B2B Lead Generation – Terms & Definitions

ABC: Acronym for  “always be closing”. A “motivational” phrase used to describe a sales strategy about how a salesperson should always look for new prospects to pitch their products or services to, and to ultimately complete a sale.

ABM: Acronym for account-based marketing. ABM concentrates resources on a set of target accounts within a market and creates personalized campaigns designed to engage each account.

A/B Testing: A/B testing is randomized testing done between two or more variables to determine which variable performs better. Also known as Split Testing.

Account Executive: A sales specialist whose responsibility includes nurturing and growing the company’s relationships with house accounts. They may also be responsible for converting qualified leads into paying customers.

Accurate Leads: Highly-accurate, triple-verified, business email contacts from Reach Marketing.

Analytics: Analytics is the active study of different types of data with the aim of discovering meaningful patterns and translating these into insight (such as historical analyses and forecasts), or action (such as those intended to improve business performance).

AIDA: Acronym for Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action. The AIDA model represents the stages a customer goes through in the buying journey.

Appointment Leads: High-quality leads from Reach Marketing that are currently engaging with content related to your products and services.

Artificial Intelligence (AI): Intelligence demonstrated by machines. In marketing, AI tools use data to learn how to best communicate with customers, then serve them tailored messages.

Asset:  This is content that includes brochures, webinars, videos, tutorials, guides, e-books, reports, infographics etc. used to educate customers and prospects.

Authority Marketing: Positioning a person or an organization as the leader and expert in their industry, community, and marketplace to command influence over all competitors.

B2B:  Acronym for Business-to-Business.

B2B Lead Generation: The process of identifying ideal business customers for your product or service and then attracting them to buy your product and services.

B2B Multi-Channel Prospecting Database: A list comprised of postal, email and telemarketing records of decision-makers qualified on the basis of certain criteria like target industry, employee size, job title, geographic location etc.

B2B Sales Lead: A potential business consumer of your company’s product or service who have expressed interest in your offerings and shared contact information.

B2C: Acronym for Business-to-Consumer.

BANT: Acronym for Budget, Authority, Need, and Time.  A method for qualifying probable sales prospects. You want to talk to qualified leads who have the budget, authority, need, and time for your product or service.Blog: An online place to post about a wide range of topics about your organization, products, and services. Blogging helps SEO and brings in website traffic and lead generation.

BOFU: Bottom of the funnel is the final stage in the buyer’s journey where they are making the final decision to buy from you or a competitor.  This is where you convert prospects into customers.

Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors who land on a page of your website or a landing page without navigating further or clicking on anything. A high bounce rate generally results in poor conversion and indicates that your content needs to be reworked.

Brand Ecosystem: The entire community such as employees, customers suppliers, influencers etc., that contributes to your brand.

Brand Recognition: How familiar your brand name is to consumers.

Business Intelligence (BI): The interpretation of data to inform product and market decisions.

Business Email Lists: A B2B marketing list that includes email contact information for business decision makers.

Business Lead: A person who is interested in the product or service you sell.

Business Mailing Lists: A B2B marketing list that includes postal contact information for business decision makers.

Buyer Persona: A buyer persona is a detailed description of someone who represents your target audience. It is a fictional customer, not a real one, and it has a name, demographic details, interests, and behavioral traits.

Buying Intent: The apparent likelihood of a person or organization purchasing a product or service inferred from behavior such as online searching, document downloads, or event participation.

Buying Signal: These indicate your prospects are ready to buy.

Buzz: The excited chatter around your brand.

CAC: Acronym for Cost of Customer Acquisition. The total cost of acquiring a new customer. It can be calculated by dividing all the sales and marketing expenses by the number of customers acquired.

Cadence: A sales cadence is the sequence of actions taken to close a sale with a prospect. It includes every contact attempt a salesperson makes with a prospect, including emails, phone calls, voicemails, and social media interactions.

Call Blitz: A focused full day of calling prospects and/or customers from a targeted list with a specific offer and short-term goal(s).

Call Cadence: Rules of engagement a salesperson follows when calling a prospect on the phone such as how often to call, what to do if no one answers, and how to track results.

Call for Proposal:The process by which a company asks for something to be sold to them. Competitors usually compete to win the client’s business. Also called RFP (Request for Proposal)

Case Study: A customer’s story that explains the details of a problem they were facing, how they tackled this problem and finally, the results they received. Popularly used by marketers to showcase their products and services through a real-life experience.

Conversion rate: The percentage of people who complete a desired action. For example, if 1,000 people arrive on a landing page and 100 people fill out the form, the landing page has a 10% conversion rate.

