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GLOSSARY

The metrics that matter.

Definitions, formulas, and worked examples for the sales performance metrics that matter.

276 terms · reviewed quarterly against verified CRM data

Metrics

120 terms

Activity Metrics: Activity metrics are rep-behavior counts — calls, emails, meetings booked, demos delivered — used as leading indicators of future revenue, measuring the inputs to pipeline generation before outcome metrics like win rate or deal velocity are observable.
Alpha Score: Alpha Score is WinsAbove's CRM-verified composite metric that scores a sales rep against the open market on revenue, win rate, and velocity — not against an internal quota.
Annual Contract Value: Annual Contract Value (ACV) is the normalized 12-month revenue value of a contract — total contract value divided by term length in years — used as the standard unit for quota assignment, territory planning, and deal-size benchmarking in B2B sales.
Annual Quota: The specific, fixed revenue target a sales representative is responsible for closing within a fiscal year, serving as the primary denominator for attainment calculations and compensation.
Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR): Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) is the normalized yearly value of a SaaS company's active subscription contracts, used to measure scale, growth rate, and valuation in recurring-revenue businesses.
ARR per Employee: ARR per employee is Annual Recurring Revenue divided by total full-time headcount — a capital efficiency benchmark that measures how much recurring revenue a company generates per unit of labor, used widely in SaaS investor benchmarking, headcount planning, and restructuring decisions.
ARR Waterfall: An ARR waterfall (also called an ARR bridge) is the period-over-period decomposition of ARR changes into four labeled movements — new, expansion, contraction, and churned ARR — that reconcile beginning ARR to ending ARR.
Attach Rate: Attach rate is the percentage of primary product sales that include a secondary product, add-on, or professional service — sold in the same deal or within a defined post-close window — used to measure how effectively a sales motion capitalizes on the initial transaction through bundling and cross-sell.
Average AE Quota: Average AE quota is the median annual new-business target assigned to account executives in a given segment and ACV band, used to benchmark compensation fairness, territory quality, and headcount-to-revenue projections.
Average Contract Length: Average contract length (ACL) is the mean duration, typically in months, of signed customer contracts across a book of business, a key input for revenue recognition, cash flow forecasting, and churn risk timing.
Average Deal Cycle: Average Deal Cycle measures the median number of days required for a sales rep to move a qualified opportunity from creation to closed-won, serving as a baseline for sales forecasting.
Average Deal Size: Average deal size (ADS), sometimes called average selling price (ASP), is total closed-won bookings divided by the number of closed-won deals in a period — a core input for capacity planning, forecasting, and recruiter tiering.
Average Discount Rate: Average Discount Rate is the mean percentage reduction from list price across closed deals, measuring how much revenue a sales team concedes to win business.
Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA) is total recurring revenue divided by the number of active accounts, measuring how much each customer is worth on average over a given period.
Average Revenue Per User (ARPU): Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) is recurring revenue divided by the number of active paying users in a period, used to measure monetization per seat rather than per account.
Average Selling Price: Average Selling Price (ASP) is total bookings divided by deal count over the same period, used to track upmarket motion, model sales capacity, and gauge price elasticity in B2B and SaaS.
Average Win Rate: The percentage of closed opportunities that result in a win, aggregated across a team or organization to benchmark rep performance and market competitiveness.
Billings: Billings is the total amount a company invoices customers in a period, calculated as recognized revenue plus the change in deferred revenue — a leading indicator of cash and future revenue.
Blended CAC: Blended CAC divides total sales and marketing spend by all new customers acquired in a period regardless of channel, distinguishing overall acquisition efficiency from channel-specific paid CAC.
Booking Window: The booking window is the date range in which a sales rep can recognize a deal as booked revenue for quota credit, typically tied to contract signature and effective dates, and it determines whether a deal counts toward the current period or the next.
Bookings: Bookings are the total dollar value of contracts signed in a period, measured at signature regardless of when the revenue is recognized or cash is collected.
Bookings Linearity: Distribution of bookings across a quarter or year. Healthy quarters book roughly evenly across the three months; hockey-stick quarters stack 60%+ of bookings in the final month.
Burn Multiple: Net cash burned per dollar of net new ARR added in a period. Lower is better — below 1x is amazing, 1-1.5x great, 1.5-2x good, 2-3x suspect, above 3x bad.
CAC Payback Period: The number of months a SaaS company needs to recover the sales and marketing cost of acquiring a customer through that customer's gross-margin-adjusted recurring revenue.
Call Coaching Score: A call coaching score is a structured rating applied to a recorded sales conversation, evaluating talk ratio, question quality, discovery depth, objection handling, and next-step clarity to surface coaching opportunities and measure rep skill development over time.
Churn Rate: Churn rate is the percentage of customers or revenue a company loses in a given period, calculated as churned units divided by the starting baseline; it is the primary driver of gross and net revenue retention and the most consequential metric a subscription business can underreport.
Churned ARR: Churned ARR measures the annualized recurring revenue lost from existing customers canceling or downgrading contracts, quantifying the leak in a SaaS revenue base.
Close Rate: Close rate is the percentage of qualified opportunities that convert to closed-won revenue within a defined period, measuring how reliably a seller turns pipeline into bookings.
Closed-Lost: A CRM disposition that records a sales opportunity as ended without revenue — with a reason code attached (competitor chosen, no budget, no decision, status quo) — and the primary input for win rate calculation, competitive analysis, and pipeline hygiene audits.
Cohort Analysis: Cohort analysis groups customers by a shared start period and tracks each group's revenue, retention, or expansion over time, separating what's actually changing from what's just averaging out.
Commission Accelerator: A commission accelerator is a variable compensation mechanism that increases a sales rep's payout rate once they exceed quota, rewarding overperformance with a progressively higher percentage of bookings on each incremental dollar above plan.
Commission Recoverable Draw: A commission recoverable draw is a fixed advance against future commissions that a rep must pay back out of earned commissions before receiving additional payout.
Committed Annual Recurring Revenue (CARR): Committed Annual Recurring Revenue (CARR) is the total annualized recurring revenue a company has contractually signed, including bookings not yet live or billing, distinguishing contracted commitment from active ARR.
Competitive Loss Rate: Competitive loss rate measures the percentage of closed-lost deals lost specifically to competing vendors, isolating internal disqualification noise to reveal true market positioning and win rates against rivals.
Competitive Win Rate: Competitive win rate is the percentage of deals closed-won in opportunities where a named competitor appeared in the deal record, divided by the total number of competitively contested deals — distinct from overall win rate, which includes no-decision losses and uncontested renewals.
Connect Rate: Connect rate is the percentage of outbound sales dials that result in a live conversation with the intended prospect, used to diagnose list quality, timing, and rep execution in outbound prospecting.
Contraction MRR: Contraction MRR is the monthly recurring revenue lost when existing customers downgrade their subscription — reducing seats, switching to a lower tier, or shrinking deployment — without canceling outright.
Cost of Sales: Cost of sales is the total fully-loaded expense required to acquire a dollar of new revenue, including AE comp, SDR comp, sales management, tools, and allocated overhead, expressed as a percentage of new bookings.
