The revenue operations vocabulary, defined

Bowtie Model

An extension of the funnel that mirrors it after the sale — the narrow point is the purchase, with onboarding, adoption, retention and expansion forming the second half.

BPMN

A standard notation for drawing business processes — events, tasks, gateways and flows. Its value is that a diagram means the same thing to everyone who reads it.

Dashboard

A fixed set of visualisations answering a defined set of questions for a defined audience. Useful when it drives a decision; decorative when it merely displays numbers.

GTM (Go-To-Market)

The coordinated plan for how a product reaches buyers: which segments, through which motions, with which pricing, message and coverage.

Marketing Operations

The function owning marketing systems, data and process — automation platform, campaign infrastructure, lead flow and reporting.

Revenue Alignment

The condition in which marketing, sales and customer success operate from shared definitions, shared data and compatible incentives.

Revenue Architecture

The deliberate design of how offerings, motions, systems and data fit together to produce revenue — as opposed to the arrangement that accumulated by default.

Revenue Engine

The connected mechanism — people, process, systems and data — that converts demand into recognised revenue.

Revenue Flywheel

A model that treats revenue as compounding rather than linear: satisfied customers generate expansion, referral and reputation that reduce the cost of the next acquisition.

Revenue Funnel

The staged model describing how prospects progress from first awareness to closed revenue, used to locate where volume is lost between stages.

Revenue Intelligence

The practice of deriving forward-looking signal from revenue activity data — conversations, engagement, deal behaviour — rather than from stage fields alone.

Revenue Leakage

Revenue the business had already earned the right to collect but does not, through process gaps rather than lost deals — unbilled usage, missed renewals, unapplied price increases, discounts that outlive their approval.

Revenue Lifecycle

The complete arc of a customer relationship from first touch through renewal and expansion, treated as one continuous process.

Revenue Maturity Model

A staged diagnostic describing how developed a revenue operation is, from ad hoc through defined and measured to optimised.

Revenue Operations (RevOps)

The function that owns the systems, data and process connecting marketing, sales and customer success, so that revenue is produced by a designed system rather than by four teams improvising in parallel.

Revenue Signal

An observable data point that reliably precedes a revenue outcome — engagement patterns, stakeholder additions, usage changes.

Revenue System

The integrated architecture — definitions, systems of record, process and reporting — that makes revenue predictable rather than episodic.

Revenue Team

The cross-functional unit — marketing, sales, customer success and revenue operations — treated as one team accountable for the whole revenue lifecycle.

Revenue Velocity

How quickly the revenue engine converts demand into recognised revenue, across the whole lifecycle rather than within the pipeline alone.

Sales Operations

The function supporting the sales organisation specifically — territories, quotas, forecasting cadence, CRM process and rep productivity.

Workflow

An automation that enrols records on a trigger and acts on them. The place operational intent becomes executable — and the place it silently rots when nobody owns it.

Enterprise Sales

The motion serving large organisations, characterised by buying committees, procurement, long cycles and high contract value.

Horizontal SaaS

Software serving a function across many industries rather than one industry deeply.

Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

The definition of the accounts your product serves best, grounded in the observed characteristics of customers who buy quickly, stay, and expand.

Mid-Market

The segment between SMB and enterprise, typically with some procurement process but without full enterprise complexity.

Segmentation

Dividing the market into groups that warrant different treatment — different motion, pricing, coverage or support model.

SMB

The small-business segment: short cycles, few decision-makers, high volume, low contract value.

Territory

The defined set of accounts a seller is responsible for, by geography, segment, industry or named list.

Territory Design

Dividing accounts among sellers so each has a patch with enough potential to support a quota, and so coverage is neither duplicated nor absent.

Total Addressable Market (TAM)

The full revenue opportunity if every possible buyer purchased — with SAM and SOM narrowing it to what you can serve and what you can realistically win.

Vertical SaaS

Software built for a single industry, with workflows and terminology specific to it.

Account-Based Everything (ABX)

Coordinating marketing, sales and customer success around a defined set of target accounts rather than around lead volume.

Attribution

The methodology connecting marketing touchpoints to revenue outcomes, so investment can be allocated on evidence rather than on preference.

Bottom of Funnel (BOFU)

The decision stage, where a prospect is comparing specific options and evaluating fit, price and risk.

Content Marketing

Publishing material that attracts and informs a defined audience, building durable demand rather than renting attention.