Champion/Challenger Test: A testing approach to determine the best engagement strategy for a given market segment, wherein the Champion represents your current production/servicing paradigm and the Challenger(s) represent new or different approaches.

Churn: A term that describes the percentage of customers that leave or cancel a service or product within a specific time period. To calculate your churn rate, perform the following equation: (customers beginning of the month – customers end of the month) / customers beginning of the month = churn rate.

Closed Opportunities: A general term encompassing closed-won and closed-lost opportunities. Closed Won is the status of an opportunity where the sale is secured, and a transaction takes place. Closed Lost is when a deal closes without the prospect converting into a buyer.

Closing Ratio: A measure of a salesperson’s efficiency calculated by dividing the number of closed deals by the number of prospects the salesperson worked with.

CLV: Acronym for Customer Lifetime Value. The total worth of a customer over the period of the relationship. To determine, calculate the average purchase value, and then multiply that number by the average purchase frequency rate to get customer value. Then, once you calculate average customer lifespan, you can multiply that by customer value to determine customer lifetime value.

CMS: Acronym for Content Management System which is a tool that can be used to design, manage, and publish a website. Word Press for example.

Cold Call: Phone call or personal visit that engages a prospect who has no prior knowledge about or contact with the salesperson or organization. making the call.

Cold Email: Email that engages a prospect who has no prior knowledge about or contact with the salesperson or organization sending the email.

Consultation: A session given by the seller to a prospect to understand their pain points and then propose how their product/service can fix those pain points.

Consumer: Person or entity who consumes a product or service.

Conversion Path: The steps taken by a user of a website towards a conversion. It starts from when the user arrives on the website and ends at conversion.

Conversion rate: The percentage of people who complete a desired action. For example, if 1,000 people arrive on a landing page and 100 people fill out the form, the landing page has a 10% conversion rate.

CPL: Acronym for Cost Per Lead. The amount it costs to acquire a lead.

CRM: Acronym for Customer Relationship Management. A system, set of practices, and associated technologies used to record, manage, and analyze customer data and interactions, with the aim of improving customer engagement and revenue.

CRM Hygiene: The process of deleting or updating contact information to maintain clean data.

CRO: Acronym for Conversion Rate Optimization. The process of improving conversions on site or landing pages by conducting A/B tests or deploying optimizing techniques.

Cross-selling: When a customer purchases a product, and they are offered a second product at a discount or as a reward.

CTA: Acronym for Call-To-Action. A button or a link that literally ‘calls out’ or prompts the user to take an ‘action’. A good CTA is one that clearly states the value proposition.

CTR: Acronym for Click-Through Rate. The percentage of people that have clicked on a link in your email, ad, website, or post. The formula is total number of clicks divided by total number of times the link was viewed.

Customer: An individual or an organization that purchases a product or a service offered by a business. Also called a Client.

Data: A set of quantitative and qualitative facts that can be used as reference or inputs for computations, analyses, descriptions, predictions, reasoning, and planning.

Data Append: A process that involves adding new data elements to an existing database like email addresses.

Database: Any collection of data organized for storage, accessibility, and retrieval.

Data Enrichment: The act or process of upgrading the value or improving the quality of data. These can be things like company size, headquarter location, annual revenue, etc.

Data Hygiene: The collective processes conducted to ensure data is clean and accurate.

Data Warehouse: A type of database that stores historical and commutative data from single or multiple sources.

Data Quality: A measure of the condition of data based on factors such as accuracy, completeness, consistency, reliability and whether it’s current.

Deal Closing (or Closing a Deal): The process of completing a sales transaction wherein the prospect agrees to purchase a product or sign up for a service.

Decision Maker: A person with purchase power who is in charge of the final decision of acquiring a product or service.

De-dupe (de-duplicate): The process of eliminating duplicate data such as records, accounts, contact details and other information.

Demand Generation: A marketing process used by businesses that aims to build awareness and excitement about a company’s products and services.

Demographics: Categorization of prospects according to variables such as children present, household income and gender.

Design: Visual content created to communicate messages.

Direct Mail: A marketing channel that involves sending a physical piece of promotional material through the U.S. Postal Service or other courier service to a home or business.

Direct Sales: The method of selling a product or service directly to consumers in a non-retail setting such as the home, work, online, or other non-store locations.

Discovery Call: A call with a lead in which the goal is to either qualify a prospect (discover a pain point your product or solution can fix) and deem a sales opportunity or disqualify them.