Cost Per Acquisition: Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) measures the total marketing and sales spend required to generate one new paying customer, serving as a bottom-line benchmark for go-to-market efficiency.
Cost Per Lead: Cost Per Lead (CPL) is the fully-loaded marketing spend required to generate a single qualified lead, calculated by dividing total demand-gen costs by the number of leads produced in a given period.
Cost Per Meeting: The total cost of generating one booked sales meeting, calculated by dividing total outbound or inbound campaign spend by the number of meetings actually held.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Customer Acquisition Cost is the total sales and marketing spend required to win one new customer, calculated as fully-loaded acquisition cost divided by new customers closed in the same period.
Customer Acquisition Cost Payback Period: The number of months it takes for a customer's gross margin to recoup the fully loaded cost of acquiring them, measuring sales and marketing capital efficiency.
Customer Effort Score: Customer Effort Score (CES) is a single-question survey metric — typically scored 1 to 5 or 1 to 7 — that measures how much friction a customer experienced completing a task like a support request or renewal, and it predicts repurchase behavior more reliably than satisfaction scores do.
Customer Health Score: A customer health score is a composite metric that predicts whether an account will renew, expand, or churn by combining product usage, support signals, and relationship data into a single number.
Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): Customer Lifetime Value is the total gross profit a single customer generates across the duration of their relationship, used to validate whether acquisition spend is economically defensible.
Customer Retention Rate: Customer Retention Rate is the percentage of customers a company keeps over a period, measured by logo count, after excluding new customers acquired during that same window.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): CSAT is the percentage of customers who rate a specific interaction or product experience favorably, usually 4 or 5 on a 5-point scale, and it's the closest thing sales has to an instant temperature read.
Days Sales Outstanding: Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) measures the average number of days between invoicing a sale and collecting the cash, exposing the gap between bookings a rep gets credit for and money the business actually has.
Deal Slippage: Deal slippage is the movement of a forecasted deal from its committed close period to a future period without a win or loss outcome, measured as the percentage of forecasted deals or bookings that shift quarters to diagnose forecast accuracy and rep credibility.
Deal Slippage Forecast: A quantitative projection of the percentage of pipeline value that will move out of the current quarter, calculated from historical slip rates by stage and rep cohort.
Deal Velocity: Deal velocity measures how quickly opportunities move from creation to closed-won, calculated as the average number of days a deal spends in pipeline before booking — the inverse of cycle time and a leading indicator of forecast reliability.
Deferred Revenue: Deferred revenue is cash a company has collected for products or services it hasn't yet delivered, recorded as a liability on the balance sheet until the obligation is fulfilled and the revenue can be recognized.
Effective Quota Attainment: Effective quota attainment measures the percentage of reps who hit at least 100% of their assigned sales quota, serving as a primary indicator of quota feasibility and sales team health.
Estimated Close Date: The specific calendar date a sales rep expects an open opportunity to close-won, used by RevOps to calculate deal velocity and bucket forecast commit.
Expansion MRR: Expansion MRR is the additional monthly recurring revenue generated from existing customers through upsells, cross-sells, seat additions, or usage-based overages in a given period — not from new logos — and is the primary driver of net negative churn in SaaS businesses.
Expansion Revenue: Expansion revenue is new recurring revenue generated from existing customers through upsell, cross-sell, seat growth, or tier upgrades, excluding new-logo and flat renewals.
Forecast Accuracy: Forecast accuracy measures how close a sales team's predicted bookings come to actual closed revenue, usually expressed as the percentage variance between forecast and actuals at the end of a quarter.
Gross Margin: Gross margin is the percentage of revenue left after the direct cost of delivering a product — hosting, support, and third-party fees — calculated as (Revenue − COGS) / Revenue.
Gross Revenue Retention: Gross Revenue Retention (GRR) measures the percentage of starting recurring revenue a company keeps from existing customers after churn and contraction, excluding expansion — the floor of a subscription business, capped at 100%.
Influenced Pipeline: Influenced pipeline is the total value of open opportunities that had any recorded marketing touch — an email, an ad click, a webinar attendance — at any point before or during the sales cycle, regardless of whether marketing generated the deal or merely brushed against it.
Lead Conversion Rate: Lead conversion rate is the percentage of leads that advance to the next defined stage — most often lead to opportunity or lead to customer — and the clearest read on whether a funnel produces revenue or just activity.
Lead Velocity Rate: Lead velocity rate (LVR) measures the month-over-month percentage growth in qualified leads, used by SaaS leaders as a real-time leading indicator of future revenue growth before any deal closes.
Logo Retention: Logo Retention is the percentage of customers retained over a given period, counted by customer count rather than revenue — measuring how many accounts stay regardless of how much they spend.
LTV:CAC Ratio: Ratio comparing customer lifetime value to customer acquisition cost; 3:1 is the conventional benchmark for healthy SaaS unit economics.
Magic Number: A SaaS efficiency metric that divides annualized net new ARR by trailing sales and marketing spend, showing how much recurring revenue each dollar of go-to-market investment produced.
Marketing Sourced Pipeline: The total value of sales pipeline generated directly from marketing campaigns and inbound channels, used to measure marketing's contribution to revenue.
Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR): Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) is the normalized monthly value of active subscription contracts — the operating heartbeat of a SaaS business, used to track growth, churn, and forecast accuracy.
Net Negative Churn: Net negative churn occurs when expansion revenue from existing customers exceeds revenue lost to churn and contraction, meaning the install base grows even with zero new sales.
Net New ARR: Net New ARR is the change in a SaaS company's recurring revenue base over a period, calculated as new logo ARR plus expansion ARR minus contraction ARR and churn ARR.
Net New Logo: Net New Logo counts first-time customers won in a period — brand-new accounts only, excluding renewals, expansions, and existing-customer upsells.
Net Promoter Score (NPS): NPS measures the percentage of customers who'd recommend you minus the percentage who'd actively warn people away, on a scale from -100 to +100, and it's the most over-cited number in B2B sales.
Net Revenue Retention: Net Revenue Retention (NRR) is the percentage of recurring revenue retained from an existing customer cohort over a period after accounting for expansions, contractions, and churn — a number that exceeds 100% when expansion revenue outpaces losses from the same base.
Net Revenue Retention (NRR) vs. Gross Revenue Retention (GRR): Net Revenue Retention (NRR) measures recurring revenue retained from existing customers including expansion, while Gross Revenue Retention (GRR) excludes expansion and isolates base retention. NRR above 100% indicates net-negative churn.
Net Swap ARR: Net Swap ARR is the net change in annual recurring revenue resulting from a customer dropping existing products while adopting new ones, distinct from pure expansion or contraction.
No-Decision Rate: No-Decision Rate is the percentage of qualified sales opportunities that close as lost to no decision — the buyer chose neither you nor a competitor, just the status quo.
No-Show Rate: No-show rate is the percentage of scheduled sales meetings where the prospect fails to attend, a key diagnostic of lead quality, scheduling process, and meeting confirmation discipline.
