57 sales terms · plain-English definitions · written by operators, not marketers
Selling & the call
The words that describe what actually happens when one human asks another to buy.
Sales consultant
An outside operator hired to find and fix what's broken in how a business sells — process, pitch, people, follow-up, tooling. The title has no license requirement, so judge one the way you'd judge a builder: by what they've built, not by what they've posted. Go deeper →
Sales process
The defined, repeatable sequence of steps that takes a stranger to a closed customer — same stages, same actions, same standards, whoever runs it. If the method lives in one rep's head, you don't own a process, you employ one — and employment ends.
Pitch
The structured presentation of your offer: what it is, what it changes for the buyer, what it costs, and what happens next. Improvising isn't the absence of a pitch — it's just a pitch you can't measure, repeat, or fix. Go deeper →
Pitch bible
The written playbook of your entire pitch — openings, transitions, picture painting, rebuttals, closes — word for word, kept current, handed to every new rep. Ours is how two people sold across state lines sounding like one voice; without one, your best pitch retires the day your best rep does.
Picture painting
Describing, in concrete detail, what the buyer's life looks like after the purchase — so they're imagining ownership instead of evaluating a brochure. People buy the picture, then use the spec sheet to defend the decision afterward. Go deeper →
Tonality
How the words sound leaving your mouth — pace, volume, emphasis, certainty. The same sentence lands as confidence or desperation depending on delivery, and buyers decide whether they trust you long before they finish weighing what you said. Go deeper →
Conviction
Genuine belief, audible in your voice, that what you sell actually helps the person you're selling it to. Prospects forgive a clumsy script far faster than a hollow one — conviction can't be faked on the fortieth call of the day, which is why reps who don't believe eventually stop dialing.
Discovery
The stretch of the call where you ask questions and mostly stay quiet: current situation, the problem, what it's costing, what they've already tried. The deal is usually won or lost here — a good close is just discovery, read back. Go deeper →
Objection
A stated reason for not buying: price, timing, spouse, "I need to think about it." An objection is a request for more information from someone still on the phone — the prospect who agrees with everything and books nothing already left.
Rebuttal
A prepared, honest answer to a known objection — acknowledge it, address it, return to the close. Not a trick; a rehearsed truth. Every objection you'll hear this year has been said before, so hearing one without a rebuttal ready is a preparation failure, not bad luck.
Closing
The point in the sale where you ask for the decision and stop talking. A close is earned by the discovery and the pitch, not performed as a trick at the end — most deals aren't lost at the close; they're lost quietly in the steps before it, and the close just delivers the verdict.
Pipeline & process
The machinery that decides whether last month repeats or improves.
Pipeline
Every open deal you're working, laid out by stage — the inventory of revenue that hasn't happened yet. The pipeline tells you about a bad quarter while there's still time to fix it; the bank statement tells you afterward.
Pipeline stages
The named steps a deal passes through on its way to closed — new, contacted, appointment set, quoted, won or lost. Stages should be named for what the buyer verifiably did, because a stage called "hot" measures the rep's mood, not the deal.
Exit criteria
The specific, checkable condition a deal must meet before it advances a stage — appointment actually held, application actually submitted. Without exit criteria, every rep grades their own homework and the forecast you present is a stack of opinions.
Close rate
The percentage of worked opportunities that become customers — the arithmetic is public: 100 real conversations and 10 sales is a 10 percent close rate. It's the honesty metric; lead volume flatters everyone until close rate says what actually happened to it.
Follow-up cadence
The planned sequence of touches a lead receives — which channel, what message, how far apart, how many attempts before you stop. The lead who didn't answer twice isn't dead, but a cadence that quits after two attempts is. Go deeper →
Speed to lead
The time between a lead raising a hand — form fill, call, quote request — and your first contact attempt. A fresh lead is a person actively shopping right now, and the first competent voice they hear usually gets the appointment. Go deeper →
Quota
The sales number a rep or team is accountable for in a set period — in writing, with a date. A quota nobody misses is decoration and a quota nobody hits is fiction; both train your floor to stop taking numbers seriously. Go deeper →
Marketing & lead gen
How strangers find out you exist — and what they're worth when they do.
Lead
A person who might buy: a name, contact information, and some signal of interest, however faint. A lead is not revenue — it's an invitation to do work, and it's perishable: interest cools, phones change, competitors call.
Internet lead
A lead generated online — usually a form fill from an ad or a landing page — delivered in real time, and often sold to more than one buyer at once. With shared leads you're not just working the prospect; you're racing every other company that bought the same name. Go deeper →
Aged lead
An internet lead that has been sitting for weeks or months, resold in bulk at a steep discount. Cheap per lead and expensive per sale is one of the quieter ways to lose money — price the deal, not the record.
