Clear definitions of AI GTM terminology for founders, operators, and buyers evaluating AI sales systems.
48 posts
A sales quota is the revenue or activity target assigned to a salesperson for a defined period. A well-set quota is achievable by 70–80% of the team — high enough to drive performance, low enough to not destroy motivation. Here's the formula and the common mistakes.
A champion is the internal advocate at a prospect account who actively pushes the deal forward inside their organisation. Deals with an identified champion close at 2–3x the rate of deals without one. Here's how to find a champion, what makes one, and how to lose one.
Net revenue retention (NRR) measures the revenue kept from existing customers over a period, including expansion, contraction, and churn. NRR above 100% means existing customers grow faster than they churn — the business compounds without adding new customers.
A buyer persona is a profile of your target buyer as an individual — their role, goals, pain points, and how they make decisions. An ICP defines the target company. The persona defines the target person within that company. Both are required for outbound that converts.
ACV (Annual Contract Value) is the average annualised revenue per active customer contract, excluding one-time fees. It's the primary metric for comparing deal sizes, sizing your sales motion, and deciding whether to build an outbound or inbound GTM.
Churn rate is the percentage of customers or revenue lost in a given period. Monthly gross churn above 2% in B2B SaaS signals a retention problem that no volume of new sales can permanently fix. Here's how to measure it correctly and what actually reduces it.
A sales cycle is the full sequence of steps from first contact to closed deal. In B2B SaaS, average cycles range from 14 days for sub-$5K ACV to 6+ months for enterprise. Here's how to measure yours, what affects it, and when a long cycle signals a problem.
Demand generation is the set of marketing activities that create awareness and interest in a product before a prospect is ready to buy. It operates upstream of lead generation — building the market, not just capturing it. Here's how it works and how it connects to revenue.
A sales engagement platform manages the execution of sales outreach — sequences, cadences, templates, call tasks, and activity tracking. A CRM stores relationship data. They solve adjacent problems and most B2B sales teams use both.
Multi-threading is the practice of building relationships with multiple stakeholders at a target account simultaneously — rather than working through a single contact. Deals with multiple active contacts are significantly less likely to go dark when one person leaves, stalls, or loses interest.
Sales objections are not rejections — they're requests for more information or reassurance. The four most common objections in B2B sales (price, timing, need, trust) each have a specific handling pattern. Here's how to work through each one.
Pipeline velocity is a single metric that captures how fast deals move through your pipeline and how much revenue that generates. It combines deal count, win rate, average deal size, and sales cycle length into one number every sales leader should track.