Drip Marketing Campaigns: An automated set of emails that are sent out over a specific period of time. The purpose is to engage with leads and push them onto the next stages of the purchase funnel.

Facebook: An online social networking website where people can create profiles and share information. Marketers use Facebook to do targeted advertising to create brand awareness and attract new leads.

Feature: Describes a fact or characteristic about a product or service.

Firmographic: Firmographics is a set of descriptive attributes such as job function, job title, or company size, used to aggregate individual firms into meaningful market segments.

Follow Up: Reaching back out to a prospect after the first contact.

Forecasting: The process of estimating future sales.

Gated Content: Downloadable content like whitepapers, e-books, case studies, guides, and reports, which usually requires the user to fill out a form in order to download the content. It can also be non-downloadable like free consultations, product demos, free trials etc.

Gatekeeper: A person who is responsible for keeping a prospect from being bothered by irrelevant callers.

Guides: A lead magnet featuring educational content which can move prospects further in the purchase funnel.

Hard bounce: An email that has bounced back to the sender. The recipient’s mail server did not accept it.

High-Conversion Leads: Prospects that are actively searching for the products and services that you provide offered through Reach Marketing.

Horizontal Market: A market in which a product or service meets a need of a wide range of buyers across different sectors of an economy.

Ideal Customer Profile: A type of customer who possesses all the desirable attributes (such as gender, age, location, financial capacity, lifestyle, etc.) that best fit the solutions your company offers.

Inbound: Interest that comes in – for example, cold emails to you, form submittals from your website, cold phone calls to you, etc.

Inbound Marketing: A business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them such as content marketing, search engine optimization, social media, and more.

blogs, social media platforms, and search engines. It is based on pull strategy used by marketers to create brand awareness.

Inbound Sales: A process, method or transaction wherein purchases occur as a result of customers directly approaching, engaging, and embracing your brand.

Industry: A branch of an economy that produces a closely related set of raw materials, goods, or services.

Influencer: A person with power to sway people that follow him/her to take specified action.

Interactive Content: Content and tools like calculators, quizzes, and online surveys that provide an interactive, two-way communication and convert better than passive content.

InMail Messages: Introductory emails that are sent to another LinkedIn member you’re currently not connected with.

Inside Sales Rep: A salesperson who conducts most sales processes remotely via the phone or online.

Keywords:  A targeted search phrase that internet users type in a search engine.

KPIs: Acronym for Key Performance Indicators. Help marketers keep track of performance. They evaluate their performance against standard metrics such as customer acquisition cost, customer conversion ratio, landing page conversion rate etc.

Landing Page: A web page that has one goal – pushing people to take a certain action. Usually, it contains a lead capture form or a clickthrough button which helps marketers capture visitor information.

Lead: A prospect (can be an individual or organization) that exhibits interest in your service or product.

Lead Generation: The marketing process of stimulating and capturing interest in a product or service for the purpose of developing a sales pipeline.

Lead Capture Form:  What visitors fill in to give their contact information and gain something in return.

Lead Conversion:  The process of converting a lead into an account, contact, and/or opportunity.

Lead Magnet: An irresistible offer that helps convert visitors to leads. In exchange they provide contact info.

Lead Management: The process of tracking and managing leads right from the first stage of them entering the marketing funnel.

Lead Nurturing: The process of engaging and building long-term relationships with prospective customers through different marketing techniques that develop their preference for your product and services.

Lead Qualification: The process of determining whether a potential customer has the characteristics of your company’s ideal client.

Lead Segmentation: The process of grouping leads based on common characteristics like website behavior, geographical location, and demographics.

Lead Scoring: The process of assigning a relative value to each lead based on different criteria, with the aim of ranking leads in terms of engagement priority.

Lead to Customer Rate: This is a percentage calculated by dividing the total number of customers for a given marketing channel by the total number of leads generated in that same period of time.

Lifecycle Marketing: A high-level approach to personalized customer communications, based on recognizing that different marketing messages and strategies work best for customers at different stages of their buying journey with a brand.

LinkedIn: A social networking site or business professionals that is popular with those who want to grow their professional network.

Live Chat:  A real-time, faster resolution of queries which results in better user experience and also helps in lead generation.

Marketing: Activities a company undertakes to promote the buying or selling of a product, service, or good.

Marketing Automation:  Marketing automation is technology that automatically manages marketing processes and multifunctional campaigns, across multiple channels.

Marketing Funnel: The stages of the customer journey all the way from the top of the funnel (when they first learn about your business) to the bottom of the funnel (when they are ready to buy your product or service).

