Account Plan
A written strategy for a specific target account covering stakeholders, current state, entry points, competitive position, and the sequence of moves. Standard in enterprise selling and badly underused everywhere else.
Sales Training & Coaching › Sales Glossary
The Sales
Glossary
198 sales terms defined in plain English, organized into nine categories — sales process, discovery, objection handling, buyer psychology, metrics, prospecting, pricing, methodologies, and team structure. Written by a sales trainer rather than assembled from other glossaries, which means several of these definitions will disagree with what you have read elsewhere.
Showing all 198 terms
Why another sales glossary. Most of them are written to rank, not to be read — a hundred and fifty entries of forty words each, all agreeing with each other, none of them written by someone who has been in the room when a deal died. This one takes positions. It will tell you that a tie-down is neither good nor bad but depends entirely on whether the agreement you are confirming is real. It will tell you that close rate is nearly useless as a management tool. It will tell you which widely-taught techniques have been so overused that buyers now recognize them on contact.
Where a term belongs to a trademarked methodology, I have said so and described the underlying idea in my own words rather than reproducing anyone's material. Methods and frameworks are not copyrightable; the books and the marks are. That distinction is why you can learn the substance of every major sales methodology for free, and why anyone charging you for the concept alone is selling you something you already had access to.
Terms marked with an alternate name are searchable under both. Everything here is expanded on somewhere in the sales training and coaching material, and every objection-related term has a working example in the sales objection handling library.
Process & Pipeline
22 termsHow a deal actually moves — the stages, the gates, and the hygiene that keeps a forecast honest instead of hopeful.
Close-Lost
Marking a deal as dead. Under-using this field is the most common cause of a fictional pipeline. A clean close-lost with a recorded reason is worth more than a stale open deal, because it becomes data.
Deal Slippage
When a deal forecast to close in one period moves into the next. Chronic slippage almost always traces to a skipped gate earlier in the process, not to a weak close at the end.
Handoff
The transfer of a customer from sales to onboarding, service, or account management. Sloppy handoffs are where churn is born, because the promises made in the sale evaporate the moment the person who made them disappears.
Lead
A person or company that has shown some signal of interest but has not been qualified. Leads become opportunities only after qualification. Conflating the two is why forecasts are wrong.
Loss Reason
The recorded cause of a lost deal. The critical distinction is between losing to a competitor and losing to no-decision, because they require opposite fixes: competitive losses point at differentiation, no-decision losses point at weak discovery.
MQL
Also known as: Marketing Qualified LeadA lead that has met marketing's threshold for interest — downloaded something, attended something, visited enough pages. An MQL is a signal of attention, not of intent to buy, and treating it as a warm lead frustrates everyone.
Mutual Action Plan
Also known as: MAPA written, shared timeline of every step both sides must complete to reach a decision and go live, with named owners and dates. Most useful in long, multi-stakeholder deals where the buyer's internal process is the actual bottleneck.
Next Step
A specific, calendared, mutually agreed action with a date and an owner. “I'll follow up next week” is not a next step. “We're meeting Thursday at 2 with your operations lead” is. Next-step booking rate is the strongest early predictor of close rate.
No-Decision Loss
A deal lost to inaction rather than to a competitor. Frequently the largest single loss category and the most fixable. High no-decision rates mean the problem was never made urgent enough to displace whatever else was on the buyer's plate.
Onboarding (Rep)
The structured process by which a new salesperson becomes productive. Without a documented sales process, onboarding is osmosis and takes six to nine months. With one, twelve to sixteen weeks is realistic.
Opportunity
A qualified potential deal with a named buyer, an identified problem, and a plausible path to a decision. The most common pipeline hygiene failure is calling every polite conversation an opportunity.
Pipeline
The set of live opportunities organized by stage, used to forecast revenue and diagnose where deals die. A pipeline is only useful if the stage definitions are enforced; otherwise it is a wish list with dollar signs attached.
