One word for every part of the business

The terms a company runs on, each defined once. Your team, your fractionals and your agents read the same definition, so a decision means the same thing to everyone who acts on it.

A

  • A/B testing

    Showing two versions of one thing to separate, random slices of an audience, and judging which wins on a number that matters.

  • Above the fold

    Above the fold is the part of a page a visitor sees the instant it loads, before any scrolling, where a first impression is made or lost.

  • Accountability Chart

    A one-page map of the seats a company needs, the handful of outcomes each seat owns, and who currently holds it.

  • Accounts Receivable

    Accounts receivable is the money customers owe a business for goods or services already delivered but not yet paid for.

  • Acquihire

    An acquisition made mainly to bring on the target company's team, not to buy its product or its revenue.

  • Activation rate

    The share of new leads that show enough interest or fit to be worth chasing, activated leads divided by total new leads.

  • Activity tracking

    Logging the specific actions people take, a click, a page view, an email opened, a feature used, so what moves a deal forward is visible.

  • Agent evals

    Agent evals are the tests that score whether an AI agent's outputs are actually right, against known-good answers or real outcomes, rather than trusting that they look right.

  • Agentic Operations

    Running parts of a company with AI agents that take real actions, pulling data, drafting outputs, updating records, not only answering questions.

  • Agentic org chart

    A company map where AI agents, not people, hold the operational seats, with the founder directing rather than doing the work.

  • Agentic workflow

    A process where an AI agent decides its own steps to reach a goal, rather than following one fixed script.

  • Aha Moment

    The aha moment is the point in a new user's first experience where they see, for themselves, the value a product actually delivers.

  • AI Citation

    An AI citation is the moment an answer engine names a site as the source for something it tells a user, usually as a link or footnote beside its generated answer.

  • AI coding agent

    A model that acts inside your codebase, reading files, running commands and editing across a project, rather than only suggesting a line of code.

  • AI harness

    The tools, context, rules and memory built around an AI model that turn it from a chat box into a system reliable enough to run in production.

  • AI Note-Taker

    An AI note-taker is a tool that joins a call, transcribes it and produces a structured summary with action items automatically.

  • AI Overview

    An AI Overview is the AI-generated summary Google places at the top of many search results, answering the query directly and citing a few sources before the ordinary links begin.

  • AI SDR

    An AI SDR is software that prospects, personalises outreach and books meetings in place of a human sales development rep.

  • AIDA

    A four-stage model of how a stranger becomes a buyer: attention, interest, desire, then action.

  • Annual Contract Value (ACV)

    Annual contract value is the revenue a single customer contract is worth over one year, averaged out if the deal runs longer than that.

  • Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)

    Annual recurring revenue is the revenue a subscription business expects to receive each year from its recurring contracts.

  • Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO)

    Answer Engine Optimisation is the practice of making content easy for AI answer engines to cite directly in a generated answer, rather than only ranking a clicked link.

  • Answer-First Content

    Answer-first content puts the direct answer to the reader's question in the opening lines, then backs it up underneath instead of building up to it.

  • API

    An API is the set of rules two pieces of software use to talk to each other automatically, without a person copying data by hand.

  • API integration

    API integration is connecting a product to another service through its API, so the two share data or trigger actions automatically.

  • ARR multiple

    An ARR multiple values a recurring revenue business as a number of times its annual recurring revenue, used to estimate what it might sell or raise at.

  • Async

    A way of working where people exchange information and respond in their own time, rather than needing to be online together.

  • Attribution model

    An attribution model is the rule for deciding which marketing touchpoint gets credit for a sale, out of everything a prospect saw before they bought.

  • Attribution window

    The period after someone sees or clicks an ad during which a later conversion still gets credited to it.

  • Autonomous agent

    An AI that pursues a goal across many steps on its own, without a person approving each individual move.

  • Average deal size

    The mean revenue per closed deal, found by dividing total new sales by the number of deals won.

  • Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)

    Average revenue per user, or ARPU, is total recurring revenue for a period divided by the number of active customers in it.

  • Avg. Unit price

    Average unit price is the average amount a business earns per unit sold or per customer, found by dividing total revenue by units or customers sold.

B

  • Back-office Automation

    Back-office automation is replacing the repetitive admin that keeps a company running, invoicing, reconciliation, onboarding, with software that does it reliably.

  • Backlinks

    A backlink is a link from another website pointing to yours, treated by search engines as a vote of confidence in the page it points to.

  • BANT

    A four-point sales qualification check, budget, authority, need and timing, used before investing serious selling time in a deal.

  • BANT vs MEDDIC

    Two sales qualification frameworks for different deals: BANT's four-point check for quicker, simpler sales, MEDDIC's six-point check for longer, higher-value ones.

  • Battle card

    A one-page reference that tells a salesperson exactly how your product compares with one named competitor.

  • Billings

    Billings is the total amount a business invoices customers in a period, whether or not that cash has been collected yet.

  • Booking rate

    Booking rate is the share of qualified leads who actually get a sales meeting on the calendar, out of everyone who was offered one.

  • Bootstrapping

    Bootstrapping means funding a business from its own revenue and the founder's own money, with no outside investors.

  • Bottleneck

    The single step in a process that limits total output, no matter how fast every other step runs.

  • Bottleneck Resource

    The specific person, tool or slice of capacity whose limited availability sets the ceiling on how much the whole operation can produce.

  • Bottom-Up Adoption

    Individuals or small teams adopting a product on their own, with usage spreading until the company formalises and pays for it.

  • Bounce rate

    Bounce rate is the share of visitors who land on a page and leave without any further action, no second click and no other page.

  • Braindump

    A braindump is the act of getting everything in your head, tasks, ideas, worries, onto a page or screen all at once.