Dark Funnel

The buying activity that happens where analytics cannot observe it — private communities, peer conversations, group chats, word of mouth.

Demand Generation

The discipline of creating awareness and interest in a category and a product, as distinct from capturing demand that already exists.

Demand Waterfall

A staged model tracking volume as it falls from inquiry through qualification to closed revenue, giving marketing and sales a shared vocabulary.

Full-Funnel Visibility

The ability to follow volume and conversion continuously from first touch to closed revenue and beyond, in one connected view.

Inbound Marketing

Attracting prospects by publishing material they seek out, rather than by interrupting them.

Marketing Automation Platform (MAP)

The system executing marketing programmes — email, nurture, forms, scoring — and the entry point for most lead data.

Marketing Influenced Pipeline

Pipeline where marketing touched the account at some point, without necessarily having originated it.

Marketing ROI

The return produced by marketing investment, expressed against the revenue it can be credibly connected to.

Marketing Sourced Pipeline

Pipeline where marketing originated the first meaningful contact with the account, according to a documented rule.

Nurture

A sequence of communications keeping a prospect engaged until they are ready to buy.

Search Intent

What a searcher is actually trying to accomplish — learn a definition, compare options, or buy.

Top of Funnel (TOFU)

The awareness stage, where a prospect becomes aware of a problem or a category rather than a product.

Account Scoring

Scoring at the account level rather than the individual, reflecting that B2B purchases are made by groups.

Buyer Intent

Signals suggesting an account is actively researching a purchase, drawn from on-site behaviour or third-party data.

Enrichment

Appending third-party data to records so routing, scoring and segmentation have fields to operate on.

Lead Response Time

The elapsed time between an inbound lead arriving and a human making a genuine first attempt to contact them.

Lead Routing

The rules assigning each inbound lead to a specific owner — by territory, segment, product, account ownership or round-robin.

Lead Scoring

A model assigning a numeric value to leads based on fit and behaviour, so attention goes to the ones most likely to convert.

Lifecycle Stages

The shared sequence describing a contact's relationship with the company over time — subscriber through customer — used to align marketing, sales and customer success on where someone is.

Marketing Qualified Account (MQA)

The account-level equivalent of an MQL: an account showing enough aggregate engagement to warrant sales attention.

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)

A lead that marketing considers ready for sales attention, according to a definition both teams have agreed. Without that agreement it is a marketing activity metric wearing a pipeline costume.

Product Qualified Lead (PQL)

A user whose product behaviour indicates readiness to buy — reaching a usage threshold, hitting a limit, or adopting a key capability.

Progressive Profiling

Asking for a little more information each time someone returns, instead of everything at once. Trades a slower profile for a materially higher completion rate.

Sales Accepted Lead (SAL)

A lead sales has acknowledged and agreed to work, sitting between marketing qualification and genuine pipeline.

Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)

A lead that sales has examined and accepted as a genuine opportunity worth working. The point at which pipeline responsibility formally transfers.

Service Level Agreement (SLA)

An internal commitment between teams — typically how quickly sales will work a lead marketing delivers, and what quality standard marketing will deliver.

Suppression List

A list of addresses or domains deliberately excluded from sending or logging. The mechanism that keeps competitors, colleagues and private correspondence out of your marketing and your CRM.

Account Executive (AE)

The closing role carrying a revenue number, responsible for working opportunities from qualification to signature.

Channel Sales

Selling through partners — resellers, integrators, referral partners — rather than only directly.

Discovery Call

The conversation in which a seller establishes whether a real problem exists, who owns it, and what solving it is worth.

Enablement Content

Material produced for sellers rather than buyers: battlecards, objection handling, discovery guides, competitive positioning.

Free Trial

Time-limited access to the full product so a prospect can evaluate it directly.

Freemium

A permanently free tier intended to build a user base from which some proportion converts to paid.

Land and Expand

Entering an account with a small initial purchase, then growing through additional seats, teams or products.

Multi-Threading

Building relationships with several stakeholders in a buying account rather than relying on one contact.

Outbound Sales

Manufacturing pipeline by initiating contact with accounts that have not raised their hand.

Product-Led Growth (PLG)

A motion where the product itself drives acquisition, conversion and expansion — users experience value before speaking to anyone.

Sales Development Representative (SDR)

The role responsible for creating qualified pipeline through prospecting, rather than closing it.