On-Target Earnings (OTE): On-Target Earnings (OTE) is the total annual compensation a sales rep earns at exactly 100% of quota — base salary plus variable commission — used as the headline number in offers and benchmarks.
Percent of Reps at Quota: The share of fully-ramped, quota-carrying sales reps who attain 100% or more of their assigned quota in a given period, used as the primary diagnostic for quota design health and sales org effectiveness.
Pipeline Coverage Ratio: Pipeline coverage ratio is open pipeline value divided by remaining quota — the metric every RevOps team treats as a constant when it should be a function of win rate.
Pipeline Coverage Ratio by Rep: Pipeline Coverage Ratio by Rep measures whether a salesperson carries enough qualified pipeline to hit quota, calculated as weighted pipeline divided by remaining quota.
Pipeline Velocity: Pipeline velocity measures how fast revenue moves through your sales pipeline, calculated as opportunities × win rate × deal size divided by sales cycle length.
Qualified Pipeline: Qualified pipeline is the total aggregate value of open opportunities that have passed a strict qualification framework, representing the actual capital a sales team has a realistic chance of closing.
Qualified Pipeline Coverage: Qualified pipeline coverage measures the ratio of sales-verified pipeline value to the remaining quota for a given period, indicating whether a rep has enough real opportunities to hit their number.
Qualified Pipeline Coverage Ratio: A sales metric that measures the ratio of qualified pipeline value to the remaining sales quota, indicating whether a rep has enough active deals to hit their target.
Quota Attainment: Quota attainment is the percentage of an assigned sales target a rep closed in a given period — a number set inside one company that does not travel between employers.
Quota Attainment Distribution: Quota attainment distribution measures how revenue production is spread across a sales team, revealing whether a few top performers are carrying the team or if consistent performance is driving the number.
Ramp Attainment: Ramp attainment measures a sales rep's productivity against a graduated quota during their onboarding period, rather than judging them against a full annual quota on day one.
Ramp Time: Ramp time is the number of months from a sales rep's start date to consistent full-quota productivity, used to model sales capacity, comp plan accelerators, and hiring ROI.
Ramp Time to Quota: Ramp Time to Quota is the number of months a new sales rep needs to reach full quota attainment, used to model hiring costs, territory capacity, and revenue expectations.
Ramped Revenue: Ramped revenue is the actualized revenue contribution of a sales rep during their onboarding period, measured against a graduated quota schedule rather than a full target.
Renewal Rate: Renewal Rate is the percentage of customers or contract value up for renewal in a period that actually renews, measured before any expansion is counted.
Revenue Per Rep: Revenue per rep divides total revenue or ARR by the number of quota-carrying reps, measuring sales-team productivity and how efficiently headcount converts into bookings.
Revenue Per Sales Rep: Total company revenue divided by the number of quota-carrying sales reps, measuring the average revenue productivity of the sales force.
Revenue Velocity: Revenue velocity measures how quickly a sales organization converts pipeline into booked revenue, calculated by multiplying deal count, average deal size, and win rate, then dividing by sales cycle length.
Rule of 40: The Rule of 40 is a SaaS health benchmark stating that a company's revenue growth rate plus its profit margin should sum to 40% or more.
Rule of 78: The Rule of 78 is a mathematical shortcut used by SaaS finance and RevOps teams to calculate the cumulative revenue impact of a single month of new sales spread across a 12-month period.
Run Rate: Run rate annualizes a recent period of revenue by multiplying it out to a full year, giving fast-growing companies a forward number that a single strong month can quietly inflate.
SaaS Quick Ratio: The SaaS Quick Ratio measures growth efficiency by dividing the sum of new and expansion MRR by the sum of churned and contracted MRR in the same period; a ratio of 4 or above is the standard benchmark for healthy, sustainable growth.
Sales Accepted Opportunity: A sales accepted opportunity (SAO) is a lead or meeting that a quota-carrying rep has reviewed, qualified against agreed criteria, and formally accepted into active pipeline — the handoff checkpoint between SDR and AE.
Sales Capacity: Sales Capacity is the total bookings a sales team can theoretically produce in a given period, calculated by multiplying the number of fully-ramped reps by their average quota and expected attainment.
Sales Cycle Length: Sales Cycle Length is the average elapsed time from first qualified opportunity to closed-won, measured in days and used as a leading indicator of forecast risk and pipeline health.
Sales Efficiency Ratio: Sales efficiency ratio measures how much new revenue a company generates for every dollar spent on sales and marketing in a prior period, the standard gut-check on whether growth is profitable or simply bought.
Sales Qualified Pipeline: The total annual contract value of open opportunities that have passed formal sales qualification criteria and are actively being worked by a quota-carrying rep.
Sales Quota: A sales quota is the revenue, bookings, or activity target assigned to a rep or team over a defined period, used to set expectations, calculate commission, and measure performance.
Sales Rep Turnover Rate: Sales rep turnover rate is the percentage of quota-carrying reps who leave a sales org — voluntarily or involuntarily — over a given period, typically annualized and benchmarked against SaaS industry norms of 20-34%.
Sales Velocity: Sales velocity is the dollars-per-day a rep or team produces, computed from opportunity count, deal size, win rate, and cycle length — the closest thing sales has to a throughput equation.
SDR to AE Ratio: The SDR to AE ratio is the number of sales development reps supporting each account executive, used by RevOps and sales leadership to size pipeline-generation capacity against closing capacity.
Sourced Pipeline: Sourced pipeline is the dollar value of new sales opportunities attributed to a specific origin — marketing, sales, partners, or customers — used to measure which function actually generates revenue.
Speed to Lead: Speed to lead is the elapsed time between a prospect raising their hand and a sales rep making first contact, measured in minutes because buyer attention decays fast.
Stage Conversion Rate: Stage conversion rate measures the percentage of opportunities that advance from one CRM pipeline stage to the next, exposing exactly where in the funnel deals stall or die.
Talk-to-Listen Ratio: Talk-to-listen ratio is the percentage of a sales call's total speaking time occupied by the rep versus the prospect, measured by conversation intelligence tools — top reps talk roughly 43% of a discovery call.
Territory Quota: Territory quota is the revenue target assigned to a specific geographic region, vertical, or account segment, representing the expected bookings that a rep or team must generate from that defined market space.
Time in Stage: Time in stage is the number of days an opportunity spends in a specific pipeline stage before advancing, stalling, or exiting — a leading indicator of deal health, forecast risk, and sales process adherence.
Time to Value (TTV): The elapsed time between contract signature and a customer's first measurable business outcome — the metric that separates a sale that delivered from a sale that merely closed.
Total Contract Value (TCV): Total Contract Value (TCV) is the complete dollar amount of a signed contract over its full term, including all recurring fees, one-time charges, and professional services—distinct from ACV, which annualizes the recurring component only.
Variable Compensation Ratio: Variable compensation ratio is the percentage of a salesperson's on-target earnings that comes from commission or bonus rather than base salary, typically 50% for quota-carrying reps and 20–30% for sales engineers and customer success roles.
Weighted Pipeline: Weighted pipeline is the dollar value of open deals after each one is multiplied by the historical win probability of its current stage, producing a risk-adjusted forecast number.
Win Rate: Win rate is closed-won opportunities divided by closed-won plus closed-lost — the cleanest single signal of seller skill, and the one most often computed against the wrong denominator.
Win Rate by Rep: Win Rate by Rep measures the percentage of qualified opportunities a single salesperson closes, compared against the same rep's pipeline quality, deal size, and competitive context.