  • Break-Even Point

    The break-even point is the sales level at which revenue exactly covers total costs, before any profit or loss.

  • Bridge round

    A bridge round is a small, short-term raise that carries a company from one funding round to the next, or to a milestone that earns a stronger valuation.

  • Build in public

    Building in public means sharing your product's progress, metrics, decisions and setbacks openly as you go, usually on social platforms or a newsletter.

  • Burn Multiple

    The burn multiple is net cash burn over a period divided by the net new recurring revenue added in that period, showing how much a business spends to buy each pound of growth.

  • Burn Rate

    Burn rate is the amount of cash a business spends each month faster than it comes in, steadily eating into the cash it has left.

  • Buyer persona

    A buyer persona is a short profile of the specific person you sell to: their role, what they are measured on and how they actually decide to buy.

C

  • CAC Payback Period

    CAC payback period is the number of months it takes for a new customer's gross margin to repay what it cost to acquire them.

  • Cadence

    Cadence is the regular, predictable rhythm at which a recurring activity happens, such as a weekly review or a monthly close, run on a fixed beat rather than on memory.

  • Call-to-Action (CTA)

    A call to action is the short line of copy or button that tells someone exactly what to do next, pairing a clear verb with a promised benefit.

  • Cap table

    A cap table is the record of who owns what in a company: founders, investors, and anyone holding options or convertible instruments.

  • Capacity Planning

    Working out in advance how much work you can realistically deliver with the people, hours and tools you actually have.

  • Cashflow

    Cashflow is the movement of money into and out of a business over time, distinct from the profit or loss a business reports on paper.

  • Champion

    The person inside a prospect's organisation who genuinely wants your solution and sells it internally when you are not there.

  • Churn rate

    Churn rate is the percentage of customers who cancel or stop paying within a given period, the mirror image of retention.

  • CI/CD

    CI/CD is an automated pipeline that tests every code change and ships it to production without anyone running the steps by hand.

  • Click-through rate (CTR)

    The share of people who see your content or link and actually click it.

  • Click-through rate (email)

    Click-through rate is the share of email recipients who clicked a link inside it, the point where an open turns into actual interest.

  • Closing techniques

    The specific moves a salesperson uses to take a prospect from still considering to signed.

  • Code review

    Code review is the check a change goes through before it merges: does it work, does it fit existing patterns, does it introduce bugs or duplicated logic.

  • Cohort analysis

    Cohort analysis groups customers by a shared starting point, usually their signup month, and tracks how each group behaves over time.

  • Cohort Retention Curve

    A cohort retention curve plots what share of a group of customers who joined together are still paying, tracked month by month.

  • Cold email

    Targeted, researched outreach to someone who never asked to hear from you, sent to start a real conversation.

  • Committed Monthly Recurring Revenue (CMRR)

    Committed monthly recurring revenue is the monthly recurring revenue a business is contractually guaranteed to receive, including signed deals not yet billing.

  • Competitive advantage

    A competitive advantage is something a business does better or differently that a rival would find slow, expensive or impossible to copy, defending margin and winning customers over time.

  • Compound growth rate

    Compound growth rate is the steady rate at which a metric grows each period, where each period's growth builds on the last rather than on a fixed starting point.

  • Confidence interval

    A confidence interval is the range a true result probably falls in, given that only a sample was measured rather than everyone.

  • Constraint

    A constraint is the single stage in your growth engine that caps everything else, however fast the stages before and after it run.

  • Contact management

    Contact management is keeping one shared, accurate record per person you sell to: who they are, what has been said, and what happens next.

  • Content calendar

    A content calendar is a single shared plan of what you will publish, on which channel and when, so the whole team works from one timeline.

  • Content pillar

    A content pillar is a broad, strategic topic your business owns, with a hub article and a cluster of related pieces all linking back to it.

  • Content upgrade

    A resource offered in exchange for an email address, matched exactly to the article a reader is on, rather than a generic newsletter signup.

  • Context engineering

    Deciding exactly what information a model sees before it acts, the right files, rules and examples, and nothing else.

  • Context window

    The amount of text, prompt, conversation and documents together, an AI model can hold in mind at once, measured in tokens.

  • Context window

    Amount of text an AI model can reason over at once. Determines how much information a model processes in a single response.

  • Contribution Margin

    Contribution margin is what one extra sale adds to profit once the cost of delivering that sale is subtracted from its price.

  • Control group

    The slice of people deliberately left unchanged during a test, so a result can be compared against what would have happened anyway.

  • Conversion tracking

    Recording the moment someone completes an action that actually matters, and tying it back to whatever brought them in.

  • Conversion window

    The time allowed between a starting action and a goal action before it stops counting as a conversion from that start.

  • Cookie

    A small file a browser stores for a site, so a return visit can be recognised and shown something different from a first one.

  • Cost per click (CPC)

    Cost per click is the amount paid each time someone clicks a paid ad, calculated as total spend divided by clicks, and the basic cost unit of paid search.

  • Cost-per-X

    The family of pay-per-event pricing metrics, spend divided by an impression, a click, a lead or a customer won.

  • Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

    What it costs, on average, to win one paying customer: total sales and marketing spend over a period divided by the customers it brought in.

  • Customer data platform

    A customer data platform pulls customer data from every tool a company uses into one profile per person, then pushes it back out to the tools that need it.

  • Customer journey

    The whole path a person takes from first hearing about you through deciding, buying, using and eventually renewing or leaving, seen from their side.

  • Customer Lifetime

    Customer lifetime is the average length of time a customer keeps paying before they churn, usually expressed in months.

