
Understanding sales terminology reduces miscommunication, speeds up coaching, and helps reps adopt new strategies like AI video outreach and signal-based selling more effectively.
How does AI change modern sales terminology?
AI has introduced concepts like synthetic media, conversational intelligence, and AI SDRs into the sales lexicon. Staying current with these terms helps teams evaluate and adopt new tools confidently.
What's the difference between an SDR and a BDR?
An SDR (Sales Development Rep) typically qualifies inbound leads, while a BDR (Business Development Rep) focuses on outbound prospecting. In practice, many companies use the titles interchangeably.
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