62 terms · plain English

B2B sales & lead-generation glossary.

Every term that comes up when you build pipeline and book meetings — SDR vs BDR, MQL/SQL, appointment setting, CAC, BANT, MEDDIC, intent data, deliverability — defined clearly and honestly, grouped by topic.

TL;DR

B2B sales has its own vocabulary, and a lot of it gets used loosely. This glossary defines 62 terms across the whole motion — the people (roles), the numbers (funnel & metrics, cost & economics), how pipeline gets created (outbound channels and inbound & targeting), how deals get judged (qualification frameworks), the compliance and deliverability rules, and the engagement models companies buy sales through.

Each definition is honest and citation-ready — no jargon for its own sake, no inflated stats. Where a term is something we actually run for clients, we link straight to how it works.

Roles on a sales team Funnel stages & metrics Cost & economics Outbound channels & tactics Inbound, demand & targeting Qualification frameworks Compliance & deliverability Models & engagement

Roles on a sales team

Who does what across the modern B2B sales org.

SDR (Sales Development Representative): An SDR is an outbound-focused rep who prospects cold accounts — running cold calls, cold email, and LinkedIn outreach — qualifies interest, and books meetings for a closer. SDRs generate new pipeline; they don't close. Outsourcing them is the core of sales outsourcing.
BDR (Business Development Representative): A BDR does much the same job as an SDR. Where the two are split, BDRs usually own outbound, net-new account development while SDRs qualify inbound leads — but plenty of companies use the titles interchangeably. The function matters more than the label.
AE (Account Executive): An AE is the closer. They take qualified meetings, run the full sales cycle — discovery, demo, proposal, negotiation — and own the quota. Division50 books meetings straight onto your AEs' calendars; we can also help you build the sales team itself.
Sales leader (Head of Sales / VP Sales / CRO): The executive accountable for the number — owning revenue strategy, hiring, coaching, quotas, and territories. A CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) usually owns the whole revenue engine, marketing and post-sale included.
RevOps (Revenue Operations): The function that aligns sales, marketing, and customer success around one set of data, process, and tooling — owning the CRM, reporting, forecasting, lead routing, and the revenue tech stack. Good RevOps is the difference between a pipeline you can forecast and one you can only guess at.
Gatekeeper: A person — receptionist, EA, office manager — who controls access to the buyer you actually want. Getting past (or around) the gatekeeper is a core cold-calling skill.
Decision-maker: The person with authority and budget to say yes. In complex B2B deals there's rarely just one — most purchases run through a buying committee: an economic buyer, technical evaluators, end users, and an internal champion who sells on your behalf.
Champion: An internal advocate inside the prospect's org who wants you to win and sells your case when you're not in the room. A deal without a champion is a deal you don't control — qualifying for one is the heart of frameworks like MEDDIC.

Funnel stages & metrics

The numbers that tell you whether the engine is working.