Marketing Offer: A complimentary product or service of value you give in exchange for people completing a call to action. Examples include e-books, whitepapers, webinars, podcasts, and videos.

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): Leads that have been identified as more deeply engaged contacts than your usual leads, but who have not yet become fully fledged opportunities.

Marketing Segmentation: The process of dividing a market of potential customers into groups, or segments.

Messaging: The process of communicating your brand’s value proposition, the benefits you offer, and the perceived meaning of such communication among your target audience.

Mid-Market: A classification of business organizations in terms of scale (revenue, number of employees, etc.), occupying the segment between the small companies and large multinational enterprises serving the same market.

Mobile Optimization: Designing and optimizing a website, blog or landing pages to make it easy to navigate from a mobile device.

MOFU: Acronym for Middle Of Funnel. The second stage of the sales process that leads will go through in their journey towards becoming a paying customer. The prospect conducts further research for more information about a solution to their problem.

Nurturing Leads: Process of developing relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel, and through every step of the buyer’s journey.

Net New Business:A prospect that converts into a paying customer or an existing account that is reactivated as a revenue-generating account after being dormant for a long time.

Pain Point: Specific problems that prospective customers of your business are experiencing, usually this comes in the context of how your product or service can help solve the problems.

Persona: Fictional representation of your potential customers based on market research and data.

Personalization: Strategy by which companies leverage data analysis and digital technology to deliver individualized messages and product offerings to prospects and customers.

Pipeline: A set of stages that a prospect moves through, as they progress from a new lead to a customer.

Point of Contact (POC): The person representing an entity, usually tasked to facilitate decision-making and coordinate the flow of information to and from the entity.

Positioning Statement: Used by sales reps at the beginning of a sales call to engage a prospect and focus on their pain points.

PPC: Acronym for Pay-per-click. A marketing effort wherein advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked and traffic is diverted to a website or a landing page.

Predictive Analytics: Encompasses a variety of statistical techniques that use historical data, statistical models, emerging trends, and other information to formulate an informed forecast about the future typically concerning performance and growth of a business.

Product: Object or system made available for consumer use.

Product email: An email regarding information about your product.

Product Lifecycle Management (PLM): The process of managing a service or product across its entire lifecycle — development and introduction, growth, maturity/stability, and decline.

Product Qualified Lead (PQL): A potential customer who meets a set of predefined criteria and has used a benchmark product(s), indicating a relatively higher likelihood of making a purchase.

Prospect: Potential client who resembles your ideal customer profile but has not yet expressed interest in your product or service.

Prospecting: First step in the sales process, which consists of identifying potential customers, aka prospects.

Purchase Intent: The likelihood that a consumer will buy a product or service.

Qualified Business Lead: A prospect created by the marketing department that has been vetted by a salesperson.

Quota: A sales target that sales reps are required to reach within a specific period.

ReachBase: With more than 72 million unique, accurate records, ReachBase is the largest, most responsive prospecting database in the industry today. The multi-sourced, multi-channel system spans a vast array of influential professionals and decision-makers, including C-level executives, technology thought leaders, financial advisors, architects, engineering contractors, healthcare professionals, marketing managers, supervisors and more across all industries. With detailed firmographic data on individuals and extensive company profiles, the database encompasses everything from single-owner businesses to large corporations.

Referral: The act of generating sales leads wherein a third party shares information about a new prospect.

Responsive Design: Website design that responds to any device size and orientation.

Revenue: The amount of money a business generates during a specific period; also called sales.

ROI: Acronym for Return on Investment. The results gained for your dollars spent.A performance metric that evaluates the profitability of an investment. The formula to calculate ROI = ( investment return –  investment made / Investment).

Sales: The activities that lead to the selling of products or services.

Sales and Marketing Alignment: Collaboration between the sales and marketing team to direct their efforts at the same prospects and be completely aligned on decisions and pricing, resulting in better coordination and higher conversions.

Salesforce Administrator: An individual tasked to operate and maintain the Salesforce CRM.

Sales Cycle: A repeating process characterized by a predictable sequence of stages that a company undergoes as it sells its products and services to customers.

Sales Director: Sales Director is a senior-level executive who oversees an organization’s sales operations.

Sales Funnel: The progression that your company tracks while generating, qualifying, and closing leads throughout the sales and marketing lifecycle.

Awareness & Discovery also known as the top of the funnel or TOFU,

Interest & Engagement also known as the middle of the funnel or MOFU, and

Decision & Purchase also known as the bottom of the funnel or BOFU.

Sales Lead: A potential consumer of your company’s product or service who have expressed interest in your offerings and shared contact information.

