The Ultimate Sales Key Terms List That Every Sales Person Should Be Familiar With

Sales is not easy. Learning sales can be overwhelming. Here’s a long list of sales key terms that every sales person should know off the top of their head. Speak the sales language!

Take this as a guidebook and reference page! Hope this helps with the sales lingo.

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1. Annual Recurring Revenue — Annual Recurring Revenue is a measure of the predicable and recurring revenue components of recurring revenue stream such as subscriptions or maintenance. Annual Recurring Revenue always excludes one-time fees and for most organizations, would exclude variable, usage, and consumption fees.

2. Account — Typically in Business to Business sales relationships, an account is the customer or buyer. Accounts can be
categorized based on business size, revenue, or size of account. Usually this is handled by an account manager in sales. It’s one of the most used sales key terms.

3. Active Listening — Active listening is one of the most important things that a sales professional needs to learn how to do. This involves actively listening to your customer’s pain point and explaining how your product can help them solve it. A key to active listening is asking questions that will ensure clarity and full understanding of the customer’s needs.

4. B2B — Business to Business. This term is usually used when the product or service is being sold to another business. So if you are selling software to other businesses, then you are conducting a b2b business.

5. B2C — Business To Consumer. This term is referred to business that sells to consumer. For example if you are running an ecommerce sites that sells products to the regular consumer, then you are running a B2C business. It’s one of the most used sales key terms.

6. Buying Signal — Extremely important part of the sales key terms list. This is something all lead generation solution should use to qualify whether the prospect is a targeted lead. It’s a way to identify whether or not the prospect is a good fit for your product and have the intention to purchase it.

7. Canvassing — Commonly thought of as door-to-door sales,however, it has become synonymous to cold
calling. Canvassing implies an unscheduled solicitation to a business or home in order to arrange an appointment, gather information, or pitch an offering.

8. Closed deal — One of the most used sales key terms. Means that the deal is finished and the customer has paid. It’s a closed deal!

9. Cold Calling — Some people argue that this method of sales is dead. Cold calling involves sales calling random prospects on the phone unexpectedly and trying to tell them about the product.

10. Cold Lead — A cold lead is a newly generated lead that has not been contacted by a company before. Cold leads generally have no knowledge of the business at hand or its practices. Cold leads are generally the hardest and most time consuming to convert into a prospect.

11. Collaborative Selling — In a collaborative selling approach, there is a partnering mentality between customer and supplier. Both organizations realize that their longer term success is predicated on both of them staying in business — and this means that supplier needs matter too.

12. Churn — Churn is a measure of the clients, contracts, or renewals you lose. Churn is sometimes presented as an absolute or normalized (MRR) measure of lost business, that is the value of the business not renewed. Frequently, churn is expressed as a “rate” and is a measure of revenue, customer, or bookings losses relative to the total value of all the value if all customers had renewed.

13. Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue — Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue is the value of recurring portion of subscription revenue. For term-based subscription businesses, this is the portion of subscription revenue that is recognized each month. It excludes revenues that are not recurring even if such revenues are on a revenue recognition schedule.

14. Consultative Selling — A selling technique that involves increased collaboration and input between the buyer and seller. This process is aimed at gaining more information from the buyer in order to fully meet their needs.

15. Customer Lifetime Value — If you are selling a SaaS product, then it is one of the sales key terms that you should be familiar with. It’s mainly used in marketing, but sales should be familiar with this metric too. Customer lifetime value (CLV) (or often CLTV), lifetime customer value (LCV), or user lifetime value (LTV) is a prediction of the net profit attributed to the entire future relationship with a customer.

16. CRM — Customer Relationship Management refers to a software that is used for you to manage your customer base. This software should allow you to manage your leads, your current accounts, and any other possible customers. CRM systems have become a necessity for modern organizations as they allow companies of any size to effectively plan and automate their sales strategies through the management of prospects and customer details, contacts, sales history, and customer development. CRMs can be complex or simple. One of the best one in the field is Salesforce.

17. Decision Maker — Another one of the most used sales key terms. This is the person in a company that can make a decision whether or not they want to purchase your product.

18. Demo — A demo is a presentation of your product and most software demos can now be conducted on video softwares like join.me instead of actual in person demos.

19. Differentiator — A differentiator is similar to a unique selling proposition. It is a feature of a product or brand that sets your company apart from the competitor’s products or brands.

20. Deferred Revenue — Deferred revenue is equal to the value of invoices to date over the recognizable revenue to date calculated by customer contract and then aggregated and reported in summary form. Because deferred revenue is a balance sheet item, it is always calculated at a point in time.

21. Elevator Pitch — A brief explanation or description of an organization usually under 90 seconds, or its services or products offered. This term was created because people believe that you should be able to make a quick pitch to the decision maker in an elevator.

22. Gatekeeper — The person responsible for vetting sales calls or pitches for the decision maker, or keeping the
decision maker free from the bother of irrelevant inquiries. Usually you have to get past gate keepers to reach the decision makers.