Lead magnet
Something of value given away in exchange for contact information — a guide, a calculator, a quote. Bait selects the catch: a generic freebie fills your CRM with people who collect freebies, so the magnet should attract the buyer, not the browser.
MQL vs. SQL
Marketing-qualified lead versus sales-qualified lead: an MQL matched a profile or took an action marketing considers meaningful; an SQL has been vetted as ready for an actual sales conversation. Most pipeline arguments between sales and marketing are really an argument about where this line sits — draw it in writing. Go deeper →
Retargeting
Serving ads specifically to people who already visited your site, watched your video, or engaged with your page — instead of to strangers. Attention you already paid for is the cheapest attention you will ever buy twice. Go deeper →
SEO
Search engine optimization: the work of making your site the result search engines show when your buyer types the question — content, structure, speed, and links, compounding over months. It's slow, which is why competitors quit early, and owned, which is why it keeps paying after the ad budget stops. Go deeper →
AEO
Answer engine optimization: structuring your content so AI assistants and AI search results quote you as the answer instead of merely ranking you as a link — clear questions, direct answers, evidence a machine can lift cleanly. Buyers increasingly ask an assistant instead of scrolling results, and the business the answer cites is the business that gets the call. Go deeper →
GEO
Generative engine optimization: the other industry name for AEO — the same work of getting AI assistants and AI search results to cite your business as the answer. Two names, one discipline; some shops say GEO, some say AEO, and a few will happily quote you for both. What matters is whether the machines quote you, not what the line item is called. Go deeper →
llms.txt
A plain-text file that sits on your website and hands AI systems a clean summary of what your business is and which pages matter. Think of it as robots.txt's younger sibling: robots.txt tells crawlers what to skip; llms.txt tells language models what to read. It takes minutes to add and it's one more way to make your site easy for an answer engine to quote correctly. Go deeper →
Schema markup / structured data
Code added to your pages that labels the content in a format machines read directly: this is a business, this is its service, this is a question and here is its answer. Humans never see it; search engines and answer engines lean on it. A page without schema asks the machine to guess what it's about — and machines prefer quoting the pages they don't have to guess at. Go deeper →
E-E-A-T
Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness — Google's shorthand for whether the person behind the content has actually done the thing they're writing about. It's why a named operator with receipts outranks anonymous content-farm copy on the searches that matter. You don't manufacture E-E-A-T; you document what you've already done.
Map pack
The block of three local businesses Google shows on a map at the top of local search results — also called the local pack or three-pack. For "near me" searches it sits above the regular listings, so the three businesses inside it get the calls and everyone below it waits for scroll-throughs. Getting in is a different job than ranking a webpage: it runs on your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and where the searcher is standing. Go deeper →
Google Business Profile (GBP)
The free Google listing that controls how your business shows up on Google Maps and in the map pack — hours, services, photos, reviews, posts. For a local business it's often the first thing a buyer sees, ahead of your own website. An unclaimed or half-finished profile hands that first impression to whatever Google scrapes together on its own. Go deeper →
NAP
Name, address, phone — the three facts about your business published across the web: your site, your Google Business Profile, directories, social pages. Consistency is the entire point. When the listings disagree, Google trusts the business less and ranks it accordingly — one old phone number in a forgotten directory is quietly voting against you. Go deeper →
Citation
In local SEO, any mention of your business name, address, and phone number on another website — directories, chambers of commerce, industry lists — link or no link. Citations are how search engines corroborate that your business is real and located where you say it is. Matching citations build confidence; conflicting ones erode it. Go deeper →
Service-area business (SAB)
A business that travels to its customers instead of serving them at a storefront — plumbers, movers, mobile detailers. Google treats SABs differently: you hide the address and list the areas you serve instead. Set up wrong, an SAB either leaks a home address to the internet or ranks nowhere; set up right, it competes in the map pack without owning a shopfront. Go deeper →
Review velocity
The pace at which new reviews arrive — not just the total you've stacked up. A steady stream of recent reviews tells Google and buyers the business is alive and still delivering; a wall of praise that stopped years ago tells them something too. The fix is a process, not a plea: ask every happy customer, every time, right after the win. Go deeper →
Organic arbitrage
Our name for a simple trade: when a click costs serious ad money but the organic ranking is winnable, you rank instead of paying — and collect the same click over and over for free. Ad spend rents the click; ranking owns it. The play is finding the searches where advertisers bid the price up but the organic competition never showed up, then taking the position they're all renting.
Money & metrics
The numbers that survive an argument.
Commission
A percentage of the sale paid to the person who made it — earned when the deal closes or as the customer pays. Our first commission at FreedInsure was $227; that book grew to roughly $1.3M a year. The first number only became the second because we treated selling as a process to repeat, not a payday to celebrate.