  • Customer satisfaction (CSAT)

    Customer satisfaction, or CSAT, is a score from a simple survey asking how satisfied someone was with one specific product, support or feature moment.

  • Customer success

    Customer success is the team that helps customers reach the outcome they bought a product for, distinct from selling it or fixing it when it breaks.

  • Cycle Time

    Cycle time is how long the actual work on a task takes once someone starts it, excluding any time it spent waiting in a queue first.

D

  • Data Hygiene

    Data hygiene is the ongoing discipline of keeping records clean: no duplicates, no stale or missing fields, no dead entries left behind.

  • Data modelling

    Data modelling is turning messy raw data into clean, defined tables that carry one trusted meaning wherever they are read.

  • Data pipeline

    A data pipeline is the automated route data travels from where it is created to where it is used, cleaned and reshaped along the way.

  • Data warehouse

    A data warehouse is one central place where a copy of business data from every system is combined so it can be queried together.

  • Deal stage

    A label for where a prospective customer sits in your sales process, from first contact to signed contract.

  • Deep Work

    Uninterrupted, distraction-free time spent on work that genuinely demands concentration, rather than shallow or fragmented tasks.

  • Default alive

    Default alive describes a company whose current revenue and spending trend, left unchanged, reaches profitability before its cash runs out.

  • Delegation

    Handing ownership of a task or an outcome to someone, or something, else, so it gets done well without you doing it yourself.

  • Deployment

    Deployment is pushing a change from a working copy into the live environment where real users, or a real automation, can reach it.

  • Dilution

    Dilution is the fall in ownership percentage that happens when a company issues new shares, usually to raise money or grant options.

  • Discovery call

    A discovery call is your first real conversation with a prospect, meant to understand their situation and fit before you ever pitch or demo.

  • Display network

    The collection of third-party sites, apps and videos where an ad platform places a banner or image ad in front of people who are not actively searching.

  • Distribution-first

    Distribution-first means deciding how you will reach customers before you decide what to build, then shaping the product to fit that channel.

  • Domain authority

    Domain authority is a third-party score, usually one to a hundred, estimating how likely a whole website is to rank well in search results.

  • Domain reputation

    The trust score inbox providers quietly attach to your sending domain, based on its sending history.

  • Down round

    A down round is a funding round raised at a lower valuation than the company's previous round, marking existing shares down rather than up.

  • Drip campaign

    A long-running series of emails that fires automatically once a trigger starts it, staying visible to a prospect over weeks without anyone sending by hand.

E

  • Economic buyer

    The person with the authority to release budget and give final sign-off, who can say yes when everyone else can only say no.

  • Edge case

    An edge case is a rare or extreme situation a system might encounter that falls outside the typical, expected path most users take.

  • EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)

    EEAT is Google's quality framework, experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, describing what genuinely good content looks like to a human rater.

  • Eisenhower Matrix

    The Eisenhower Matrix sorts tasks into four quadrants by urgency and importance, so time goes to what matters, not whatever shouts loudest.

  • Email deliverability

    Whether an email actually reaches the primary inbox rather than being dropped or filtered into spam.

  • Email open rate

    Email open rate is the share of delivered emails someone actually opens: the first conversion step in any email funnel.

  • Email sequence

    A short, tightly aimed run of emails to one person, each assuming the last one landed, built to move them through one stretch of the journey.

  • Engagement

    Any measurable interaction someone has with your content, emails, website or product, beyond simply seeing it.

  • Engagement rate

    Engagement rate measures how many visitors actually interact with your page after arriving: scrolling, clicking or moving on to another page.

  • Enterprise value

    Enterprise value is what a business is worth as a whole, independent of financing: broadly equity value plus debt, minus cash on hand.

  • Entity (SEO)

    An entity is a distinct thing, a company, person, product, place or concept, that a search or AI engine recognises and reasons about independently of the exact words on a page.

  • EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System)

    A complete framework for running a smaller company, built around six components: vision, people, data, issues, process and traction.

  • ETL / ELT

    ETL and ELT are the two patterns for moving data from its sources into a warehouse, transforming it either before or after it lands.

  • Event tracking

    Recording each specific action someone takes on a site or in a product, a page view, a click, a form fill, a feature used, as a discrete event.

  • Expansion Revenue

    Expansion revenue is additional recurring revenue from existing customers, on top of what they already pay, through upgrades, add-ons or growing usage.

F

  • Feature flag

    A feature flag is a switch in the code that turns a feature on or off without a new deployment, letting a team control who sees it and when.

  • Featured snippet

    A featured snippet is the boxed answer Google places at the top of its results, above the normal listings, lifted directly from a page already ranking near the top.

  • First revenue

    The first real payment from a customer, the moment an idea stops being a hypothesis and becomes a business.

  • First-party data

    First-party data is information a business collects directly from its own customers and visitors, with consent, that nobody else holds.

  • First-touch attribution

    A measurement model that gives all the credit for a sale to the very first touchpoint in a prospect's journey.

  • Fixed and Variable Costs

    Fixed costs stay the same no matter how much a business sells; variable costs rise and fall with every sale it makes.

  • Forecast Accuracy

    How closely your predicted revenue for a period matches what you actually closed.

  • Founder-led growth

    The founder acting as the growth engine directly, using their own name, network and story to bring in early customers.

  • Founder-market fit

    Founder-market fit is the match between a founder's own skills, experience and network, and the market they have chosen to serve.

  • Freemium

    Freemium is a pricing model where the core product is free forever, and you charge only for advanced features, higher limits or team seats.

  • Function calling

    The mechanism that lets an AI model trigger real code, look something up, send something, update a record, rather than only produce text.