Concepts

95 terms

Account-Based Marketing (ABM): Account-Based Marketing is a go-to-market strategy that targets a finite list of named, high-value accounts with coordinated sales and marketing rather than chasing broad inbound lead volume.
BANT: BANT is a sales qualification framework — Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline — that assesses whether a prospect has the minimum conditions for a deal to close.
Battle Card: A battle card is a one-page sales enablement document that arms reps with the positioning, objection handling, and competitive intelligence needed to win against a specific competitor.
Bluebird: A bluebird is a sales deal that arrives through inbound channels with no rep-initiated outreach — the prospect found the vendor, was pre-sold before the first call, and closed with minimal sales effort, often distorting quota attainment benchmarks and commission calculations.
Book of Business: A book of business is the full portfolio of accounts and revenue a single sales rep or account manager owns, including active customers, renewals, and expansion potential.
Bookings vs. Revenue: Bookings is the total contract value a customer commits to in a given period; revenue is the portion recognized under GAAP accounting rules — in subscription businesses these two numbers diverge sharply, and conflating them causes forecast errors, comp disputes, and investor misstatements.
Bowtie Funnel: The bowtie funnel extends the traditional sales funnel past closed-won to include onboarding, adoption, retention, and expansion, modeling the full recurring-revenue lifecycle as a mirrored shape.
Buyer Persona: A buyer persona is a research-based profile of a specific role in the buying committee — their goals, pains, and decision criteria — used to target and message individual stakeholders, distinct from the company-level ICP.
Buying Committee: The group of stakeholders inside a B2B prospect that collectively approves a software purchase — averaging 6 to 10 people on deals over $50,000.
Challenger Sale: The Challenger Sale is a B2B methodology that segments reps into five behavioral profiles and finds Challengers — who teach, tailor, and take control — win 54% of complex enterprise deals.
CHAMP: CHAMP is a sales qualification framework—Challenges, Authority, Money, Prioritization—that leads with the buyer's problem instead of their budget, used to score whether an opportunity is worth a rep's time.
Champion: A champion is an internal advocate inside a prospect account who has personal motivation to close your deal, sells on your behalf when you're not in the room, and holds enough political capital to move the purchase forward.
Channel Sales: Channel sales is a go-to-market model where a vendor sells through third-party partners — resellers, VARs, system integrators, or referral agents — rather than directly to end customers, trading margin for reach and reduced headcount cost.
Churn Rate vs Retention Rate: A comparison of two opposing SaaS metrics: churn rate measures the percentage of revenue or logos lost in a period, while retention rate measures the percentage kept, with critical differences in gross versus net calculations.
Clawback: A commission plan provision that reclaims previously paid sales commission when a deal churns, refunds, or fails to collect within a defined window — most commonly 90 to 365 days after booking.
Closed-Won: Closed-won is the final opportunity stage marking a deal where the buyer signed a contract and the revenue counts toward quota — the only stage that pays.
Command of the Message: Command of the Message is a Force Management sales methodology that trains reps to lead conversations with a differentiated, customer-specific value story tied to measurable business impact rather than a generic product pitch.
Commission Cap: A commission cap is a contractual ceiling on variable pay that prevents a sales rep from earning above a set dollar amount regardless of performance above that threshold.
Commission Clawback: A commission clawback is a provision in a sales compensation plan that requires a rep to return previously paid commissions when a deal is cancelled, churns, or fails to meet contractual terms within a specified period.
Commission Cliff: A commission cliff is a threshold in a sales compensation plan — typically 50-70% of quota — below which a rep earns zero or drastically reduced commission, even on revenue they actually closed.
Commission Decelerator: A commission decelerator is a comp-plan mechanism that pays a reduced commission rate on bookings produced below a defined quota-attainment threshold.
Commission Draw: A commission draw is an advance payment against future earned commissions, used to provide income stability for sales reps during ramp periods or seasonal slow patches.
Compelling Event: A compelling event is the specific, dated business consequence that forces a prospect to solve a problem by a fixed deadline, distinguishing real sales pipeline from unqualified interest.
Consultative Selling: Consultative selling is a sales approach where the rep diagnoses the buyer's problem through structured discovery before recommending a fit, prioritizing tailored guidance over feature pitching.
Dark Funnel: The portion of the B2B buying process conducted in untrackable channels — peer forums, private Slack communities, G2 reviews, and organic search — before any form fill or CRM touchpoint, accounting for an estimated 70% or more of total buyer research activity.
Economic Buyer: The economic buyer is the single person in a B2B deal with discretionary authority to spend the budget — the one signature that can move a contract from procurement to legal to wire transfer.
Enterprise Sales: Enterprise sales is the pursuit of large, complex contracts sold to organizations with sizable buying committees, multi-stage procurement, and 6-to-18-month sales cycles, distinguished from SMB or mid-market sales by deal size, stakeholder count, and cycle length rather than any fixed revenue threshold.
FAINT: FAINT is a lead-qualification framework — Funds, Authority, Interest, Need, Timing — built as a looser alternative to BANT for qualifying prospects before a budget line exists.
Firmographics: Firmographics are the organizational attributes — industry, employee count, revenue, geography, funding stage, tech stack — used to define an ideal customer profile and score which accounts a sales team should prioritize.
Forecast Category: Forecast category is the CRM tag — Omit, Pipeline, Best Case, Commit, Closed — that reps apply to each open opportunity to signal how likely it is to close this quarter.
GAP Selling: GAP Selling is a problem-centric sales methodology that closes deals by quantifying the measurable distance between a buyer's current state and their desired future state.
Ghosting: Ghosting in B2B sales occurs when a prospect or active deal sponsor abruptly stops responding to communication without explanation, causing the opportunity to stall or die in the pipeline.