Lead generation: The practice of attracting and identifying potential buyers and capturing enough to start a conversation. It spans inbound (they find you) and outbound (you find them). A lead generation agency in the UK or in the USA runs these channels on your behalf.
Appointment setting: The point where a qualified prospect agrees to a meeting on a closer's calendar — the deliverable most appointment-setting engagements are judged on. Measured on booked meetings that show up and convert, not raw activity.
Pipeline: The set of active opportunities at every stage, usually summed as a dollar value. Pipeline is the leading indicator of future revenue — what's in it this quarter predicts what closes next. Healthy pipeline coverage is typically 3-4x the quota you need to hit.
Opportunity: A qualified deal in the pipeline: a prospect with a recognized need, budget, and a real chance of buying. A lead becomes an opportunity once it clears a defined qualification bar and gets an expected value and close date attached.
MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead): A lead marketing judges ready to hand to sales — based on fit and engagement (downloaded an asset, hit pricing, matches the ICP). An MQL is interest, not intent. Most come from demand generation and SEO.
SQL (Sales Qualified Lead): A lead sales has accepted and verified as worth pursuing — past a qualification bar (need, budget, authority, timing) that an MQL hasn't cleared yet. The MQL-to-SQL handoff is where most sales-vs-marketing friction lives; a tight, shared definition fixes it.
SAL (Sales Accepted Lead): The bridge between MQL and SQL: sales has formally accepted a marketing lead for follow-up but hasn't yet qualified it into an opportunity. Tracking SALs makes the handoff measurable — you can see exactly where leads get dropped.
Conversion rate: The percentage that moves from one stage to the next — lead-to-meeting, meeting-to-opportunity, opportunity-to-close. Stage rates are diagnostic: they show exactly where a funnel leaks, which is almost always a single weak link rather than the whole chain.
Connect rate: In cold calling, the share of dials that reach a live human rather than voicemail or a dead number. It's driven by data quality and call timing, and it sets how many dials it takes to book a meeting.
No-show rate: The share of booked meetings the prospect skips. A high no-show rate usually means weak qualification, too long a gap between booking and the call, or thin reminder sequences — not bad luck. It's the silent killer of appointment-setting ROI.

Cost & economics

What acquisition actually costs — and whether it pays back.

CPL (Cost Per Lead): Total spend ÷ leads generated. A useful efficiency check, but meaningless alone — a $30 lead that never converts costs more than a $200 lead that closes. Judge it against downstream conversion. (Our free CPL/CAC calculator scores it against B2B norms.)
CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost): Total sales-and-marketing cost to win one customer: spend ÷ new customers. Judge it not in dollars but against value — the LTV:CAC ratio (aim for 3x+) and CAC payback period (aim for under 12 months).
Cost per meeting (CPM/A): The fully-loaded cost to book one qualified meeting: program spend ÷ meetings booked. The cleanest single number for comparing outbound, paid, and appointment-setting efficiency side by side.
LTV (Lifetime Value): The total gross profit you expect from a customer over the whole relationship. LTV is the ceiling on what you can profitably spend to acquire them — the numerator in the LTV:CAC ratio that decides whether growth is funded or burning cash.
LTV:CAC ratio: Lifetime value divided by acquisition cost. 3:1 or better is the healthy benchmark; below ~1.5:1 you're losing money to grow. The clearest single test of whether acquisition is sustainable — more pipeline can't fix a broken ratio, it just loses money faster.
CAC payback period: How many months of a customer's margin it takes to earn back what it cost to win them. Under 12 months keeps acquisition self-funding; past 18 it's a cash-flow drag. The metric that tells you how fast you can afford to grow.
ROAS (Return On Ad Spend): Revenue ÷ ad spend that produced it (4:1 = four dollars back per dollar in). A fast read on paid-media efficiency — but it ignores margin and lifetime value, so pair it with LTV:CAC before you scale.
Quota: The revenue or activity target assigned to a rep or team per period. Quota attainment — the share of reps actually hitting it — is one of the truest health checks on a sales org and on how realistic the targets were set.

Outbound channels & tactics

How net-new pipeline actually gets created.

