Sales & Customer Development Glossary: 30 Terms, Plain English

Two salespeople hear the exact same sentence from a buyer: “Sounds great, I’ll think about it.” One writes it down as a win. The other knows it’s a polite goodbye.

The difference isn’t talent. It’s vocabulary. When you have a precise word for a thing, you start to see the thing clearly, and “I’ll think about it” stops looking like progress.

This is your plain-English map of the language sales and customer development people actually use. No jargon for jargon’s sake.

Why this matters

Most sales advice assumes you already speak the language. People throw around “qualify the lead,” “find your champion,” “watch your churn,” and “is that a real advance or a stall?” as if everyone learned it somewhere.

You didn’t have to. But the words carry real ideas, and the ideas change how you spend your time.

Knowing the difference between a lead and an opportunity stops you from celebrating too early. Knowing what an advance is stops you from mistaking politeness for progress. Knowing your ICP stops you from chasing the wrong customers for six months.

The terms below are sorted into how a deal actually moves: who you’re talking to, the conversation itself, how you qualify, the frameworks, and the stages a deal passes through. Read it start to finish, or jump to the word you needed.

Knowing who you’re talking to

Before you sell anything, you need to know who is worth your time and who holds the real power.

• Lead - Any person or company who might become a customer. The rawest stage. A lead becomes a prospect once you confirm basic fit.
• Prospect - A lead you’ve confirmed is a plausible fit and worth a conversation. Sits between lead and opportunity.
• ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) - A clear description of the customer who needs you most, gets the most value, and is easiest to sell to and keep. Knowing your ICP tells you who to chase and who to skip.
• Economic buyer - The person who controls the budget and can say a final yes to spending money. Often more senior than the person you first meet, which is why deals stall when you never reach them.
• Champion - Someone inside the customer’s company who wants your product to win and will push for it when you’re not in the room. Every hard deal needs one.

A quick example. You meet a friendly manager who loves your tool. That’s a warm conversation, but if she can’t approve the budget, she’s a potential champion, not your economic buyer. The deal isn’t real until your champion gets you in front of the person who signs.

The conversation itself

This is where most deals are quietly won or lost, in how you talk and, more importantly, how you listen.

Listening and questions

• Active listening - Listening so closely you can repeat back what the person meant, not just what they said. You show it by summarizing (“So the painful part is the manual re-entry, did I get that right?”) and by staying quiet long enough for them to keep going.
• Open question - A question that invites a full answer (“Walk me through how you handle that today”). Open questions do the heavy lifting in discovery.
• Closed question - A question answerable in one word, usually yes or no (“Do you like this?”). Useful for confirming facts, weak for learning.
• Leading question - A question that pushes the answer you want, like “You’d pay for this, right?” People say yes to be nice, and you learn nothing true.

Here’s why the last one bites. Ask “You’d pay for this, right?” and almost everyone nods. You walk away convinced you have a business. The leading question fed you the answer and you mistook it for a fact.

The shape of the call

• Discovery call - An early conversation whose only job is to understand the other person’s situation, problems, and goals, not to pitch. Good discovery makes everything after it easier.
• Cold outreach - Contacting someone who has never heard of you, like a cold email or message.
• Warm outreach - Reaching out where a connection already exists: a referral, a mutual contact, or someone who engaged with you. Far higher response rates than cold.
• Trial close - A small, low-pressure check on how the buyer is feeling before you ask for the full commitment, like “How does this sound so far?” It tells you whether to keep going or to address a concern first.
• Closing - Asking for and getting the buying decision. Not a single magic line; it’s the natural end of a conversation where you’ve earned the right to ask.

When they push back (or dodge)

• Objection - A reason the buyer gives for not moving forward: price, timing, trust, fit. A real objection is useful information, not an attack.
• Brush-off - A polite, vague reason to end a conversation without committing, like “send me some info” or “let me check with the team.” It usually hides a real objection you haven’t surfaced yet.

The skill is telling these apart. An objection is a door you can open with a good question. A brush-off is a door being quietly closed, and the only way through is to ask what’s really going on.

Selling value, not features

• Value vs features - A feature is what your product has (“exports to CSV”). Value is what it does for the customer (“you stop spending Friday afternoons copying data by hand”). Buyers pay for value, every time.

Qualifying: is this deal worth your time?

You have limited hours. Qualification is how you spend them on deals that can actually close.

• Qualification - Deciding whether a prospect is worth your limited time, based on fit, need, ability to buy, and timing. Saying no to bad fits is as valuable as saying yes to good ones.
• Advance - A concrete next step that moves a deal forward, agreed to by the buyer. “Let’s meet Thursday with your boss” is an advance. “Sounds great, I’ll think about it” is not.
• Stall - The opposite of an advance. The conversation ends with no agreed next step. It feels pleasant, which is exactly what makes it dangerous.
• Churn - The rate at which customers stop paying and leave. High churn means you’re filling a leaky bucket; selling more doesn’t help until you fix the leak.