Go-to-Market Strategy: A go-to-market strategy is the plan for how a company brings a product to buyers — defining the target customer, channels, message, pricing, and sales motion that turn a market into revenue.
GPCT: GPCT (Goals, Plans, Challenges, Timeline) is a sales qualification framework that scores opportunities on a buyer's measurable goals, their plan to hit them, the obstacles in the way, and the deadline driving action.
Hunter vs. Farmer: Hunter vs. farmer is a sales org segmentation model that divides account executives into hunters focused on net-new logo acquisition and farmers focused on expansion and retention within existing accounts.
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a documented description of the company most likely to buy, retain, and expand — defined by firmographics, technographics, and behavioral signals — used to filter pipeline and prioritize go-to-market spend.
Inbound Sales: Inbound sales is a sales motion where the buyer initiates contact through content, search, or a self-serve trial, and the rep's job shifts from prospecting to qualifying and closing an already-interested lead.
Inside Sales: Inside sales is the practice of selling to business customers via phone, video, and digital channels without in-person travel, and is the dominant revenue motion for B2B SaaS companies with annual contract values below $150,000.
Intent Data: Intent data is behavioral signal — content consumption, search activity, and engagement — used to identify which accounts are actively researching a purchase before they ever fill out a form.
Land and Expand: Land and expand is the go-to-market strategy of closing a small initial contract with a customer to prove value, then systematically growing the account through new users, modules, business units, and use cases—measured in net dollar retention and expansion ARR.
Marketing Qualified Account: A Marketing Qualified Account (MQA) is a target account that has hit a defined engagement threshold — multiple stakeholders visiting the site, high-value content consumed, intent signals spiking — indicating the account as a whole, not one lead, is ready for sales outreach.
MBO (Management by Objectives): MBO is a slice of a sales rep's variable pay tied to completing defined strategic or qualitative objectives rather than closing revenue.
MEDDIC: MEDDIC is a six-step B2B sales qualification framework — Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, Champion — used to qualify enterprise opportunities and reduce no-decision losses.
MEDDPICC: MEDDPICC is a B2B sales qualification framework with eight checkpoints — Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Paper Process, Identify Pain, Champion, Competition — used to score whether a deal is real.
Mobilizer: A mobilizer is the buyer-side stakeholder who drives internal consensus to make a complex purchase happen, identified by Gartner/CEB research as the strongest predictor of complex deal closure.
MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead): An MQL is a lead that marketing has scored above a threshold—based on behavioral signals and firmographic fit—and formally passed to sales as worth a rep's time; the MQL-to-SQL conversion rate determines whether that designation means anything.
NEAT Selling: NEAT Selling is a B2B sales qualification framework — Need, Economic impact, Access to authority, Timeline — built to replace BANT's budget-first reflex with a value-first one.
Non-Recoverable Draw: A non-recoverable draw is a guaranteed minimum payment a company pays a rep each period regardless of commissions earned, with any shortfall forgiven rather than clawed back from future pay.
North Star Metric: A North Star Metric is the single leading indicator a revenue organization tracks because it causally predicts future revenue better than revenue itself, chosen instead of lagging outputs like bookings or ARR.
OTE (On-Target Earnings): OTE is the total cash a rep earns at exactly 100% of quota — base salary plus variable commission — and the figure most often inflated on resumes and job posts.
Outbound Sales: Outbound sales is the motion where reps initiate contact with prospects who have not raised their hand — cold calls, cold email, and social outreach to a targeted account list — rather than waiting for inbound demand.
Overlay Quota: A revenue target assigned to a specialist rep — solutions engineer, product specialist, or overlay account executive — whose coverage area overlaps with one or more direct AE territories, holding both accountable for the same closed deals without double-counting the revenue.
Paper Process: Paper process is the sequence of legal, procurement, security, and signature steps a closed-won deal must clear between verbal agreement and executed contract — the P in MEDDPICC.
Pay Mix: The split between fixed base salary and variable commission inside a sales rep's on-target earnings, expressed as a ratio like 60/40 or 50/50.
President's Club: President's Club is the annual recognition program — almost always a destination trip with partners — that sales orgs award to reps who exceed a defined performance threshold, typically 100%+ of quota for the year.
Product-Led Growth: Product-led growth (PLG) is a go-to-market motion where the product itself drives acquisition, conversion, and expansion — users self-serve to value before sales ever gets involved.
Product-Qualified Lead: A user who has demonstrated buying intent through product usage signals — activation depth, team invites, paywall encounters — in a freemium or free-trial product. The PLG counterpart to an MQL.
Quota Cap: A quota cap is a ceiling on the total commission a sales rep can earn within a specified period, regardless of how much revenue they close above their target.
Quota Relief: Quota relief is a temporary, formal reduction of a sales rep's quota to account for circumstances outside their control, such as territory changes, parental leave, or product outages.
Quota Retirement: The mechanism by which closed bookings are formally credited against a sales rep's quota, determining commission eligibility and attainment tier — and the contract math that separates a good quarter from a great one.
Ramp Quota: A ramp quota is a reduced sales quota assigned to a new rep during their onboarding period, stepping up on a fixed schedule — commonly 25/50/75/100% — until they carry full quota.
Recoverable Draw: A recoverable draw is a guaranteed minimum commission payment to a sales rep that must be paid back from future commissions once they exceed the draw amount, creating a deficit balance the rep works off over time.
Replacement-Level Rep: Replacement-level rep is the WinsAbove benchmark for the median seller at the same role, segment, and tenure who could be hired this quarter for the same comp — sales' answer to baseball's replacement-level value.
Revenue Recognition: Revenue recognition is the accounting principle under ASC 606 that determines when a closed contract counts as income on the income statement — not at signing, but as the performance obligation is satisfied over the delivery period.