Outbound: Proactively reaching prospects who haven't raised their hand — cold calling, cold email, LinkedIn — to create demand instead of waiting for it. Division50's outbound service runs all three as one motion.
Cold calling: Phoning a prospect with no prior contact, to open a conversation and book a meeting. Despite its reputation, cold calling remains one of the highest-conversion outbound channels for high-value B2B — when it's paired with clean data, a tight opener, and disciplined follow-up.
Cold email: Emailing a no-prior-relationship prospect, at scale but personalized, to start a conversation. Cold email lives or dies on list quality, deliverability, and relevance — not volume. Blasting a bad list just burns your domains.
Social selling / LinkedIn outreach: Using social platforms — primarily LinkedIn in B2B — to research prospects, build credibility with content, and open conversations through connections and DMs. Best run as a complement to cold calling and email, not a replacement.
Multichannel outbound: Coordinating calls, email, LinkedIn, sometimes SMS, into one sequence aimed at a single prospect. It beats any single channel because it meets each buyer where they actually respond — the core of a modern outbound program.
Sales cadence / sequence: A scheduled, repeatable series of outreach touches — calls, emails, LinkedIn — over days or weeks, with defined count, channels, and spacing. A cadence turns ad-hoc outreach into a measurable process. Most replies come from touch 3 onward, which is exactly where unstructured outreach quits.
Dials: The raw count of calls placed — an activity input, not an outcome. But with a known connect rate and conversion rate, dials predict meetings, which is why power dialers and clean data matter in any cold-calling program.
Prospecting: Finding and researching potential customers and building targeted lists before any outreach. Right accounts, right people, accurate data — prospecting is the single biggest lever on outbound results, because no opener saves a list of the wrong people.
SDR-as-a-service: An outsourcing model where a vendor supplies trained SDRs, tooling, data, and management to run your outbound — delivering booked meetings, not headcount. It's the heart of sales outsourcing and what Division50's outbound team delivers.
Sales outsourcing: Hiring an external team to run all or part of your sales function — most often the outbound and appointment-setting layer — instead of building it in-house. Sales outsourcing is faster to stand up and easier to flex up or down than hiring SDRs yourself.

Inbound, demand & targeting

Pulling buyers in — and aiming at the right ones.

Inbound: Attracting buyers who come to you — via content, SEO, paid ads, and referrals — instead of reaching out cold. Inbound leads usually convert higher but take longer to build into volume, which is why most teams run it alongside outbound.
Demand generation: Creating awareness and interest across the whole funnel — paid ads, content, events, SEO — so buyers already know and trust you when they enter the market. Demand gen builds the pipeline that outbound and appointment-setting then convert.
Paid ads / performance marketing: Buying placement on search and social to drive traffic and leads, optimized against measurable cost targets (CPL, CPA, ROAS). The paid engine inside demand generation — fast to turn on, and measurable to the dollar.
ABM (Account-Based Marketing): Targeting a defined list of high-value accounts as 'markets of one' — coordinating marketing and outbound to engage the whole buying committee at each named account, instead of casting a wide net. Best for high-deal-size, low-account-count markets.
ICP (Ideal Customer Profile): A precise description of the company that gets the most value from your product and is most likely to buy and stay — by industry, size, revenue, geography, tech stack. The ICP scopes every targeting decision; a sharp one is the foundation of efficient outbound and ABM.
Buyer persona: A profile of an individual buyer within the ICP — role, goals, pains, buying triggers. The ICP picks the companies; the persona picks the people and shapes the message. Strong outbound targets a named persona, not a generic 'decision-maker'.
TAM / SAM / SOM: Three nested measures of market size. TAM (Total Addressable Market) = total demand if you reached everyone. SAM (Serviceable Addressable Market) = the portion your product and geography can actually serve. SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market) = the realistic near-term slice. They turn 'how big is this?' into a defensible target list size.
Intent data: Behavioral signals that an account is actively researching a buy — search spikes, competitor-page visits, content consumption. Intent data tells you which accounts to reach first, so outbound effort lands on accounts already leaning in.
Data enrichment: Augmenting leads with verified attributes — direct dials, valid emails, titles, firmographics, tech stack — so outreach is accurate and targeted. Enrichment quality directly drives connect rates and deliverability; bad data is the most common silent cause of poor outbound results.

Qualification frameworks

How reps decide a deal is real before they invest in it.