Pipeline Coverage
The ratio of open pipeline value to the quota you need to hit in a period. Three-times coverage is a common rule of thumb, but the meaningful number depends entirely on your actual close rate. A team closing at 40% needs far less coverage than one closing at 12%.
Ramp Time
How long a new rep takes to reach full quota productivity. The single clearest financial argument for systematizing your sales process, because every month of shortened ramp is a month of full production you were already paying salary for.
Sales Cycle
The elapsed time from first meaningful contact to closed-won. Cycle length is a design constraint, not a fixed fact — it shifts with deal size, number of stakeholders, and how early you surface the decision process.
Sales Playbook
The operating manual for how your company sells: process, stages, gates, scripts, objection responses, discovery questions, and scorecards. The artifact that converts founder-dependent revenue into a transferable business asset.
Sales Process
The documented, repeatable sequence of stages a deal moves through from first contact to signed agreement. A real sales process has named stages, a required behavior in each, and an exit condition that must be satisfied before the deal advances. Without exit conditions you have a list of labels, not a process.
SQL
Also known as: Sales Qualified LeadA lead that sales has spoken with and confirmed meets the qualifying criteria. The handoff definition between MQL and SQL is one of the highest-value agreements a company can write down, and one of the least often written down.
Stage Gate
Also known as: Exit criteriaThe specific, observable condition that must be true before a deal moves to the next stage. For example, a deal cannot leave discovery until the buyer has stated a problem in their own words and attached a number or consequence to it. Gates are what stop optimistic reps from inflating a pipeline.
Territory
The defined set of accounts, geography, or verticals a rep owns. Poorly drawn territories create either starvation or overload, and both produce turnover.
Time in Stage
How long a deal has sat in its current stage. A deal parked in ‘proposal sent’ for 45 days is not a deal, it is a memory. Setting a maximum stage age and forcing a decision or a close-lost keeps the forecast honest.
Discovery & Questioning
22 termsThe phase that decides the outcome. By the time you present, the deal is already won or lost; the presentation just reveals which.
Active Listening
Listening to understand rather than to prepare your response, demonstrated by reflecting concerns back accurately before answering them. Measurable in a call recording: if the rep never restates anything the buyer said, they were not listening.
Closed Question
A question answerable in one word. Useful for confirming and advancing, harmful when used to run a discovery call, because it turns a conversation into an interrogation and produces almost no usable information.
Compelling Event
A dated external forcing function — a contract expiry, a regulatory deadline, a lease end, a busy season — that makes inaction expensive on a specific day. Deals without a compelling event slip indefinitely.
Cost of the Gap
The quantified consequence of the distance between current and desired state — in money, hours, customers, risk, or stress. Without this number there is no urgency, and without urgency there is no decision.
Current State
How the buyer does the thing today: who touches it, how long it takes, what it costs, and how long it has been that way. “It's inefficient” is not a current state. Specific hours, people, and dollars are.
Decision Criteria
The factors the buyer will use to judge competing options. Whoever establishes the criteria usually wins the deal, because everyone else spends the cycle defending against a standard they did not set.
Decision Process
The actual sequence by which the buyer's organization reaches a yes: who is involved, what steps occur, what approvals are required, and how long each takes. Most reps ask about budget and stop. Budget is the least useful part of this.
Desired State
What the buyer's world looks like if the problem were solved, described in their words rather than your product's features. This language should appear verbatim in your proposal.
Discovery
The phase where you map the buyer's current state, desired state, the cost of the gap between them, and how a decision actually gets made. Discovery is not a warm-up for the pitch — it is where the deal is decided. By the time you present, the outcome is already set.
Discovery Call
A structured conversation whose only goal is to understand the buyer's situation well enough to know whether and how you can help. The most common mistake is turning it into a demo halfway through.
Disqualification
Deliberately removing a prospect who does not fit. Counterintuitively one of the highest-leverage habits in selling, because a fast honest no protects your time and makes your yes credible.
Implication Question
A question that asks the buyer to articulate the downstream consequences of a problem they have already admitted. This is the question type that does the persuading, because when a buyer says out loud what the problem costs them, they convince themselves in a way no seller can.