Sales Accepted Lead (SAL): A Sales Accepted Lead (SAL) is a marketing-generated lead that a sales rep has reviewed and formally accepted as qualified to work, marking the contractual handoff between marketing-sourced pipeline and the sales team's pursuit list.
Sales Commission: Sales commission is the variable portion of a seller's pay tied directly to results — revenue closed, quota attained, or specific deals booked — and the lever that decides which deals reps actually chase.
Sales Commission Split: A sales commission split is the pre-agreed division of commission credit between two or more reps on a single closed deal, formalized before close to prevent comp disputes over shared, multi-territory, or handed-off accounts.
Sales Compensation Plan: A sales compensation plan is the documented structure defining how a rep gets paid — base salary, variable commission, quota, accelerators, and clawbacks — designed to align rep behavior with company revenue goals.
Sales Enablement: Sales enablement is the function inside a revenue org that equips reps with content, training, tooling, and certifications designed to shorten ramp time and lift win rate.
Sales Funnel: A sales funnel is the staged model of how prospects move from first awareness to closed customer, with predictable drop-off at every stage that lets teams forecast revenue from top-of-funnel volume.
Sales Methodology: A sales methodology is the repeatable framework a sales team uses to qualify, advance, and close deals — defining the questions reps ask, the criteria they score, and the order they do it in.
Sales Motion: A sales motion is the repeatable way a company acquires and expands customers — the specific combination of who sells, to whom, at what price, and through which channel.
Sales Pipeline: A sales pipeline is the structured set of open opportunities a rep or team is actively working, organized by deal stage and weighted by value, used to forecast revenue and diagnose where deals stall.
Sales Qualified Account (SQA): A Sales Qualified Account is an account that sales has reviewed and formally accepted as worth active pursuit, based on ICP fit and observed buying signals from multiple stakeholders — the account-based equivalent of an SQL.
Sales Qualified Lead: A prospect vetted by both marketing and sales as having the intent, budget, and authority to enter the active sales cycle, bridging the gap between a Marketing Qualified Lead and a Sales Qualified Opportunity.
Sales Qualified Meeting: A Sales Qualified Meeting (SQM) is a scheduled prospect conversation that clears a predefined fit-and-intent bar, distinguishing meetings worth an AE's time from meetings an SDR merely got on the calendar.
Sales Qualified Opportunity: A lead that an AE has qualified into a real buying opportunity — past the conversation stage and into the pipeline with buyer, budget, need, and timeline confirmed.
Sandler Selling System: The Sandler Selling System is a sales methodology built on mutual qualification and buyer-seller equality, designed to disqualify bad-fit deals early and prevent reps from chasing prospects who will never buy.
Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM): Serviceable Addressable Market is the share of total market demand a company can realistically reach with its current product, pricing, geography, and sales motion.
Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM): Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) is the share of the serviceable addressable market a company can realistically capture in a defined period given its sales capacity, pricing, geography, and competition.
Social Selling: Social selling is the practice of using social networks—primarily LinkedIn—to research, engage, and build trust with buyers before a formal sales conversation begins, measured by activity, relationship depth, and influenced pipeline.
Solution Selling: Solution Selling is a B2B sales methodology developed by Mike Bosworth that structures the sales conversation around diagnosing a buyer's pain, quantifying business impact, and co-creating a vision of the fix before any product capability is introduced.
SPICED: SPICED is a six-stage discovery and qualification framework — Situation, Pain, Impact, Critical Event, Decision — used by sales teams to anchor deals to a buyer's measurable business outcome and a hard deadline.
SPIFF: A SPIFF (Sales Performance Incentive Fund) is a short-term cash bonus paid to sales reps for completing a specific selling behavior — closing a target product, segment, or deal type — separate from standard commission.
SPIFF vs MBO: SPIFFs are immediate cash bonuses for specific transactions, while MBOs are periodic bonuses tied to broader strategic objectives, creating distinct behavioral incentives in sales compensation.
SPIN Selling: SPIN Selling is a discovery framework that structures sales conversations around four question types — Situation, Problem, Implication, and Need-payoff — to build buyer urgency in complex deals.
SQL (Sales Qualified Lead): A Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) is a prospect that a sales rep has contacted and confirmed meets the organization's criteria for active selling, distinguishing it from an MQL by requiring human judgment rather than automated behavioral scoring.
Technical Win: The formal endorsement from a buyer's technical evaluators that a vendor's product meets their requirements, serving as the stage gate before commercial negotiation begins in enterprise deals.
Technographics: Technographics is data describing the specific software, infrastructure, and tools a company runs, used to prioritize accounts for integration, displacement, or greenfield sales plays.
Total Addressable Market: Total addressable market (TAM) is the maximum annual revenue available if every viable buyer in a category bought at current pricing — a ceiling for capacity planning and fundraising, not a forecast.
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Total cost of ownership (TCO) is the full lifetime cost of a purchase — license, implementation, training, maintenance, downtime, and switching costs — not just the sticker price on the quote.
Total Target Market: Total Target Market (TTM) is the portion of a serviceable obtainable market that a sales organization can realistically reach and win based on its current product, pricing, and go-to-market motion, expressed in annual revenue potential.
Uncapped Commission: Uncapped commission is a sales compensation structure with no ceiling on variable earnings — a rep who sells more keeps earning commission past 100% of quota, with no cutoff.
Value Proposition: A value proposition is a specific, quantifiable statement of the outcome a buyer gets by choosing a product over the status quo or a named competitor — not a feature list or a tagline.
Value Selling: Value selling is a sales methodology that anchors price to a quantified business outcome — the deal is justified by what the buyer gains or stops losing, not by product features or competitor pricing.