Sales Enablement

The function equipping sellers to execute: onboarding, training, content, tooling and the measurement of whether any of it worked.

Sales-Led Growth

A motion where a sales team drives acquisition: prospects are qualified, guided through evaluation, and closed by people.

Usage-Based Pricing

Charging in proportion to consumption rather than by fixed subscription.

Activity Metrics

Counts of seller actions — calls, emails, meetings booked — used as leading indicators of pipeline.

Close Date

The date an opportunity is expected to be signed. The single most consequential field in a pipeline record.

Deal Pipeline

The ordered set of stages a deal moves through from creation to closed. A model of the buying process, which is why stages defined by seller activity rather than buyer evidence stop predicting anything.

Forecast Accuracy

How closely forecasts match actual results, measured consistently over time. The metric that separates disciplined forecasting from lucky forecasting.

Opportunity

A record representing a specific potential purchase, with a value, a close date and a stage.

Pipeline Coverage

The ratio of open pipeline value to the target for a period. Answers whether there is enough in play to hit the number at historical conversion rates.

Pipeline Generation

The creation of new qualified opportunities, as an activity measured and owned separately from closing.

Pipeline Hygiene

Whether pipeline records are accurate and current — as distinct from pipeline health, which is whether the pipeline is any good.

Pipeline Velocity

A composite of the four variables determining how fast pipeline converts to revenue: number of opportunities, average deal size, win rate, and sales cycle length.

Sales Cycle Length

The elapsed time from an opportunity's creation to its close. The time dimension underneath capacity planning and forecasting.

Sales Forecast Category

A judgement label applied to an opportunity — commit, best case, pipeline — expressing confidence independently of stage.

SQL-to-Close Rate

The proportion of sales-qualified leads that eventually become closed-won revenue.

Stage-to-Stage Conversion

The proportion of opportunities moving from each stage to the next. The most localised view of where pipeline dies.

Time in Stage

How long opportunities remain in each pipeline stage. The diagnostic that localises where deals actually stall.

Weighted Pipeline

Pipeline value multiplied by a probability assigned to each stage, producing an expected value rather than a gross total.

Win Rate

The proportion of opportunities that close won, measured against a defined denominator — which is where most of the disagreement lives.

BANT

Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline — the original qualification shorthand, still useful for triage and weak as an enterprise framework.

Champion

Someone inside the buying organisation who wants the purchase to happen and will advocate for it when you are not in the room.

Competitive Intelligence

Structured knowledge of the alternatives a buyer is considering, and how to position against them honestly.

Decision Criteria

The explicit and implicit standards a buyer will use to choose between options.

Decision Process

The sequence of steps, approvals and reviews a buyer must complete before a purchase can be executed.

Economic Buyer

The person who can authorise the spend — not who recommends it, and not who signs the paperwork, but who controls the budget decision.

MEDDIC

An enterprise qualification framework covering Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify pain and Champion — a checklist of what must be known before a deal is credible.

MEDDPICC

MEDDIC extended with Paper process and Competition — acknowledging that deals are lost to procurement and to rivals as often as to unclear value.

Mutual Action Plan

A jointly owned document listing the steps, owners and dates required to get from agreement to signature.

Paper Process

The contractual, legal, security and procurement steps between verbal agreement and a signed contract.

SPICED

A qualification framework covering Situation, Pain, Impact, Critical event and Decision — designed around understanding the buyer rather than completing a checklist.

Win/Loss Analysis

Systematically examining why deals were won or lost, based on evidence rather than on the closing rep's account.

Annual Operating Plan (AOP)

The agreed financial and operational plan for the year: targets, headcount, spend and the assumptions connecting them.

Annual Planning

The process producing the operating plan: target setting, capacity modelling, territory and quota design, and budget allocation.

Capacity Planning

Translating a revenue target into the number of productive selling resources required to hit it, accounting for ramp, attrition and expected attainment.

Clawback

A provision reclaiming paid commission when a deal churns, fails to pay, or is cancelled within a defined window.

Compensation Plan

The document defining how a seller earns variable pay: what is measured, at what rates, with what accelerators, caps and clawbacks.

Draw

An advance against future commission, used to provide income stability during ramp or seasonal variation.

OKRs for Revenue

Objectives and key results adapted to revenue teams, expressing goals that are not simply the number.

