A working glossary of sales vocabulary for people who build software and have never sold it. Each term gets a plain definition, what it is actually used for, and an honest note on whether it is a real idea or a number invented to make a chart go up. The short version: ICP, pipeline, reply rate and churn are load-bearing. MQL is mostly theatre.
You can build the product and you cannot follow the conversation about selling it. That is not a knowledge gap so much as a vocabulary one: sales has a jargon layer roughly as dense as any technical field, and unlike a technical field, nobody expects to have to explain it.
Here is the vocabulary, defined properly, with a note on each one about whether it names a real thing or exists to fill a slide. They are grouped by what they are about rather than alphabetically, because the relationships are the point.
Who you are selling to
ICP — Ideal Customer Profile. A description of the kind of company or person that gets the most value from what you built, specific enough that you can decide whether a given company is in or out without arguing about it. 'Startups' is not an ICP. 'Seed-stage B2B SaaS companies with 5 to 30 people, no dedicated salesperson, selling to engineering teams' is.
This is the highest-leverage word in the glossary. Get it wrong and every number downstream is measuring the wrong population, which is why a bad reply rate so often turns out to be a targeting problem wearing a copywriting costume.
Persona — the role inside that company you are writing to. The ICP is the company; the persona is the human. Same product, different message to the CTO and to the head of ops, because they are bothered by different things.
Lead — a person who might buy. Deliberately vague, and its vagueness is why the qualifiers below exist.
Prospect — a lead someone has decided is worth pursuing. The line between the two is judgement, not data.
Firmographics — company-level attributes you filter on: size, industry, location, funding, tech stack. The company equivalent of demographics.
Intent data — signals that a company might be in the market now, like a relevant job posting or a funding round. Treat claims about it carefully. Some of it is genuinely predictive, much of it is inferred from browsing data of uncertain provenance, and vendors rarely distinguish the two.
The people and the roles
SDR — Sales Development Representative. Finds people, qualifies them, and books meetings for someone else to run. They do not close. Their whole job is the top of the funnel, which is exactly why it was the first sales role anyone pointed automation at: it is a rate-limited research and messaging loop with a measurable output.
BDR — Business Development Representative. Functionally the same job. Where the distinction is drawn at all, BDR tends to mean outbound and SDR inbound, but the usage is not consistent and nobody will correct you.
AE — Account Executive. Runs the meetings the SDR booked, and closes. The word 'executive' is doing no work here.
Quota — the number a salesperson must hit. Matters to you because it explains behaviour: quota is why you get chased at the end of a quarter.
The funnel words
Pipeline — the total value of deals currently in progress. A forecast, not an achievement. Useful mainly for noticing you have far too little, and close to useless as prediction below a few dozen deals, where multiplying by an inferred win rate is arithmetic without statistics.
MQL — Marketing Qualified Lead. Someone marketing scored as worth contacting, using rules marketing wrote. The most gameable number in this glossary. When a team is measured on MQLs, MQLs go up, and that tells you nothing.
SQL — Sales Qualified Lead. Someone sales has accepted as worth their time. The gap between MQL and SQL counts is where the two teams argue, and the size of that gap is a good proxy for how seriously to take either figure.
Conversion rate — the proportion moving from one stage to the next. Real, useful, and only meaningful when you say which two stages. 'Our conversion rate is 3%' is not a sentence with content.
Churn — the rate customers leave. The number that decides whether you have a business, because acquisition without retention is a treadmill you pay to stay on.
ACV and LTV — annual contract value, and the total a customer pays before leaving. ACV silently determines every piece of sales advice you will read. Most of it is written for high-ACV enterprise sales, which is why it reads as insane when you are selling something at $39 a month.
The outbound mechanics
Outbound — you contact them first. Inbound — they find you. Different economics entirely: outbound is a cost you control and can scale on demand, inbound is cheaper per customer and cannot be turned on this week.
Cold email — outbound email to someone with no prior relationship. Legal in most jurisdictions with conditions; see the compliance note below.
Sequence (or cadence) — a scheduled series of messages with rules about when to stop. The direct analogy is a retry policy with backoff and a circuit breaker, and it fails the same way: retry too hard and you get blocked.
Touch — one message in that sequence. 'A seven-touch sequence' is seven scheduled attempts.
Warm-up — gradually increasing send volume from a new domain so mailbox providers form a view of you before you send at scale. Not optional, and roughly three weeks.
Reply rate — replies divided by messages sent. The one outbound number worth watching closely, because it is hard to game and it responds to both targeting and message quality. Typical cold outbound sits around 1 to 2%; 4% is good.
Bounce rate — messages that could not be delivered. Above about 5% you are signalling that you do not know who you are writing to.
Deliverability — whether your mail reaches the inbox at all. Distinct from delivery, which only means it was accepted. A message can be delivered to the spam folder and count as delivered.
The words that mean less than they sound like
Growth hacking — marketing, with the implication of cleverness. Thought leadership — writing, with the implication of importance. Solution — product. Enterprise-grade — expensive, and usually with an SSO login page.
None of these are lies exactly. They are register: signals about who is being addressed. Recognising them is useful mainly so you can read past them to whatever is actually being claimed.
The compliance words you cannot ignore
CAN-SPAM — the US rule set. In practice: do not falsify headers or the sender, do not mislead in the subject line, identify the message as an ad where required, include a real postal address, and honour opt-outs promptly.
GDPR — the EU regime. Business-to-business cold email is possible under legitimate interest, but the bar is real: a genuine relevance argument, transparency about where you got the data, and easy objection.
This is not legal advice and the details differ by country. The general shape holds everywhere: say who you are, make leaving easy, and stop when asked.
The six that matter
If you take six words out of this: ICP, pipeline, reply rate, conversion rate, churn, ACV. Those name real things you will have to reason about whatever you do.
Most of the rest is organisational language, invented so a repeatable process could be made legible to a manager. As one person, you need the concepts and almost none of the ceremony — and the reason this glossary exists is that not knowing the words has stopped more builders from selling than not knowing how to sell ever has.
Key takeaways
- ICP is the highest-leverage term here. Getting it wrong makes every downstream number meaningless, and 'anyone with this problem' is not an ICP.
- SDR is a job title describing a rate-limited research and messaging loop, which is why it is the first sales role anyone tried to automate.
- MQL is the most gameable metric in the vocabulary. Treat any number defined by a marketing team's own scoring rules with suspicion.
- Pipeline is a forecast, not an achievement, and multiplying it by a win rate you inferred from twelve deals is not forecasting.
- Most of these words exist to make a repeatable process legible to a manager. As a solo founder you need the concepts and almost none of the ceremony.