Process

41 terms

Account Planning: A structured pre-pursuit process in which an AE or account team maps a named account's organizational structure, budget authority, competitive presence, revenue history, and expansion potential to produce a prioritized 90-day engagement strategy.
Account Tiering: Account tiering is the process of ranking every account in a company's addressable market into ordered segments — typically Tier 1, 2, and 3 — based on revenue potential, ICP fit, and propensity to buy, then aligning sales coverage, marketing investment, and executive attention proportionally to each tier.
Cold Calling: Cold calling is outbound phone prospecting to people who haven't asked to be contacted, measured by connect rate and conversion to meetings rather than raw dial volume.
Cold Email: Cold email is unsolicited outbound email sent to a prospect with no prior relationship, used by SDRs and BDRs to book qualified meetings, measured through a funnel of open rate, reply rate, and meetings booked.
Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ): Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) is the process and software category that turns a product configuration into an approved, priced, signable quote — enforcing pricing rules and discount approvals automatically.
Cross-Selling: Cross-selling is the practice of selling an existing customer a different, additional product than the one they already bought — widening the account to drive expansion revenue at near-zero acquisition cost.
Deal Desk: A cross-functional approval function that reviews non-standard sales deals — discounts, custom terms, multi-year structures — before they're signed.
Deal Registration: Deal registration is a channel program where a partner formally claims a sales opportunity with the vendor to secure exclusive rights, margin protection, and pricing on that specific deal.
Deal Review: A deal review is a recurring meeting where a sales manager stress-tests a rep's active opportunities against forecast category, next steps, and buyer engagement before those deals reach deal desk or the executive forecast roll-up.
Demand Generation: Demand generation is the set of marketing and sales activities that create awareness and interest in a product, building the qualified pipeline that revenue teams convert into bookings.
Discovery Call: A discovery call is the structured first conversation between a seller and a qualified prospect to identify business pain, decision criteria, and whether to advance the opportunity.
Forecast Commit: A forecast commit is a rep's or manager's binding promise that a specific set of deals will close within the period, carrying personal accountability distinct from pipeline or best-case categories.
Lead Generation: Lead generation is the process of identifying and capturing contact information from people or accounts who show early buying interest, before they've been qualified as sales-ready.
Lead Nurturing: Lead nurturing is the structured process of staying in contact with prospects who aren't ready to buy, delivering relevant touches over time until a buying trigger moves them into an active sales cycle.
Lead Routing: Lead routing is the automated process of assigning an inbound lead to a specific rep or queue the instant it hits the CRM, based on rules like territory, account size, or lead score.
Lead Scoring: Lead scoring is the practice of assigning numeric values to leads based on fit and behavior so sales prioritizes the prospects most likely to convert.
Multithreading: Multithreading is the deliberate practice of building substantive relationships with multiple stakeholders inside a single buying account so a B2B deal survives turnover, reorgs, and shifting priorities.
Mutual Action Plan (MAP): A Mutual Action Plan is a jointly-owned, dated document listing every step required to move a B2B deal from verbal commitment to signed contract, with named owners on both buyer and seller sides.
Mutual Close Plan: A documented timeline agreed upon by both the seller and the buyer that outlines the specific milestones, tasks, and dates required to execute a final purchase.
Objection Handling: Objection handling is the skill of surfacing, understanding, and resolving a buyer's stated and unstated reasons not to buy without becoming adversarial.
Opportunity Stage: An opportunity stage is the named step in a sales pipeline that marks how far a deal has progressed toward a close, defined by buyer actions and exit criteria rather than rep optimism.
Performance Improvement Plan (PIP): A performance improvement plan (PIP) is a formal, time-boxed document — usually 30 to 90 days — that defines specific targets an underperforming sales rep must hit to keep their job.
Pipeline Generation: Pipeline generation is the systematic creation of qualified sales opportunities through outbound prospecting, marketing-sourced inbound, partner referrals, and account-based motions—measured in dollars of qualified pipeline created and pipeline-to-quota coverage ratios.
Pipeline Hygiene: Pipeline hygiene is the discipline of keeping CRM opportunity data accurate and current, measured against close-date staleness, next-step recency, and required-field completion.
Power Map: A structured diagram of the key stakeholders within a prospect organization that maps each person's authority level, internal influence relationships, and deal stance — used to identify champions, blockers, and gaps in executive engagement before close.
Proof of Concept (POC): A proof of concept is a time-boxed, success-criteria-driven trial in which a prospect validates that a product solves their specific problem before committing to purchase.
Proof of Value: A time-boxed, structured evaluation in which a vendor demonstrates measurable business impact against pre-agreed buyer success criteria before a contract is signed — distinct from a proof of concept, which tests technical feasibility alone.
Quarterly Business Review: Recurring 90-day meeting between a vendor and customer to review value delivered, surface risks, and align on the next quarter — the primary forum where renewals get won or lost.
Quote-to-Cash: Quote-to-cash (Q2C) is the end-to-end process — and the metric measuring its duration — from generating a sales quote through contract signature, provisioning, invoicing, and collected cash.
Request for Proposal (RFP): A Request for Proposal is a formal document a buyer issues to invite competing vendors to submit structured bids against a defined set of requirements.
Sales Cadence: A sales cadence is a predefined sequence of outreach touches — emails, calls, LinkedIn messages, voicemails — spaced across a fixed number of days to systematically pursue a prospect until they respond or exit.
Sales Capacity Planning: Sales capacity planning is the headcount math that works backward from a revenue target to determine how many ramped, quota-carrying reps an org needs to hit it.
Sales Compensation Benchmarking: Sales compensation benchmarking is the process of comparing a company's OTE, base-to-variable split, quota size, and accelerators against market data for reps in the same role, segment, and region, to determine whether pay is competitive and quotas are realistically attainable.
Sales Forecasting: Sales forecasting is the process of predicting how much revenue a sales team will close in a given period, built from pipeline data, historical conversion rates, and rep-level judgment.
Sales Kickoff (SKO): A Sales Kickoff (SKO) is an annual or semi-annual all-hands event where sales leadership reveals new quotas and compensation plans, delivers product and competitive training, and resets the team's go-to-market priorities for the coming period.
Sales Playbook: A sales playbook is a documented set of repeatable strategies, talk tracks, qualification criteria, and objection responses that sales reps follow to move deals from first contact to closed-won — the codified institutional knowledge of a sales organization.
Stack Ranking: A forced-distribution performance management system where all sales reps are ordered by attainment and the bottom tier — typically 5–15% — automatically enters a performance improvement plan or is terminated, regardless of absolute quota performance.
Territory Design: Territory design is the systematic carving of an addressable market into rep-owned books of business based on account count, revenue potential, geography, or vertical, with the goal of balancing opportunity equally across the sales team.
Upselling: Upselling is the practice of selling an existing customer a higher tier, larger volume, or premium version of a product they already buy — distinct from cross-selling, which adds a different product.
Whitespace Analysis: Whitespace analysis is the exercise of mapping what a customer currently buys against what they could buy across your product line, used to plan account expansion.
Win/Loss Analysis: Win/loss analysis is the systematic post-decision review of why B2B deals closed or didn't — interviewing buyers and reps to surface the real reasons behind outcomes, separate from CRM dispositions.