  • Funnel analysis

    Funnel analysis tracks how many people move through each step of a journey, from first touch to the action you care about, and where they drop off.

G

  • Gated content

    Gated content is anything valuable you put behind a form, so a visitor trades their email for a report, template, webinar or guide.

  • Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)

    Generative Engine Optimisation is the discipline of getting a brand surfaced and cited inside the answers generative AI tools compose, rather than in a list of links.

  • Go-to-market strategy

    Your go-to-market strategy is the plan for who you sell to, how you reach them and how the deal actually closes into revenue.

  • Goodhart's Law

    When a measure becomes a target, people optimise the number rather than the outcome it was meant to represent, and the two quietly come apart.

  • Gross Dollar Retention

    Gross dollar retention is the share of a cohort's starting recurring revenue still present a year later, counting only churn and downgrades.

  • Gross Margin

    Gross margin is the share of revenue left once the direct cost of delivering a product or service is subtracted.

  • Growth drivers

    The small number of activities that actually cause a business to grow, as distinct from everything else it does.

  • Growth engine

    A part of the business that, once tuned, keeps producing leads or revenue with less manual push behind it each time.

  • Growth hacking

    Growth hacking is running many small, cheap experiments across a product and its channels to find which ones reliably move acquisition or revenue.

  • Growth lever

    A growth lever is the one improvement that lifts the whole business when pulled, because it sits on a mechanism that compounds.

  • Growth Loop

    A growth loop is a self reinforcing cycle where the output of one round of growth becomes the input for the next, so growth compounds.

  • Growth marketing

    A discipline of running small, measured experiments across the whole customer journey rather than one big campaign.

  • Growth mindset

    A growth mindset is the belief that ability improves through practice, feedback and repetition, so a setback is information about the next attempt rather than a verdict.

  • Growth plateau

    The point where your key numbers stop climbing no matter how much of the same activity you throw at them.

  • Guardrails

    The rules and checks that keep an AI agent inside safe bounds, what it can say, what it can do, and where it must stop and ask.

H

  • Hallucination

    An AI stating something false with complete confidence, an invented statistic, a fake citation, a detail that was never real.

  • Hallucination

    When an AI model confidently states something false. A key risk when deploying AI systems without verification.

  • Handoff

    The moment work passes from one person, tool or step to another, one of the most fragile points in any process.

  • Health score

    A health score is a single number, usually zero to a hundred, that blends a customer account usage, adoption and support signals to predict churn or growth.

  • Heatmap

    A heatmap is a visual overlay showing where users click, move and scroll on a page, using colour to show which areas get the most attention.

  • Hero section

    A hero section is the full-width block at the top of a page, its headline, subtext, visual and button, that a visitor sees before scrolling.

  • Human-in-the-loop

    A person reviewing or approving an AI agent's work at the points that matter, before it goes live or takes effect.

  • Hypothesis testing

    Hypothesis testing is the practice of stating a specific, falsifiable prediction and running a controlled experiment to see whether the evidence supports it.

I

  • Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

    Your ideal customer profile is the precise description of the company and person you are best placed to win and keep as a customer.

  • IDS (Identify, Discuss, Solve)

    The three-step method, identify the real issue, discuss it once fully, then solve it with an owner and a deadline, for working through problems.

  • Impressions

    How many times your content, ad or outreach message is shown to someone, counting repeats.

  • Inbound Marketing

    Inbound marketing attracts buyers with genuinely useful free content so they come to you when ready, instead of you chasing them with outbound pitches.

  • Inbox zero

    Inbox zero is the habit of clearing an inbox to zero unprocessed messages by deciding the fate of each one rather than letting it sit.

  • Indie hacker

    An indie hacker is a founder who builds and runs small software products solo or in a tiny team, funded by revenue instead of investors.

  • Integration

    Integration is wiring two pieces of software together so data moves between them on its own, without anyone copying it by hand.

  • Internal linking

    Internal linking is the practice of connecting related pages on a website with hyperlinks, so search engines can read the site's structure and visitors are guided deeper into it.

  • Invoices / contract

    Average invoices per contract is the number of bills a customer relationship generates, found by dividing total invoices by total contracts.

  • Invoicing

    Invoicing is the process of billing a customer for goods or services, turning agreed work into a formal request for payment.

J

  • Jobs to be done

    Jobs to be done is the idea that people do not buy products, they hire them to make progress, so the real job is understanding that progress rather than the features clicked on.

K

  • Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

    A KPI is one of the small number of metrics that show whether the business is hitting a specific goal, tracked closely enough to catch problems while they are still cheap to fix.

  • Keyword research

    Keyword research is finding the actual words customers type into a search box when looking for what a business sells or for help with the problem it solves.

  • Kill criteria

    Kill criteria are the conditions you set in advance that will trigger shutting a project, product or experiment down, decided while you can still think clearly.

  • Knowledge Graph

    A knowledge graph is a structured map of entities and the relationships between them that search and AI engines use to understand a business.

L

  • Landing page

    A landing page is a standalone page built around one conversion goal, stripped of the distractions a homepage carries for every kind of visitor.

  • Large language model

    A large language model (LLM) is software trained on vast amounts of text that predicts what comes next in a piece of writing, which lets it draft, summarise, classify and answer questions.

  • Last-touch attribution

    A measurement model that gives all the credit for a sale to the last thing a prospect touched right before converting.

  • Lead

    A person or company who has knowingly signalled interest, left contact details you can lawfully use, and can be reached by name and channel.

  • Lead capture rate

    Lead capture rate is the share of engaged visitors who hand over their details and become a lead, on a given page or channel.

  • Lead generation

    Lead generation is the set of activities that produce leads: people or companies who have shown interest in what you sell and given you a way to contact them.