Labeling
Naming the emotion or position you sense in the buyer — “It sounds like the timing is the hard part” — so they can confirm or correct it. Defuses tension and surfaces hidden concerns.
Latent Need
A problem the buyer has but has not recognized or named. Converting a latent need into an admitted one is done through questions, never through telling, because a buyer told they have a problem becomes defensive.
Layering
Asking a follow-up question to an answer instead of moving to the next item on your list. The second and third question about the same topic are where the real information lives. Most reps ask one and move on.
Mirroring
Repeating a few of the buyer's own words back to them to prompt elaboration. Used sparingly it produces more information; used mechanically it becomes obvious and irritating.
Open Question
A question that cannot be answered with yes, no, or a single word. Open questions produce information; closed questions produce confirmation. Discovery runs on the former.
Pain
A specific, admitted problem with a consequence attached. Not a general dissatisfaction. Pain the buyer will not name out loud is not yet pain you can sell against, however obvious it looks from outside.
Payoff Question
Also known as: Need-payoff questionA question that asks the buyer to describe the value of solving the problem. “What would it mean for your team if that stopped happening?” The buyer builds the business case in their own words, which makes it far more durable than one you construct for them.
Qualifying Criteria
The written conditions a prospect must meet to be worth your time: size, trigger events, budget indicators, decision structure, urgency. The most common revenue leak in small business is excellent selling aimed at people who were never going to buy.
Silence
Deliberate pause after asking a question or hearing an objection. The most underused tool in selling. Untrained people fill silence, and in filling it they answer their own question and lose the information the buyer was about to volunteer.
Talk-to-Listen Ratio
The proportion of a call spent talking versus listening. A healthy discovery call runs roughly 40% rep and 60% buyer. A rep talking more than the prospect during discovery is presenting, not discovering.
Objections & Closing
22 termsWhat buyers say when they are not yet convinced, and what to do about it. Every term here has a worked example in the objection library.
Alternative Choice
Offering two options that both assume forward motion, such as two install dates. Reduces decision friction when the buyer has decided; reads as a cheap trick when they have not.
Assumptive Close
Proceeding as though the decision is made and moving to logistics. Appropriate when the buyer has genuinely decided and is simply waiting for someone to move things forward. Manipulative when used to skip an unresolved concern.
Buying Signal
A statement or question that indicates the buyer is mentally past the decision — asking about implementation, timelines, financing, or references. Financing questions in particular are almost always buying signals dressed as price objections.
Conditional Close
Attaching a concession to a commitment: “If I could do that, would we be moving forward today?” Prevents you from trading margin for a maybe.
Cost of Inaction
Also known as: COIThe quantified price of leaving the problem in place. The most powerful reframe available, because the buyer's real alternative is almost never zero cost — it just never appears on an invoice.
Feel-Felt-Found
A legacy three-part response pattern acknowledging the concern, citing others who shared it, and describing what they discovered. Widely recognized by modern buyers, so it now often reads as scripted. The structure underneath is sound; the exact wording is worn out.
Ghosting
A prospect who stops responding entirely. Usually means the deal never had a compelling event or the rep never earned a real next step. The highest-reply-rate response is asking permission to close the file.
Isolating the Objection
Asking whether the stated concern is the only thing standing between the buyer and moving forward. Converts an infinite queue of objections into a finite list, which is the difference between a conversation and a war of attrition.
Negative Reverse
Responding to enthusiasm with mild skepticism to test whether it is real. “It sounds like you're interested, but I'm not sure this is right for you.” Effective at surfacing false politeness, damaging if overused.
Objection
A request for information delivered in the grammar of refusal. Almost never a flat rejection. “It's too expensive” is rarely “I lack money” and usually “I can't yet see why it costs what it costs.”
Objection Library
A written collection of the objections your team actually hears, each with a reframe and scripted responses. Turning improvisation into preparation is the single fastest measurable improvement most teams can make.