Roles

13 terms

Account Executive (AE): An Account Executive is a quota-carrying B2B sales rep who owns opportunities from qualified pipeline through closed-won, running discovery, demos, negotiation, and contract close.
Account Manager: An account manager owns the commercial relationship with existing customers, carrying a quota built on retention and expansion rather than new-logo acquisition.
Business Development Representative (BDR): A Business Development Representative (BDR) is an outbound sales role responsible for prospecting cold accounts and generating qualified pipeline for account executives, measured primarily on meetings booked and opportunities created.
Chief Revenue Officer (CRO): A Chief Revenue Officer is the executive who owns every revenue-generating function — sales, marketing, and customer success — and is held to a single number: total company revenue growth.
Customer Success Manager: A Customer Success Manager owns the post-sale relationship for a book of accounts and is measured on retention, adoption, and expansion through renewal rate and net revenue retention.
Field Sales: Field sales is a go-to-market model where reps travel to meet prospects in person, typically carrying larger quotas and deal sizes than inside sales reps working the same market by phone or video.
Quota-Carrying Rep: A quota-carrying rep (QCR) is any sales employee whose pay is formally tied to a revenue, bookings, or pipeline target, the headcount classification RevOps uses to calculate rep productivity, ramp cohorts, and capacity plans.
Revenue Operations (RevOps): Revenue Operations (RevOps) is the centralized function that aligns sales, marketing, and customer success around shared data, process, and tooling to deliver predictable revenue growth.
Sales Development Representative (SDR): An SDR is the rep who books qualified meetings for closers — they don't carry a revenue quota, they carry a meetings-set quota, and they're the entry point into B2B sales for most careers.
Sales Engineer: A sales engineer is the technical counterpart to the account executive on a B2B sales team, owning demos, technical discovery, and proof-of-concept design to win the technical evaluation.
Sales Manager: The first-line leader responsible for coaching a quota-carrying team, inspecting pipeline, and converting company revenue targets into rep-level execution — the role with the most direct line between daily behavior and revenue outcome.
Sales Operations: Sales Operations (Sales Ops) is the internal function responsible for CRM administration, territory and quota design, compensation plan management, forecasting infrastructure, and performance reporting that enables a sales team to operate efficiently and at scale.
VP of Sales: A VP of Sales is the executive who owns the revenue number for the field organization — quota setting, hiring, forecasting, and the systems that turn rep activity into predictable bookings.

Anti-patterns

7 terms

Happy Ears: Happy ears is the sales anti-pattern where a rep hears commitment the buyer never gave, producing inflated Commit forecasts and 40-60% slip rates that show up only after the quarter is lost.
Pass-Through Opportunity: A pass-through opportunity is a CRM record that is moved from one stage to the next without genuine sales activity, often to inflate pipeline metrics or hit activity quotas.
Phantom Pipeline: Sales opportunities in a CRM that are technically open but have zero chance of closing, often kept active by reps to artificially inflate pipeline coverage and mask poor prospecting.
Pipeline Padding: Pipeline padding is the practice of inflating CRM opportunity counts or dollar values with weak, stale, or fictional deals to hit coverage ratios and avoid pipeline reviews.
Sandbagging: Sandbagging is the deliberate timing of deal close dates to maximize commission, accelerator, or attainment outcomes — a CRM gaming pattern WinsAbove detects from deal-event timestamps.
Single-Threaded Deal: A single-threaded deal is an open opportunity where the sales rep has an active relationship with only one engaged stakeholder at the target account, regardless of how many contacts are logged in the CRM record, making it high-risk if that one person goes dark, changes jobs, or gets overruled.
Zombie Deal: A zombie deal is a sales opportunity that remains perpetually active in the CRM pipeline despite zero buying momentum, often kept open to inflate a rep's pipeline coverage.

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