  • Lead scoring

    Lead scoring gives each lead points for how well they fit your ideal customer and how much interest they show, so sales can work the best ones first.

  • Lead Time

    Lead time is the total wall-clock time from a customer request to its delivery, including every queue and handoff in between.

  • Lead velocity rate

    Lead velocity rate is the month-over-month percentage change in qualified leads, a leading signal for revenue that moves before deals close or stall.

  • Leading vs lagging indicators

    A leading indicator predicts where a result is heading; a lagging indicator, such as revenue or churn, only confirms it after the fact.

  • Level 10 Meeting (L10)

    The fixed, ninety-minute weekly leadership meeting in EOS, covering a check-in, a scorecard review, quarterly priority updates and issue solving.

  • Lifetime Value (LTV)

    Lifetime value (LTV) is the total gross margin you expect to earn from one customer over the whole relationship: margin per period multiplied by average lifespan.

  • Liquidation preference

    A liquidation preference is the clause deciding who gets paid first, and how much, when a company is sold or wound down.

  • List hygiene

    List hygiene is removing invalid, inactive and unwanted addresses from an email list, so it stays deliverable and worth paying to send to.

  • llms.txt

    llms.txt is a proposed plain-text file placed at a domain's root that gives large language models a clean, curated guide to a site's most important content, in readable markdown.

  • Lookalike audience

    A new audience an ad platform builds by finding people who resemble your existing best customers.

  • LTV to CAC Ratio

    The LTV to CAC ratio compares a customer's lifetime value against what it cost to acquire them, showing whether acquisition spend is actually profitable.

M

  • Magic Number

    The magic number measures how efficiently sales and marketing spend turns into new recurring revenue, quarter over quarter.

  • Maker schedule

    A maker's schedule is a working day arranged around long, uninterrupted blocks of time, suited to the deep, continuous focus that building something well requires.

  • Marketing Automation

    Software that fires a set message the moment a lead's behaviour meets a rule you defined, without anyone sending it by hand.

  • Marketing stack

    A marketing stack is the set of tools a business uses to find leads, follow up with them, and see what is actually working.

  • MCP (Model Context Protocol)

    MCP is an open standard for connecting an AI agent to tools and data without building a custom connection for each one.

  • MCP server

    An MCP server is a small service that exposes a tool, a dataset or an action to an AI model through one consistent interface.

  • MEDDIC

    A six-point sales qualification framework, metrics, economic buyer, decision criteria, decision process, pain and champion, for complex or high-value deals.

  • Micro-SaaS

    A micro-SaaS is a small, focused software product, often run by one person or a tiny team, built to serve a narrow need profitably rather than scale into a large company.

  • Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

    A minimum viable product is the smallest version of a product real customers can use and pay for, built to test the core idea before anything else is added.

  • Minimum viable test

    A minimum viable test is the smallest experiment that can prove or disprove a business assumption before real time and money are committed to it.

  • Mobile responsive

    Mobile responsive means one website whose layout reshapes itself to fit any screen, from a wide desktop monitor down to a phone.

  • Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

    Monthly recurring revenue, or MRR, is the predictable subscription revenue a business can count on each month, one-off fees excluded.

  • MQL

    A lead whose fit and behaviour cross an agreed line, the point where marketing judges a sales conversation would be welcome rather than pushy.

  • Multi-agent system

    A multi-agent system is several AI agents, each with its own role, working one problem together rather than one agent doing everything.

  • Multi-touch attribution

    A measurement model that spreads the credit for a sale across every touchpoint in a buyer's journey, instead of giving it all to the last click.

  • Multithreading

    Multithreading means building relationships with several people inside a target account, instead of relying on one contact who might leave, go quiet or lack real authority.

  • Mutual close plan

    A mutual close plan is a shared document that maps every step both you and the buyer must complete before signing, each with an owner and a date.

N

  • Negative Churn

    Negative churn is when expansion revenue from existing customers outweighs what is lost to cancellations and downgrades, so the base grows without new customers.

  • Net Promoter Score (NPS)

    Net Promoter Score, or NPS, asks how likely someone is to recommend a company, then nets the promoters against the detractors.

  • Net Revenue Retention (NRR)

    Net revenue retention, or NRR, is starting revenue from a cohort plus expansion minus churn and downgrades, over that starting revenue.

  • North Star Metric

    A North Star metric is the one number that best predicts whether a business is winning over the long run.

O

  • Objection handling

    Working out what a prospect is actually worried about when they push back, and answering that instead of arguing.

  • Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)

    A two-layer goal method: an ambitious objective paired with three to five measurable key results that prove whether it was reached.

  • Offer

    The whole proposition put in front of a prospect: the service, the price, the guarantee, and the terms.

  • OMTM (One Metric That Matters)

    OMTM is the single number that, at the current stage, best predicts whether the business is winning, chosen so every team rallies behind one goal instead of several.

  • On-page SEO

    On-page SEO is optimising everything inside a single page, its title, headings, content, URL and internal links, so search engines understand it and rank it for the right query.

  • On-target earnings (OTE)

    A salesperson's total expected pay, base salary plus commission, when they hit all of their quota.

  • Onboarding Funnel

    An onboarding funnel is the sequence of steps a new user moves through from signup to becoming an activated, value-getting customer.

  • One-pager

    A one-pager is a single page that tells someone everything they need to know about a product, service or idea in about the time it takes to scan it.

  • Operating Cadence

    The fixed rhythm of recurring meetings, reviews and check-ins, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, that keeps a company on track.

  • Operating Expenses (OpEx)

    Operating expenses are the ongoing costs of running a business, such as salaries, rent and software, not tied directly to producing one unit of product.

