Glossary of Terms
By Pritesh Yadav 5 min read —
- Active listening
- Listening so closely that 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.
- 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. The opposite of an advance is a stall.
- BANT
- A simple qualification checklist created at IBM: Budget (can they pay?), Authority (can this person decide?), Need (do they have the problem?), Timeline (when will they act?). Fast but blunt.
- Brush-off
- A polite, vague reason someone gives 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 have not surfaced yet.
- Champion
- A person inside the customer's company who wants your product to win and will push for it when you are not in the room. The "C" in MEDDIC.
- Churn
- The rate at which customers stop paying you and leave. High churn means you are filling a leaky bucket; selling more does not help until the leak is fixed.
- Closed question
- A question answerable with one word, usually yes or no ("Do you like this?"). Useful for confirming facts, weak for learning. Compare open question.
- Closing
- Asking for and getting the buying decision. Not a single magic line; it is the natural end of a conversation where you have earned the right to ask.
- Cold outreach
- Contacting someone who has never heard of you (a cold email or message). Compare warm outreach, where there is an introduction or prior connection.
- CRM
- Customer Relationship Management tool, a piece of software (or even a spreadsheet) where you track every prospect, conversation, and next step so nothing falls through the cracks.
- 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 as "get out of the building."
- 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.
- Economic buyer
- The person who controls the budget and can say final yes to spending money. The "E" in MEDDIC. Often more senior than the person you first meet.
- GAP selling
- An approach (from Keenan's book of the same name) built on finding 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.
- ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
- A clear description of the type of 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.
- Lead
- Any person or company who might become a customer. The rawest stage. A lead becomes a prospect once you confirm basic fit.
- 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. The thing the Mom Test is built to avoid.
- MEDDIC / MEDDPICC
- A B2B qualification framework for bigger deals: Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify pain, Champion (the extra PC adds Paper process and Competition). It helps you judge whether a deal is real and winnable.
- The Mom Test
- Rob Fitzpatrick's set of rules for customer conversations so honest that even your mom could not lie to you: talk about their life not your idea, ask about the past not the future, and talk less while you listen more.
- Objection
- A reason the buyer gives for not moving forward (price, timing, trust, fit). A real objection is useful information, not an attack.
- 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.
- Opportunity
- A qualified prospect with a real need, budget, and intent to buy, a deal worth actively working. The stage after lead and prospect.
- Pipeline
- The list of all your active deals, organized by stage (from first contact to closed). Your pipeline shows what is coming and where things are stuck.
- 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 and customer development.
- Prospect
- A lead you have confirmed is a plausible fit and worth a conversation. Between lead and opportunity.
- 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.
- SPIN
- Neil Rackham's question sequence, drawn from analyzing 35,000 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.
- 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 address a concern.
- 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.
- Warm outreach
- Reaching out where there is already a connection, a referral, a mutual contact, or someone who engaged with you. Far higher response rates than cold.