Permission to Close
Explicitly offering to stop pursuing: “Should I close the file on this, or is it just bad timing?” Gets replies when nothing else does, because it removes the buyer's obligation to be polite.
Price Objection
Pushback on cost. Only an objection when value is unclear, since nobody argues about the price of something they clearly want and fully understand. You have two responses: lower the price, which is permanent and teaches your market you are negotiable, or raise perceived value, which is the job.
Real Objection
Also known as: Underlying objectionThe concern beneath the stated one that the buyer is unwilling, unable, or unaware enough to articulate. Found with questions, not rebuttals.
Reframe
Changing the axis of comparison the buyer is using. They are comparing your price to a competitor's; you move the comparison to cost of ownership, or the cost of the problem continuing. Not a trick — showing them a dimension of the decision they had not considered.
Shopping Tax
The real cost in hours, calls, meetings, and delay of collecting and comparing additional quotes. Frequently exceeds the savings the additional quotes produce, and almost never gets counted by the buyer.
Stall
A delay presented as an objection — “call me in six months,” “let me think about it.” Distinguished from a true objection by asking what will actually be different later. If nothing will be, the delay has no reason behind it.
Stated Objection
The concern the buyer actually says out loud. Usually a socially acceptable version of the real one, and answering it directly often solves a problem that was never the problem.
Summary Close
Restating the buyer's own stated problems and the agreed solutions, then asking for the decision. The least manipulative close available, because every element came from the buyer.
Takeaway
Suggesting the buyer may not be a fit or may not qualify. Powerful and easily abused. Legitimate when you genuinely doubt the fit, corrosive when manufactured to trigger scarcity.
Tie-Down
A short confirming question appended to a statement to check agreement — “that matters to you, right?” Honestly used, it is just verifying you are still together. Dishonestly used, it stacks forced agreements to make refusal awkward. The line between the two is whether the agreement is genuine.
Trial Close
A low-stakes question that tests readiness without asking for the whole decision — “How does that sound so far?” Used honestly it prevents you from asking into an unresolved objection. Used to corner someone, it becomes pressure.
Psychology & Persuasion
22 termsWhat is actually happening in a buyer's head. Buying is conditioning, and these are the mechanics of it.
Anchoring
The cognitive tendency for the first number mentioned to bias every number that follows. Why an unqualified ballpark becomes the price the buyer remembers regardless of what the real quote turns out to be.
Buyer Psychology
The study of what actually happens in a person's mind during a purchase decision. The short version: buying is conditioning, built from associations formed over a lifetime firing in a particular sequence.
Cognitive Load
The mental effort a decision demands. Overwhelmed buyers do not want more information or more options — they want a recommendation. Adding choices to a stalled deal usually stalls it further.
Commitment and Consistency
The tendency to behave consistently with prior statements and small commitments. The honest application is confirming genuine agreement as you go; the dishonest one is stacking trivial yeses to make a no feel awkward.
Conditioning
The process by which repeated association links a stimulus to a response. In selling, it describes how a buyer comes to connect your product with an outcome they want. The connection is what a decision is made of.
Confirmation Bias
The tendency to favor information supporting existing beliefs. Cuts both ways: it explains why buyers dismiss your evidence and why reps ignore the signals that a deal is dead.
Decision Fatigue
Degrading decision quality after many decisions. Why late-day meetings stall and why a proposal with fourteen options gets no answer.
Emotional Buying, Logical Justification
The pattern in which decisions are made emotionally and then defended with reasons. Practical implication: you need both. Emotion produces the decision, logic lets the buyer explain it to a spouse, a boss, or themselves at 2am.
Framing Effect
How the presentation of identical information changes the decision it produces. $71 a month and $6,000 are the same price, and they are not the same offer.
Future Pacing
Guiding the buyer to mentally rehearse life after the purchase. The mechanism behind self-selling questions and the reason vivid, specific imagining outperforms abstract benefit statements.