Comp plan
The written rules of how salespeople get paid: base, commission rates, bonuses, accelerators, clawbacks, and when it all pays out. Reps read the comp plan more carefully than any memo you will ever send — and they do exactly what it pays them to do.
Residual income
Income that continues after the original sale — renewal commissions, subscriptions, recurring service fees — money that arrives because of work already done. One-time income stops the day you stop; residuals are the reason a business is sellable instead of merely survivable. Go deeper →
Chargeback
A commission taken back after the sale unwinds — the customer cancels early and the payout comes off your next check. A chargeback costs the lead, the time, and the payment; a floor that celebrates volume without watching what sticks is renting its own paychecks.
CAC & LTV
Customer acquisition cost is everything you spend on sales and marketing divided by the customers it produced; lifetime value is the profit one customer generates across the whole relationship. The relationship between the two numbers is the whole game — when LTV comfortably exceeds CAC you can buy growth on purpose, and when you don't know either, your ad budget is a slot machine. Go deeper →
Scoreboard / KPI
Key performance indicators: the short list of numbers that says whether the machine worked this week — dials, contacts, appointments held, closes, revenue, kept business. What's on the scoreboard gets chased and what's off it gets skipped, so choose the numbers as carefully as you choose the people. Go deeper →
Retention & the book
Keeping what you won — the part of the business a buyer actually pays for.
Book of business
The full set of active customers a producer or agency owns, services, and earns renewals from. It's the difference between a job and a company — when an agency sells, the book is most of what the buyer is paying for. Go deeper →
Persistency
An insurance metric: the share of policies still in force after a given period instead of lapsing or cancelling. Carriers price your future on it, and it's the plainest test of whether you sold people what they needed or talked them into what they didn't. Go deeper →
Retention
Keeping the customers you already earned, measured as the share still with you after a given period. Acquisition gets the applause and retention pays the bills — a business that only knows how to start relationships never compounds. Go deeper →
Churn
The rate at which customers leave — retention's shadow. The arithmetic is simple: start the month with 100 customers, lose 5, and that's 5 percent monthly churn. It compounds against you quietly, and growth poured into a leaking bucket is just expensive water.
Win-back
A deliberate campaign aimed at former customers: a fixed problem, a new offer, an honest request for another shot. They already trusted you once and cost nothing to identify — the list of people who left is warmer than any list you can buy.
Cross-sell & upsell
Cross-selling adds a second product to an existing relationship — a health client adds a life policy. Upselling moves the customer to a bigger or better version of what they already own. The cheapest customer you will ever acquire is the one you already acquired. Go deeper →
Onboarding
The structured first stretch of a new customer relationship: setup completed, expectations set, first result delivered on schedule. Churn is usually decided during onboarding — months before anyone writes the cancellation email.
Tools & tech
The stack. None of it matters until the process underneath it does.
CRM
Customer relationship management software: the single system of record for every lead, customer, conversation, note, and next step your business has. If it isn't in the CRM it didn't happen — and a floor that keeps its pipeline in reps' heads loses the whole pipeline every time a rep leaves. Go deeper →
GoHighLevel
An all-in-one sales and marketing platform: CRM, pipelines, dialer, texting, email, calendars, and automations under one login. It runs our agency and the booking calendar on this site. Full disclosure: we're a GoHighLevel partner, so we make money when you buy it through us — which is exactly why our plans come with free expert setup and a straight answer if you don't need it. Go deeper →
Zapier
A no-code tool that connects apps that don't natively talk to each other: a form submission in one tool creates a contact in another and fires a text from a third. It's brilliant duct tape — and duct tape becomes a problem the day your revenue runs through a zap nobody remembers building.
Automation workflow
A prebuilt sequence your systems run without a human: new lead arrives, instant text goes out, task gets assigned, follow-up schedules itself. Automation never gets tired, never skips attempt five, and never decides a lead "felt cold" — reps do all three.
A2P 10DLC
The registration system U.S. carriers require before a business can text customers from a regular ten-digit local number — A2P means application-to-person, 10DLC means ten-digit long code. You register the business and what you'll be texting about, the carriers approve it, and your messages get delivered instead of filtered as spam. Skip it and your follow-up texts die silently in transit while you blame the leads.
Pixel
A snippet of code on your website that reports visitor behavior back to an ad platform: pages viewed, forms submitted, purchases made. The platform optimizes toward whatever the pixel can see, so a broken or missing pixel means paying full price for blind ad delivery.
Conversions API (CAPI) & offline conversions
The Conversions API sends conversion events to an ad platform directly from your server or CRM, instead of relying on a browser pixel that ad blockers and privacy settings can strangle. Offline conversions close the loop further: deals that happened on a phone call or in person get reported back so the algorithm learns what a real buyer looks like. Feed the machine closed deals and it hunts buyers; feed it clicks and it hunts clickers. Go deeper →
Now you speak the language. Speaking it isn't the hard part.
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