  • Orchestrator agent

    The lead AI agent that breaks a large task into smaller jobs, hands each to a specialist agent, and stitches the results together.

P

  • P-value

    The probability of seeing a result at least this extreme if the change being tested actually did nothing at all.

  • Page speed

    Page speed is how long a page takes to load and become usable. A faster page bounces less, converts more and ranks higher than a slow one.

  • Paid search

    Paid search means buying ads that appear in a search engine's results for keywords buyers type, paying only per click, to reach people at the exact moment they are looking for a solution.

  • Paid social advertising

    Paying a social or display network to put your message in front of people who have not searched for you yet.

  • Pain point

    A pain point is a specific problem a customer already feels, costing them money, time or risk, that they would happily pay to make go away.

  • Pareto Principle

    The observation that a small share of inputs tends to produce most of the outcome, so effort is rarely worth spreading evenly.

  • Partner-led growth

    Other companies handling your distribution, recommending or reselling your product for a share of the value.

  • Personal brand

    The professional reputation that follows a person, built by sharing a consistent point of view in public.

  • Pipeline coverage

    The ratio of open pipeline value to the quota you still need to hit, showing whether you have enough deals in flight.

  • Pirate metrics

    Pirate metrics, coined by Dave McClure and pronounced like a pirate's growl, breaks the customer journey into five stages: acquisition, activation, retention, referral and revenue.

  • Pivot

    A pivot is a deliberate change of direction that keeps one thing already learned and replaces the part of the plan that is not working.

  • Portfolio model

    A portfolio model runs several small, independent bets side by side rather than one big bet, so a few winners can fund the rest.

  • Positioning statement

    A positioning statement names the customer, the problem and the differentiator a company is judged against, so every team tells the same story.

  • Pricing strategy

    A pricing strategy is the deliberate set of choices behind what a business charges, to whom, and how that price changes as a customer grows.

  • Prioritisation

    Prioritisation is the discipline of ranking ideas, projects and experiments by impact, then deliberately saying no to everything that does not make the cut.

  • Process Mapping

    Writing down how a piece of work actually flows, step by step, from what starts it to the finished outcome.

  • Product-led growth

    Product-led growth is when the product itself does the selling: people sign up, use it, feel the value and upgrade without a salesperson involved.

  • Product-Led Sales

    A hybrid motion where the product drives self-serve adoption and sales steps in only once usage signals a bigger opportunity.

  • Product-market fit

    Product-market fit is the point where a product solves a genuine, urgent problem for a defined market that is actively pulling the solution in, rather than needing to be pushed.

  • Product-Qualified Lead (PQL)

    A user who has already experienced real value inside the product, usually on a trial or free plan, and whose behaviour signals readiness to buy.

  • Profit and Loss Statement (P&L)

    A profit and loss statement lists a business's revenue and costs over a period and shows whether the result was a profit or a loss.

  • Profit Margin

    Profit margin is the share of revenue left as profit once every cost of running the business is subtracted.

  • Programmatic SEO

    Programmatic SEO is generating many search-optimised pages at scale from a structured data source and a single template, rather than writing each page by hand.

  • Progressive profiling

    Collecting a lead's details a little at a time across several visits, rather than asking for everything in one long form.

  • Prompt

    The text an AI model reads before it answers: the task, the background and the rules, which together decide how useful the answer is.

  • Prompt engineering

    The craft of phrasing an instruction to a model so it reliably produces what you actually want.

  • Prompt injection

    An attack where text hidden in an email, web page or document tricks an AI model into following the attacker's instructions instead of its owner's.

  • Prompt-Level Ranking

    Prompt-level ranking is tracking how a brand performs for individual prompts inside AI engines, the AEO equivalent of keyword-level ranking in classic search.

  • Proposal rate

    The share of qualified opportunities that actually receive a formal proposal.

  • Prototype

    A prototype is a quick, throwaway version of an idea, a clickable mockup or a rough demo, built to answer one question before committing to the real build.

  • Pull request

    A pull request is a proposed set of code changes packaged for review before it joins the main codebase, showing exactly what would change.

Q

  • Qualification rate

    The share of discovery calls where a prospect is confirmed as a genuine fit, qualified opportunities divided by completed calls.

  • Quick Ratio (SaaS)

    The SaaS quick ratio compares new and expansion revenue against lost and downgraded revenue, showing whether growth is outpacing churn.

  • Quota

    A quota is the revenue or deal target a salesperson must hit in a set period, usually a month, quarter or year, and the yardstick their role is measured against.

  • Quote

    The document that states exactly what a prospect is buying, what it costs, and on what terms.

R

  • RACI

    A grid tagging who is Responsible, Accountable, Consulted or Informed for each task or decision, with only one person ever Accountable.

  • Ramp time

    How long a new salesperson takes to reach full productivity, consistently hitting quota rather than still learning the role.

  • Refactoring

    Refactoring is restructuring existing code so it behaves exactly the same but is easier to understand and safer to change, without adding a feature.

  • Referral marketing

    Turning satisfied customers into a steady stream of warm introductions to new business.

  • Regression

    A regression is when a change breaks something that used to work, often somewhere that looks unrelated to what was actually changed.

  • Renewal rate

    Renewal rate is the share of customers whose contracts renew at the end of their term, the mirror image of churn.

  • Reply rate

    The share of your outreach that gets an actual written response back.

  • Retargeting

    Showing ads specifically to people who already visited your site or engaged with you but did not convert.

  • Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

    The technique of retrieving relevant documents first, then having a model write and cite its answer from that material.

  • Revenue Churn

    Revenue churn is the share of recurring revenue lost to cancellations and downgrades over a period, measured in money rather than accounts.