Sales Manager: Sales Manager is an executive who leads a sales unit, team or department by setting goals and meeting targets, formulating plans and policies, designating tasks, and developing salespeople.

Salesperson:  Individual who sells goods and services to other entities.

Sales Pipeline: A visualization showing the status of each sales prospect in the customer life cycle or sales process.

Sales Prospecting: The process of finding and qualifying potential buyers or clients through marketing.

Sales Qualified Lead (SQL): Leads that your sales team has accepted as worthy of a direct sales follow up. They are people who are ready to buy.

Sales Signals:  Indications your prospects are ready to buy.

Segmentation: The process of subdividing a large market into distinct partitions based on demographics and other factors.

SEM: Acronym for Search Engine Marketing. The act of using paid advertisements to  increase search visibility. Advertisers bid on keywords that users of search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing might enter when searching for certain products or services, which gives the advertiser the opportunity for their ads to appear alongside results for those search queries. Also known as Pay Per Click.

SEO:  Acronym for Search Engine Optimization.  A means of improving a website’s visibility on search engine results.

Siloed: An organization whose units, teams or departments lack collaboration, coordination, or synergy because they are run and managed as separate and exclusive “silos”.

Small & Mid-Size Business (SMB): A business organization that straddles the middle of the scale between an office/home office (SOHO) and large enterprises, having fewer than 100 employees while a mid-sized business has 100-999 workers.

Social Media: Computer-based technology that allows for the sharing of ideas, thoughts, and information through the building of virtual networks and communities.

Soft Bounce: An email message that does reach the recipient’s mail servers but bounces back undelivered either because the recipient’s inbox was full or the server was unavailable.

Solution: A combination of strategies, processes, ideas, technologies, and services that helps an organization achieve its goals or hurdle its challenges.

Structured Data: Highly organized information that can easily be added into, managed, and searched for in a database.

Subject Line: The introduction that identifies tan email’s intent displayed to the email recipient when they look in their inbox at their list of messages.

Subscriber: People who have opted in to receive information from you periodically.

Target Market: A specific group or subset of potential consumers a company plans to sell its product to.

Template: A generic file showing the standard sections or features of a specific document, used to create a new document of the same type.

TOFU: Acronym for Top of the Funnel. The top and largest portion of a sales or marketing funnel where prospects enter a screening process until only the leads most inclined to purchase are left. These prospects (raw leads) have shown initial interest in a service or product as a result of inbound marketing and outbound marketing.

Touch / Touchpoint: Touches are milestones or points of contact used to measure the marketing effort it takes to transform a prospect into a viable, qualified lead.

Triggers: A set of signals or occurrences that meet certain criteria to be considered an opportunity to make a sale.  It is also an event that stimulates another event such as a visitor signs up on your landing page which triggers an automated email with more information.

Twitter: Twitter is a social network that allows the sharing of links, images and videos as well as the publishing of short posts called tweets.

Upselling: A selling technique where a seller introduces a more expensive, an upgrade, or add-on to a buyer to increase the average order value.

URL: Acronym for Uniform Resource Locator. The address of a given unique resource on the Web.

Unsubscribe: In email marketing, to unsubscribe means to remove your email address from a company’s mailing list so as not to receive any further communication.

Use Case: Description of a particular situation in which a product or service could potentially be used.

User: In marketing, the one who has the authority to consume a good or service.

User Experience: Overall experience of a visitor on an app, a web page, or a landing page.

Value proposition: The unique value you provide which makes you irresistible to your target audience that differentiates yourself from the competitors.

Value Statement: An official declaration that informs the customers and staff of an organization about the company’s top priorities and its core beliefs.

Velocity:  The measurement of how fast deals move through your pipeline and generate revenue.

Vertical: A market where a business targets only a small subset of customers such as a specific industry, sector, profession, or niche.

Viral Content: Any piece of content that gains immense popularity on the internet and shared by people in huge numbers.

Visitor:  A web searcher who lands on your website.

Warm Call: The process of calling or visiting a sales prospect with whom the sales professional has had a prior contact such as during an event or via a referral.

Warm Email: The process of emailing a sales prospect with whom the sales professional has had a prior contact such as during an event or via a referral.

Webinar: A seminar or course conducted over the internet.

WordPress: The number one Content Management System (CMS) used by websites around the world.

Workflow:  In marketing, a workflow is a series of triggers and actions that facilitate the movement of a lead or prospect from one stage of the buying cycle to another.

YouTube: A video-sharing site where users can view, upload and share videos.