On-Target Earnings (OTE)

Total expected compensation when a seller hits quota exactly: base salary plus target variable.

Quota

The revenue target assigned to an individual rep for a period. The most consequential number in a seller's working life, and the mechanism translating a company target into individual accountability.

Quota Attainment

The proportion of quota a rep achieved, and across a team, the distribution of that proportion.

Quota-to-OTE Ratio

Quota divided by on-target earnings — how much revenue a seller must produce per unit of their own cost.

Ramp Quota

A reduced quota applied during a new seller's ramp period, stepping up to full quota as productivity is expected to arrive.

Ramp Time

The time between a seller starting and reaching expected productivity. The variable that makes hiring plans wrong when it is guessed rather than measured.

Revenue per Rep

Revenue produced divided by the number of quota-carrying sellers. A productivity measure and a planning input.

SPIFF

A short-term incentive layered on top of the compensation plan to direct attention at something specific.

Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)

The annualised value of recurring subscription revenue at a point in time. A run rate, not a measure of revenue earned during a period.

ARPA (Average Revenue Per Account)

Recurring revenue divided by number of accounts. The per-customer economics figure that decodes what is driving ARR growth.

ASP (Average Selling Price)

The average price at which deals actually close — as opposed to list price.

Attach Rate

The proportion of customers who buy an additional product or module alongside the primary one.

Average Contract Value (ACV)

The annualised value of a contract, averaged across a set of deals. The standard unit for comparing new business.

Average Deal Size

The mean value of closed-won opportunities over a period. An input to pipeline velocity and capacity planning.

Bookings

The total value of contracts signed in a period, regardless of when revenue is recognised or cash collected.

Contraction MRR

Recurring revenue lost from customers who stayed but reduced spend — fewer seats, a lower tier, a renegotiated rate.

Conversion Rate

The proportion of items moving from one defined state to the next. The arithmetic underneath every funnel and forecast.

Expansion Revenue

Additional recurring revenue from existing customers: more seats, higher tiers, additional products or increased usage.

Gross Bookings

Total contract value signed in a period before deducting churn or contraction.

Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

The normalised monthly value of recurring subscription revenue. The same quantity as ARR at a finer resolution, and the base for movement analysis.

Net New ARR

The change in ARR over a period: new plus expansion minus contraction minus churn. The headline growth number.

Total Contract Value (TCV)

The full value of a contract across its entire term, including non-recurring elements.

Churn

Customers or revenue lost over a period. The leak determining whether acquisition compounds or merely replaces.

Churn Rate

The proportion of customers or revenue lost over a period, expressed as a percentage of the starting base.

Cross-Sell

Selling an existing customer an additional product alongside the one they have.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

A survey measure of how much effort a customer had to expend to get something done.

Customer Health Score

A composite indicator combining usage, engagement and support signals to estimate the likelihood an account renews.

Customer Success

The function responsible for ensuring customers achieve the outcome they bought, and therefore renew and expand.

Escalation

The defined path by which an at-risk account or unresolved issue is raised to people with authority to act.

Gross Revenue Retention (GRR)

Revenue retained from an existing cohort excluding expansion. Caps at 100% and measures only what was lost.

Logo Retention

The proportion of customers retained by count rather than by value.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

A survey metric derived from likelihood-to-recommend, reported as promoters minus detractors.

Net Revenue Retention (NRR)

Revenue retained from an existing cohort over a period including expansion, expressed as a percentage of where that cohort started. The clearest single indicator of whether the base grows without new customers.

Onboarding

The structured process taking a new customer from signature to working use of the product.

Quarterly Business Review (QBR)

A recurring structured meeting with a customer to review outcomes achieved, usage, and plans for the coming period.

Renewal

The event at which a customer decides whether to continue, and the process leading up to it.

Renewal Rate

The proportion of contracts up for renewal in a period that actually renewed.

Time-to-Value (TTV)

How long from purchase until a customer experiences the outcome they bought. The early metric that predicts retention.

Upsell

Selling an existing customer a higher tier or a larger commitment of what they already buy.

Burn Multiple

Net cash burned divided by net new ARR added — how much cash is consumed to produce a unit of recurring revenue.

CAC Payback Period

How long it takes for a customer's gross profit to repay the cost of acquiring them. The bridge between sales efficiency and cash flow.