  • Reverse ETL

    Reverse ETL is pushing data out of a warehouse back into the tools a team uses every day: a CRM, an email platform, a support desk.

  • RevOps (Revenue Operations)

    RevOps is aligning the systems, data and processes behind marketing, sales and customer success so the revenue engine runs as one.

  • Rocks (Quarterly Priorities)

    The three to seven most important things a company or a person commits to finishing in the next ninety days.

  • Rollback

    A rollback is the act of reverting a system to a previous working state after a new release causes a problem.

  • Rule of 40

    The rule of 40 adds a business's growth rate to its profit margin, treating a combined score of forty or more as a healthy balance between the two.

  • Rules file

    A document an AI coding agent reads on every task, stating your conventions, your stack and the things it must never do.

  • Runbook

    A runbook is a step-by-step guide for handling one urgent, defined situation, so anyone can follow it under pressure.

  • Runway

    Runway is the number of months a business can keep operating at its current spending rate before its cash runs out.

S

  • SAFE

    A SAFE is an investment contract that converts into equity at a future funding round, without setting a valuation or interest rate up front.

  • Sales cadence

    A sales cadence is the planned sequence of multichannel touchpoints, timed and ordered, used to reach and move a single prospect forward without it turning into random follow-up.

  • Sales cycle

    The sales cycle is the time, measured in days, that a deal takes to travel from first contact to closed, through stages such as discovery, demo, proposal and negotiation.

  • Sales deck

    The set of slides used to walk a prospect through why your product is worth buying.

  • Sales engagement

    Sales engagement is the coordinated set of touchpoints, across email, phone, LinkedIn and other channels, that a rep uses to reach and progress a prospect, and the software category built to run it.

  • Sales methodology

    Repeatable framework your sales team uses to run deals consistently, defining qualification and process.

  • Sales methodology

    A written framework for how a team sells: the stages a deal moves through, and the test it must pass to advance at each one.

  • Sales qualified lead velocity

    Sales qualified lead velocity is the speed at which leads clear your qualification bar and reach the sales team, month over month.

  • Sales tech stack

    A sales tech stack is the software a sales team runs on day to day: where deals live, how reps reach out, and how managers see what is happening.

  • Sales velocity

    Sales velocity is how much revenue moves through your pipeline each day, worked out from deal count, average deal size, win rate and cycle length.

  • Sales-led growth

    Sales-led growth means winning customers mainly through direct sales conversations, where a rep qualifies, shapes and closes each deal by hand.

  • Sample size

    Sample size is how many data points a decision is based on. Too few and the result you see may just be chance rather than a real pattern.

  • Scope creep

    Scope creep is a project quietly growing beyond what was agreed, one small addition at a time, until a short build becomes a long one.

  • Scorecard (Weekly Metrics)

    A scorecard is a small set of leading numbers, reviewed every week against a target, with one clear owner named for each row.

  • Search intent

    Search intent is the underlying goal behind a query, informational, navigational, commercial or transactional, what a person actually wants when they type it.

  • Self-serve analytics

    Self-serve analytics is anyone on a team answering their own data questions through a dashboard, without filing a request and waiting.

  • Self-Serve Motion

    A go-to-market model where a customer discovers, buys and onboards entirely without a salesperson.

  • SEM (Search Engine Marketing)

    SEM is the umbrella term for buying visibility on search engines, mainly the paid ads shown above and beside organic results, though some use it to cover organic search too.

  • SEO

    SEO is the discipline of making content the best answer to a search query and helping the search engine recognise that, through topics, structure, trust signals and technical health.

  • SERP (Search Engine Results Page)

    The SERP is the full page a search engine returns after a query, mixing organic results, paid ads, featured snippets, AI overviews and other formats competing for attention.

  • Session

    A session is one continuous visit by a user, bundling their activity until they leave or go inactive long enough to time out.

  • Share of Voice in AI

    Share of voice in AI is the proportion of relevant AI answers that mention or cite a brand, measured across a defined set of prompts buyers are likely to ask.

  • Single customer view

    A single customer view is one unified record per customer that stitches together their usage, billing, support and marketing history.

  • Single Source of Truth

    A single source of truth is one authoritative place a fact lives, so every report and automation reads it there rather than a copy.

  • Social proof

    Social proof is evidence that other people already trust and use what you sell: testimonials, case studies, logos and reference calls that lower a buyer's risk.

  • Social selling

    Using your own social profile, not the company page, to build relationships and trust before you ever pitch someone.

  • Spam score

    A number estimating how likely a given email is to land in the junk folder instead of the inbox.

  • Spec-driven development

    Spec-driven development is writing down exactly what you are building, its scope, states and data, before any code gets written, so the spec becomes the contract the build follows.

  • SPIN Selling

    SPIN Selling is a questioning method for complex B2B deals: situation, problem, implication and need-payoff questions asked in that order.

  • SQL

    A contact both marketing and sales agree is a real buying opportunity, checked by a person and moved into the pipeline as a deal.

  • Stages of awareness

    The stage a buyer is at, from never having heard of the problem to being ready to buy, which decides what message lands.

  • Staging environment

    A staging environment is a private copy of a live product, mirroring production, where changes are tested before any customer sees them.

  • Stakeholder Management

    Stakeholder management is the habit of keeping the right people informed, involved and confident about a piece of work without them having to ask.

  • Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)

    A written, repeatable set of steps for a task, so the outcome stays the same no matter who runs it.

  • Statistical power

    Statistical power is the probability a test will detect a real effect when one genuinely exists, rather than missing it entirely.

  • Statistical significance

    The judgement that a measured difference is large enough, and the sample big enough, to trust it as real rather than random noise.