Intrinsic Motivator
The underlying self-interest driving a purchase. Nearly all trace to five: health, family, finances, safety, and ease. Buyers look infinitely varied on the surface and run the same five programs underneath.
Loss Aversion
The finding that people weigh potential losses more heavily than equivalent gains. Why “this is costing you $31,000 a year” consistently outperforms “this could save you $31,000 a year” despite being the same fact.
Neural Connectivity
The strengthening of associative pathways through repetition and mental rehearsal. When a buyer imagines a future state, that rehearsal physically strengthens the link between your product and their desired outcome — which is why questions that prompt imagining outperform claims that assert.
Pratfall Effect
The finding that admitting a genuine flaw increases credibility. Practically: volunteering a real limitation makes everything else you claim believable, which is why “there's no catch” is never believed.
Price Conditioning
Establishing context before the number lands, so the price is heard against a frame rather than against nothing. Ranges, comparisons, and sequencing. Honest when the frame is true, manipulative when it is invented.
Rapport
Earned trust. Built through useful questions and demonstrated understanding, not through weather talk. The fastest route to rapport is showing you understand their situation better than the last three people who called.
Reactance
The instinct to resist when freedom of choice feels threatened. Why pressure produces the opposite of its intent, and why explicitly removing pressure often generates more forward motion than applying it.
Reciprocity
The tendency to return a favor. In selling, delivering genuine value before asking for anything. Degrades into a tactic the moment the giving is obviously transactional.
Scarcity
Perceived limited availability increasing desirability. Legitimate when the constraint is real, corrosive when manufactured. A price that expires in four hours tells the buyer it was never the real price.
Self-Selling
Prompting the buyer to articulate the benefit rather than describing it yourself. “What do you think your back will feel like after a month of proper support?” The argument they build is more persuasive than yours, because it is made of their actual life.
Social Proof
Using the behavior of similar others as evidence. Effective in proportion to similarity: a reference from a company that looks exactly like the buyer beats a famous logo that does not.
Status Quo Bias
The preference for the current state over change, even when change is clearly better. The reason doing nothing is the most common competitor in every market.
Metrics & Forecasting
22 termsThe numbers worth managing. Note how many of these are behaviors you can change today rather than results you can only report.
Activity Metrics
Counts of calls, emails, and meetings. Necessary but insufficient, and dangerous as a primary target, because activity volume is trivially gameable and says nothing about quality.
Attrition
The rate at which salespeople leave. Reps rarely quit because the product is hard; they quit because they are failing and nobody can tell them precisely why. Failure without diagnosis is demoralizing.
Average Deal Size
Also known as: ACVMean revenue per closed deal. Rising deal size with a flat close rate usually indicates better qualification; rising deal size with a falling close rate usually indicates chasing deals you cannot win.
Average Discount
Mean percentage off list actually given. A direct measure of whether your team is selling value or buying deals. At thin margins, a few points of average discount can exceed the entire cost of training.
Call Scorecard
A written rubric defining what a good sales call contains, used to review recordings objectively. Converts “that felt off” into a specific, coachable observation and is the single most useful coaching artifact there is.
Churn
The rate at which customers leave. Frequently a sales problem rather than a service problem, because customers sold on expectations the product cannot meet churn on schedule.
Close Rate
Also known as: Win rateThe percentage of qualified opportunities that become customers. A lagging indicator — useful for diagnosis, useless for daily management, because you cannot manage it directly. Manage the behaviors that produce it.
Cohort Analysis
Grouping customers by acquisition period and tracking behavior over time. Reveals whether a change in how you sell actually improved retention or just moved a quarterly number.
Conversion Rate
The percentage moving from one defined stage to the next. Far more useful than overall close rate, because it identifies which specific gate is leaking rather than telling you the roof is wet.
Coverage Model
How accounts are assigned across the team by size, geography, or vertical. Determines whether high-value accounts get proportional attention or the same fifteen minutes as everyone else.
Customer Acquisition Cost
Also known as: CACTotal sales and marketing spend divided by new customers acquired. Improving close rate lowers CAC without spending another dollar on leads, which is the argument for training that finance actually responds to.