Qualification: Judging whether a lead is worth pursuing — real need, budget, authority, timeline. Qualifying out bad-fit deals early protects rep time as much as qualifying good ones in. Frameworks like BANT and MEDDIC make it consistent across a team.
BANT: A classic qualification checklist — Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline. Money, the power to spend it, a real need, a timeframe: qualified. Fast and easy to teach, though many complex sales now find it too rigid and reach for MEDDIC instead.
MEDDIC: A rigorous enterprise framework — Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify pain, Champion. It forces reps to map both the buying process and the people in it, which is why it suits large, multi-stakeholder deals where BANT is too thin.
GPCTBA/C&I: A consultative framework — Goals, Plans, Challenges, Timeline, Budget, Authority, and the Consequences / Implications of acting or not. It opens on the prospect's goals rather than a blunt budget question, fitting a modern, discovery-led sale.
Discovery (call): The first substantive sales conversation — uncovering the prospect's situation, goals, pains, and decision process before any pitch. Strong discovery is what turns a booked meeting into a real, qualified opportunity rather than a polite no.

Compliance & deliverability

The rules and plumbing that keep outreach legal and landing.

GDPR (B2B outreach): The EU/UK data-protection regulation. For B2B outreach it governs how you process personal data (a work email is personal data) and typically relies on a 'legitimate interest' basis — demanding relevance, transparency, and an easy opt-out. It is not a blanket ban on cold outreach, but it does require doing it properly.
PECR / ePrivacy: UK/EU rules for electronic marketing. In the UK, PECR generally allows B2B cold email to corporate recipients without prior consent — provided the sender is identified and an opt-out is offered. Sole traders and consumers get stricter protection. Always check current guidance for your market.
CAN-SPAM: The US commercial-email law. It doesn't require prior consent for B2B email, but every message must carry accurate headers and 'from' lines, a truthful subject, a valid physical postal address, and a working opt-out that you honor promptly.
Email deliverability: Whether your emails reach the inbox rather than spam. Governed by sender reputation, authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), list hygiene, and engagement. Poor deliverability quietly kills good campaigns — the prospect never even sees the message.
Domain warm-up: Gradually building a new sending domain's reputation — ramping volume slowly with positive engagement — before any real campaign. Blast a fresh domain and it gets flagged, dragging deliverability down. Warm-up is unglamorous plumbing that decides whether cold email lands at all.
Suppression list: A maintained list of who you must never email — opt-outs, current customers, competitors, hard bounces, do-not-contact requests. Honoring it is both a legal requirement and a deliverability safeguard; emailing a suppressed contact is the fastest way to a complaint.

Models & engagement

How companies structure and buy sales capacity.

GTM (Go-To-Market): The overall strategy for how a company reaches customers and sells — target market, positioning, pricing, channels, and motion. Whether the motion is sales-led, product-led, or partner-led shapes every downstream lead-gen and sales decision you'll make.
Sales motion: The repeatable way a company sells, set mainly by deal size and complexity — self-serve, inside sales (remote SDR + AE), or enterprise field sales. The motion decides which channels and roles you need, and whether outsourcing the SDR layer fits.
Lead generation agency: An external partner that generates qualified leads or booked meetings on a retainer — running outbound, paid acquisition, or both. Division50 is a lead generation agency in the UK and the USA that owns both demand creation and meeting-booking, not just one.
Retainer: A recurring monthly fee for an ongoing scope — the standard model for sales and marketing agencies. A retainer buys capacity and continuity rather than a one-off deliverable, usually scoped to channels and volume. Division50 works on quote-based monthly retainers.
Pay-per-meeting / pay-per-lead: A performance model where you pay per qualified meeting or lead delivered rather than a flat retainer. It shifts risk to the vendor — but without a tight, shared qualification bar it can reward volume over quality, so the definition of 'qualified' matters more than the price.
In-house vs outsourced sales: The build-vs-buy decision for sales capacity. In-house means full control and deep product knowledge, but it's slow and expensive to hire, ramp, and manage. Outsourcing is faster to stand up and easier to flex up or down — trading some control for speed, tooling, and data you don't have to build.

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How the vocabulary fits together

Most of these terms describe one continuous motion. Demand generation and SEO build awareness so that, when an account enters the market, it already knows you. Outbound — cold calling, cold email, and LinkedIn — reaches the in-market accounts on your ICP, qualifies them with a framework like BANT or MEDDIC, and converts interest into booked meetings. Those meetings become opportunities, opportunities become pipeline, and pipeline is the leading indicator of revenue — measured all the way down by CPL, cost per meeting, CAC, and the LTV:CAC ratio.