23. Influencer — A person in an organization who has the power to persuade and influence a decision maker.
Influencers may also be a decision maker themselves for low value sales. Another person that could be a great influencers are evangelist that talk about your product niche a lot.

24. Lead — Everyone lives off leads and this is what we provide for our customers here at Inspire Beats. Qualified Leads! It is usually defined as a person or prospect that has an intention to purchase your product.

25. Lead Conversion — Lead conversion is a product of lead generation and lead scoring. When a lead is pursued by the marketing team through a campaign or strategy, once the marketing team has solicited a response or has observed enough activity by the lead to assign them a good lead score, a sales representative will reach out to the lead. Once a meeting time has been achieved, the lead will be converted from the lead funnel to the opportunity pipeline.

26. Lead Funnel — The process of diagramming the stages a lead goes through by defining different levels that qualify one lead over another. The Sales and Marketing departments must work together to define their perfect lead and then create a funnel comprised of qualified leads. Most lead funnels will be comprised of 4 or 5 tiers of differently qualified leads.

27. Lead Generation — Methods or strategy used to gain interest or inquiry from the consumer for the service or product offered by an organization. This could involve creating webinars with opt in forms, using paid ads or outsourcing to a lead generation service like Inspire Beats.

28. Life Cycle Renewal Rate — The Life Cycle Renewal Rate Curve is the plot of the renewal rates throughout the customer contract life cycle for a like group of contracts.

29. Lead Scoring — Usually lead scoring is handled by an “inbound rep”. They would usually look and research into each lead that comes in and score them based on their status, company size, buying intention etc.

30. Lead Management — A B2B marketing strategy focused on generating revenue that begins when a Salesperson has
identified an initial interest from a prospect. Once this interest has been identified, the focus shifts to
growing the relationship and knowledge of the lead through things like Webinars, White Pages, and marketing automation to keep the relationship relevant.

31. Lead Qualification — A method or strategy in which leads are evaluated for likeliness of conversion based on a set of predetermined criteria. In order to qualify a lead, employment and organizational information is needed. Usually in this process you would want to determine a buying signal.

32. Lead Time — The period of time between ordering and delivery of a product or service.

33. Market Segment — A group of people or companies that share one or more characteristic. Each market segment is unique and may require a different sales approach.

34. Mirror- A technique used in sales to build rapport and comfortability with a client by mirroring their physical and verbal behaviors. This can be both phone calls or emails and should be widely used by all sales teams.

35. Monthly Recurring Revenue — The general concept is that Monthly Recurring Revenue is a measure of the predicable and recurring revenue components of your subscription business. It will typically exclude one-time and variable fees, but for month-to-month businesses could include such items. Bread and butter to any saas or sales key terms list.

36. New Bookings — New Bookings typically refers to the portion of bookings attributed to new customers, or more specifically new contracts with new or existing customers.

37. Onboarding — On boarding is the process of taking on a new client. This is usually the part when all the sales paperwork is finished and you are “onboarding” the customer to your platform so they know how to use it.

38. Partnership Selling — An approach to selling, where the seller truly collaborates with the buyer and buying organization to help the buyer come up with the best solution. This usually involves custom packages.

39. Pipeline Management — This pertains to the sales pipeline or opportunity pipeline of a business. Pipeline management is a
useful tool that shows the number of deals in a pipeline, the average size of the deals, and the average number of deals that successfully make it through the pipeline (lead to customer conversion rate). This gives businesses the ability and knowledge to project revenues for future quarters based on averages and ratios of past opportunities.

40. Positioning — Identifying and attempting to occupy a market niche for a brand, product or service. Positioning involves creating an image in the customers mind that’s distinguishable from the competitor.

41. Profit Margin — The measure of how much out of every dollar of sales a company actually keeps in earnings. In other words, how much do you make.

42. Quota — This is what sales people live on. Out of all the sales key terms that you should know, this is one of the most important. Knock out those quotas and always be closing! A target set by the company to determine how much the sales team is expected to sell in the given time period. (Week, Month, Quarter, Year).

43. Referral — The best type of leads are referral leads. A referral is a prospect or lead provided to the salesperson by a third party who is familiar with the potential customer. Leverage referrals to make your sales more warm!

44. Renewal Bookings — Renewal Bookings typically refers to the portion of bookings attributed to existing contracts.

45. Sales Cycle — A cycle that begins at the first contact with a customer and ends when the sale occurs. Sales Cycle times can vary greatly based on the size of the deal, the company, effectiveness and efficiency of sales process, and many other variables.

46. Sales Forecast — A prediction of expected output of the sales department based on analysis of sales data from past periods or quarters. Utilizing your opportunity pipeline is a very useful way to gain an accurate sales forecast.

47. Sales Process — A series of well understood basic steps that are utilized in the selling process. A sales process is a measurable process that can always be added to and improved upon.

48. Total Contract Value — The Total Contract Value (CV and some times TCV) metric summarizes the contractual value of fully executed term contracts.

Booom! That’s a lot of info right there :) If you’re tired of sales leads that don’t convert or outdated sales data, then reach out to GrowthOK