  • Structured Data

    Structured data is machine-readable markup added to a page, usually schema.org vocabulary, that states directly what the content is rather than leaving an engine to infer it from prose.

  • Stub

    A stub is a placeholder piece of code standing in for functionality that is not built yet, a button that does nothing or a function returning fake data.

  • System prompt

    The standing instruction that frames every reply an AI gives, its role, its tone, its boundaries and what it must always follow.

T

  • TAM SAM SOM

    TAM SAM SOM is a three-layer way to size a market: everyone who could ever buy, the slice you can reach, and the share you can realistically win.

  • Tech stack

    A tech stack is the set of technologies a product is built on: the framework, the database, the hosting, and the services bolted on.

  • Technical debt

    Technical debt is the accumulated cost of shortcuts left in a codebase, the quick hack or half-finished migration that makes every future change slower until it is paid down.

  • Technical SEO

    Technical SEO is the underlying plumbing that makes a website easy for search engines to crawl, read and rank, page speed, mobile layout, indexing and structure.

  • Term sheet

    A term sheet is a short, mostly non-binding document that sets out the key terms of a proposed investment before the full legal agreements are drawn up.

  • Test coverage

    Test coverage is the share of your code that runs during automated tests, a rough guide to how much of the product is checked whenever something changes.

  • Testimonial

    A testimonial is a customer saying, in their own words, that your product worked for them, which a buyer trusts more than any of your own marketing.

  • Theory of Constraints

    A management approach that says one limiting factor holds back a whole system at a time, so fixing that one thing matters most.

  • Thought leadership

    Publishing a genuine, original point of view on a topic your buyers care about, consistently enough that people trust you understand the space.

  • Throughput

    The amount of finished work a process actually produces in a given period, not how busy anyone looks doing it.

  • Time blocking

    Giving a piece of work a fixed appointment in your calendar, rather than hoping you get to it between meetings.

  • Time-to-Value (TTV)

    Time-to-value is how long it takes a new customer to experience the value a product promised, from the moment they first sign up.

  • Tool use

    Tool use is an AI agent reaching outside its own text to search, calculate, call an API or act, then folding the result back into what it does next.

  • Topical authority

    Topical authority is the depth and breadth of trust a search engine assigns a site on a specific subject, based on how thoroughly and credibly the whole topic is covered.

  • Total Addressable Market (TAM)

    Total addressable market is the total revenue on the table if you won every single customer in a defined market, the ceiling rather than a forecast.

  • Total cost of ownership

    Total cost of ownership is the full lifetime cost of a decision, the subscription plus setup, training and switching cost, not just the sticker price.

  • Tracking plan

    A tracking plan is the one document defining every event a business tracks: what it means, when it fires, and what it carries.

  • Trigger

    The event that starts an automated action without a person in the loop, so a response fires the moment someone actually does something.

  • Trust signals

    A trust signal is anything on your site or in your sales process that shows a buyer you are reliable before they have to take your word for it.

U

  • Unit economics

    Unit economics is the question of whether a business makes money on one customer, after everything it cost to win and serve them.

  • Units per invoice

    Units per invoice is total units sold divided by total invoices in a period, the average volume, seats, hours or items, on each bill.

  • Unsubscribe rate

    The share of people who opt out after an email send: unsubscribes divided by the emails delivered.

  • Usability testing

    Usability testing is watching real people try to use a product and noting exactly where they get stuck.

  • Usage metrics

    Usage metrics are counts of how often and how deeply people actually use a product, logins, features touched, time spent, rather than signups.

  • Usage-Based Pricing

    Usage-based pricing charges a customer according to how much of a product they actually consume, rather than a fixed fee regardless of use.

  • User interview

    A user interview is a structured one-on-one conversation with a real customer, used to understand how they actually work, what hurts, and how they decide.

  • User story

    A user story is a short, plain-language description of a feature from the person using it: who wants it, what they want to do, and the result that proves it worked.

  • UTMs

    Parameters added to the end of a URL that tell your analytics tool which source, medium and campaign sent the visitor.

V

  • Validation

    Validation is gathering real evidence, ideally involving money or commitment, that people want what you are building before you spend months building it.

  • Value proposition

    A value proposition names the exact outcome a customer gets by choosing a product over doing nothing, building it in house or picking a rival.

  • Value Stream

    A value stream is the full sequence of steps, including every wait and handoff, that carries a request from first ask to delivered value for the customer.

  • Version control

    Version control is a system that tracks every change to code over time, so a mistake can always be traced and undone.

  • Vesting

    The schedule by which founders and employees earn their equity over time, rather than owning it all from day one.

  • Vibe coding

    Vibe coding is building software by describing what is wanted in plain language and letting an AI write the code, staying in the loop to steer and correct rather than typing every line.

  • Viral Coefficient (K-factor)

    The viral coefficient, or K-factor, is the number of new users each existing user brings in, found by multiplying invites sent by their conversion rate.

  • Voice of customer

    Voice of customer is the practice of capturing the exact words customers use about their problems and needs, then feeding those words back into the product and the message.

W

  • Warm-up

    Gradually increasing how many emails you send from a new domain so inbox providers learn to trust it.

  • Webhook

    A webhook is a way for one service to notify another the instant something happens, by sending a message to a URL it controls.

  • Wedge

    A wedge is the narrow, sharp entry point you use to break into a market: one acute problem for one specific group, solved better than anyone else.

  • Win rate

    The share of proposals sent that turn into paying customers.

  • Workflow automation

    Workflow automation is wiring software so one thing automatically triggers the next, across whatever tools a business already uses.

Z

  • Zero-click search

    A zero-click search is one where the user gets their answer directly on the results page and never clicks through to a website.