That last one matters more than it looks. You can be brilliant at closing and still go nowhere if customers pour out the bottom as fast as you pour them in.

The famous frameworks (decoded)

You’ll hear these named like everyone already knows them. Here’s what each one actually is.

• BANT - A fast qualification checklist born at IBM: Budget (can they pay?), Authority (can this person decide?), Need (do they have the problem?), Timeline (when will they act?). Quick but blunt.
• MEDDIC / MEDDPICC - A B2B framework for bigger deals: Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify pain, Champion. The extra “PC” in MEDDPICC adds Paper process and Competition. It helps you judge whether a deal is real and winnable.
• SPIN - Neil Rackham’s question sequence, drawn from analyzing thousands of sales calls: Situation, Problem, Implication, Need-payoff. You move from facts, to pains, to the cost of those pains, to the value of fixing them.
• GAP selling - From Keenan’s book of the same name. You find the gap between where the customer is now (current state) and where they want to be (future state). The size of that gap is the value of solving it.
• The Mom Test - Rob Fitzpatrick’s rules for customer conversations so honest that even your mom couldn’t lie to you: talk about their life not your idea, ask about the past not the future, and talk less while you listen more.
• Customer development - Steve Blank’s method of systematically talking to customers to test your assumptions, in four stages: discovery, validation, creation, and company-building. Summed up in one line: “get out of the building.”

Think of these as lenses, not laws. BANT is a quick gut check. MEDDIC is a full medical exam for a big, complex deal. The Mom Test keeps your early research honest. You don’t need all of them on every call.

The stages a deal (and a product) moves through

These words describe progress, both for a single deal and for your whole business.

• Pipeline - The list of all your active deals, organized by stage from first contact to closed. Your pipeline shows what’s coming and where things are stuck.
• Opportunity - A qualified prospect with a real need, budget, and intent to buy. A deal worth actively working, one stage past lead and prospect.
• CRM (Customer Relationship Management) - Software (or even a spreadsheet) where you track every prospect, conversation, and next step so nothing falls through the cracks.
• Problem-solution fit - The point where you have proof that a real problem exists and your proposed solution addresses it. It comes before product-market fit.
• Product-market fit - The point where a real market clearly wants your actual product, shown by people buying, using, and staying. The goal of early-stage selling.

So the journey of one customer looks like this: a lead becomes a prospect, a prospect becomes an opportunity, and the opportunity moves through your pipeline until you close it. The journey of your whole product looks similar: problem-solution fit first, then product-market fit.

Common misconceptions

A few of these terms get used wrong constantly, and the mistakes cost real money.

• “A friendly meeting means the deal is moving.” Not unless it ended with an advance. Warmth without a concrete next step is a stall wearing a smile.
• “More features will win the deal.” Buyers don’t pay for features; they pay for value, the outcome in their own life. A long feature list can even scare people off.
• “A ‘yes’ from a customer is proof.” If you asked a leading question, the yes proves nothing. The whole point of the Mom Test is to stop fishing for the answer you want.
• “Closing is a clever line at the end.” Real closing is the natural result of a good conversation. If you need a trick, you skipped the discovery.
• “Qualification means convincing everyone.” It actually means disqualifying fast. Saying no to a bad fit frees you for a good one.

How to use this

You don’t memorize a glossary. You put it to work. Try this:

1. Audit your pipeline with real words. Go through your active deals and label each honestly: lead, prospect, or opportunity? You’ll likely find a few “opportunities” that are really just leads in disguise.
2. End every call with an advance. Before you hang up, agree on one concrete next step with a date. If you can’t, you have a stall, and it’s better to know now.
3. Catch your own leading questions. For one week, notice every time you ask “right?” or “wouldn’t you?” Rewrite them as open questions and watch what you learn.
4. Pick one framework, not five. Use BANT for a fast check, the Mom Test for early research, or MEDDIC for a big complex deal. Match the tool to the moment.
5. Translate features into value out loud. For your three best features, finish the sentence “which means you can…” in the customer’s words. That’s the line that actually sells.
6. Watch the bottom of the bucket. Track churn alongside new sales. Keeping a customer is usually cheaper and faster than winning a new one.

Conclusion

If you remember one thing, make it this: the words on this page are really one question asked over and over: is this real? Is this a real opportunity or just a lead? A real advance or a stall? A real objection or a brush-off? Real value, or just a feature? The vocabulary exists so you stop fooling yourself.

The single most honest test of all is the Mom Test, and it’s worth a closer look. Once you learn to ask questions even your mother couldn’t answer dishonestly, you’ll never trust a polite “I love it” the same way again, and your early customer conversations will start telling you the truth.