The reason companies split this across two vendors — one for demand, one for meetings — is exactly why the handoff so often leaks. Division50 runs both halves as one engine, whether you want it fully outsourced, focused on a single market like the UK or USA, or extended into building the sales team itself.

Definitions are general industry explanations written for clarity, not legal or financial advice. Compliance terms in particular vary by jurisdiction — always check current guidance for the markets you operate in.

Frequently asked questions

What's the difference between an SDR and a BDR?

In practice the roles overlap heavily and many companies use the titles interchangeably. Where there is a distinction, it's usually the direction of motion: a BDR (Business Development Representative) typically works outbound, net-new accounts, while an SDR (Sales Development Representative) — in that company's naming — qualifies inbound leads. Either way, both generate pipeline and book meetings for a closer (an Account Executive); neither one closes deals. The function matters far more than the label, so don't read too much into which title a given company uses.

What is sales outsourcing?

Sales outsourcing means hiring an external team to run all or part of your sales function instead of building it in-house — most commonly the outbound prospecting and appointment-setting layer (the SDR work), and sometimes paid acquisition too. A good provider brings trained reps, the data, the tooling, and the management, and is measured on the outcome: qualified meetings booked, not headcount supplied. Done well it's faster to stand up and easier to scale up or down than hiring and ramping SDRs yourself, which is why many B2B companies use it to test new markets or add pipeline quickly.

What is appointment setting?

Appointment setting is the part of the sales process where a qualified prospect agrees to a meeting that lands directly on a closer's (Account Executive's) calendar. It's the deliverable at the end of an outbound sequence — calls, emails, and LinkedIn outreach that surface interest, qualify it, and convert it into a booked, confirmed meeting. The metrics that matter aren't just the number of meetings but their quality: do they show up (no-show rate) and do they convert into real opportunities? Appointment-setting services exist precisely so your closers spend their time selling to qualified buyers rather than prospecting cold.

What's the difference between inbound and outbound lead generation?

Outbound means proactively reaching prospects who haven't raised their hand — through cold calling, cold email, and LinkedIn — to create demand. Inbound means attracting buyers who come to you, through content, SEO, paid ads, and referrals. Inbound leads usually convert at a higher rate because the buyer is already interested, but they take longer to build into volume; outbound creates pipeline on demand but needs sharp targeting and good data to convert. Most strong B2B engines run both: demand generation builds awareness and interest, and outbound converts the in-market accounts into booked meetings.

What's the difference between an MQL, an SQL, and an SAL?

These are stages in the handoff from marketing to sales. An MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) is a lead marketing judges ready to pass on, based on fit and engagement — it represents interest, not intent to buy. An SAL (Sales Accepted Lead) is the intermediate step where sales has formally accepted that lead for follow-up, which makes the handoff measurable. An SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) is a lead sales has actively verified as worth pursuing, having met a higher bar of need, budget, authority, and timing. The clearer and more shared the definitions are between the two teams, the less friction — and the fewer leads dropped — at each handoff.

Is B2B cold outreach legal under GDPR and CAN-SPAM?

Generally yes, when done properly — none of these laws is a blanket ban on B2B outreach. Under GDPR (EU/UK), processing a business contact's data for relevant outreach usually relies on a 'legitimate interest' basis, which requires relevance, transparency, and an easy opt-out. In the UK, PECR generally permits B2B cold email to corporate recipients without prior consent, provided you identify the sender and offer an opt-out. In the US, CAN-SPAM doesn't require consent for B2B email but does require accurate headers, a truthful subject, a valid physical address, and a working opt-out in every message. The common thread is honesty and an easy way out — and you should always check current guidance for the specific market you're contacting. This glossary is general information, not legal advice.