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

The cost of acquiring one customer through a specific channel or campaign — a narrower, channel-level cousin of CAC.

Cost Per Lead (CPL)

Marketing spend divided by leads generated. The most immediately available demand-gen metric and the easiest to misread.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

The fully loaded cost of acquiring one new customer: sales and marketing spend for a period divided by new customers acquired from it.

Gross Margin

Revenue minus cost of goods sold, as a percentage of revenue. Whether the business model scales.

LTV:CAC Ratio

Lifetime value divided by acquisition cost. Whether a customer returns more than they cost to win.

Magic Number

A sales efficiency measure comparing new recurring revenue produced to the sales and marketing spend that produced it.

Revenue per Employee

Total revenue divided by total headcount. A crude but durable efficiency benchmark.

Rule of 40

A heuristic that revenue growth rate plus profit margin should sum to at least forty, used to judge whether growth and profitability are in a defensible balance.

SaaS Quick Ratio

New plus expansion revenue divided by contraction plus churned revenue — how much growth is produced per unit of loss.

Sales Efficiency Ratio

New revenue produced per unit of sales and marketing spend, in one of several closely related formulations.

Association

A defined relationship between two CRM records — which contact belongs to which company, which deal to which contacts. The structure that decides whether reporting can follow revenue across objects.

Attribution Model

The specific rule assigning credit for a conversion across the touchpoints that preceded it.

Calculated Property

A field whose value is derived by formula from other fields rather than entered. Cannot go stale through neglect, which makes it preferable wherever the value is derivable at all.

Champion/Challenger Testing

Running a proposed process change against the current one concurrently, so the comparison is controlled rather than sequential.

Cohort Analysis

Grouping customers by a shared starting characteristic — usually the period they were acquired — and following each group over time.

CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote)

The system governing how products are configured, priced and quoted, enforcing rules about what may be sold and at what discount.

CRM

The system of record for customer relationships — the accounts, people, deals and interactions a revenue team works from. Its value is decided by what is entered into it, not by which vendor supplies it.

Custom Object

A record type you define yourself when the standard objects do not describe your business — subscriptions, properties, vehicles, matters. Powerful and expensive: every one is a schema somebody maintains forever.

Data Enrichment Waterfall

Querying multiple data providers in sequence, using the next only where the previous returned nothing, to raise coverage without paying for duplicate lookups.

Data Governance

The rules determining who may change what, how changes are reviewed, and how they are recorded. The control that stops a designed system from drifting back to whatever it was before.

Data Hygiene

The continuous practice of keeping records accurate, complete and current — as distinct from data quality, which is the state that practice produces.

Data Mapping

The documented correspondence between fields in two systems: what moves, in which direction, and what happens when both sides change. The artefact that decides whether an integration is maintainable.

Data Orchestration

Coordinating how data moves and transforms across systems so a multi-tool stack behaves like a single one.

Data Steward

The named person accountable for a defined set of data: its definition, its quality and who may change it. Governance without a steward is a document nobody enforces.

Deal Desk

A cross-functional function reviewing non-standard deals — pricing exceptions, unusual terms, complex structures — before they are committed.

Deduplication

Identifying and merging records representing the same person or company.

Dunning

The process of recovering failed payments through retries and customer communication.

Field Governance

The rules controlling who may create, alter or retire fields, and the review that applies before they do.

Handoff

The transfer of an account or opportunity between teams — marketing to sales, sales to onboarding, onboarding to customer success.

Integration Layer

The connections moving data between systems, and the rules governing direction, timing and conflict.

iPaaS

A hosted platform for building and running integrations between systems. Buys you speed and observability; costs you a dependency and a bill that scales with volume.

Lead-to-Revenue (L2R)

The end-to-end process and measurement connecting an initial inquiry through to recognised revenue.

Process Automation

Replacing manual steps with system-executed ones, so the process runs the same way every time.

Property

A single field on a CRM record. The unit of everything a CRM knows — and the unit of everything it gets wrong, because each one is a promise that somebody will maintain it.

Single Source of Truth (SSOT)

The declared authority for a given piece of data — the system whose value wins when two systems disagree. Correctly applied it is decided per field, not per system.

Systems of Record

The set of systems that each hold authoritative data for part of the business, and the map of which owns what. The architectural decision underneath every reporting question.

Tech Stack

The set of systems a revenue team operates, and — more importantly — how they relate to each other.