Deal Review
A structured examination of a specific opportunity against the stage gates. Distinct from a status update: the question is not “where are we” but “what evidence supports this being in this stage.”
Forecast Accuracy
How closely predicted revenue matches actual. Chronically poor accuracy is almost always a stage-definition problem rather than a judgment problem: if anyone can call anything stage four, no forecast can be right.
Lagging Indicator
A measure that reports a result already produced — revenue, close rate, quota attainment. Useful for diagnosis and useless for intervention, because by the time it moves the causes are months old.
Leading Indicator
A measure that predicts a future result and can be influenced now — talk ratio, next-step rate, discovery call length. Where sales management should spend nearly all of its attention.
Lifetime Value
Also known as: LTVTotal expected profit from a customer over the relationship. Justifies acquisition spend and explains why a sale made to a poor-fit buyer can be worth less than nothing once churn and support are counted.
Next-Step Booking Rate
The percentage of calls ending with a calendared next action. The strongest early predictor of close rate available, and unlike close rate it is a behavior you can enforce today.
Objection Frequency Log
A running tally of which objections come up most. Thirty days of logging tells you exactly what your next training should cover and often reveals a marketing problem masquerading as a sales problem.
Quota Attainment
Percentage of reps hitting target. If most of the team misses, the quota or the process is wrong. If one rep misses, that is a coaching conversation. Reading a systemic problem as an individual one is a common and expensive management error.
Ramp-to-Quota
Time for a new hire to reach full productivity. The clearest dollar-denominated measure of onboarding quality.
Sales Velocity
A composite of opportunity count, average deal size, close rate, and cycle length, expressing how fast revenue moves through the pipeline. Useful because it shows that shortening the cycle can matter as much as raising the close rate.
Stage Aging Report
A view of deals sorted by how long they have sat in place. The fastest way to find the rot in a pipeline that looks healthy in aggregate.
Prospecting & Outreach
22 termsFinding people worth talking to. The least glamorous work in selling and the most reliably predictive.
Buyer Persona
A profile of an individual role within a target account — their goals, pressures, vocabulary, and objections. Distinct from ICP, which describes the company rather than the human.
Cadence
Also known as: SequenceThe defined rhythm and mix of follow-up touches after initial contact: how many, over what period, through which channels. Most reps give up at two attempts; most deals require substantially more.
Cold Call
An unsolicited call to a prospect with no prior relationship. Still effective in most markets and still hated by most reps. The difference between a cold call that works and one that does not is almost entirely the first sentence.
Drip Campaign
A scheduled series of automated messages over time. Useful for staying present with prospects who are not ready; harmful when it substitutes for a real conversation with someone who is.
Elevator Pitch
A short explanation of what you do, ideally framed as the problem you solve rather than the thing you sell. The test is whether the listener asks a follow-up question.
Follow-Up
Contact after an initial conversation. The distinction that matters: following up on an agreed next step is professional, following up without one is chasing, and chasing reads as desperation.
Gatekeeper
The person whose role includes deciding whether you reach the decision maker. Treating them as an obstacle is the standard error; treating them as an informed colleague who knows exactly how the organization works is far more productive.
Ideal Customer Profile
Also known as: ICPA written description of the accounts most likely to buy, succeed, and stay. Built from analyzing your best existing customers rather than from aspiration. Aspirational ICPs waste years.
Inbound
Prospects who initiate contact. Higher intent and frequently worse handled, because teams that consider themselves non-selling often have the weakest process precisely where interest is highest.
Lead Response Time
How long between an inbound inquiry and the first genuine contact attempt. One of the highest-leverage and most neglected numbers in small business, because interest decays fast.
Multi-Threading
Building relationships with several stakeholders in one account rather than depending on a single contact. The insurance policy against your champion leaving, being reorganized, or simply going quiet.
Nurture
Maintaining useful contact with a prospect who is not ready to buy. Done well it means periodically sending something genuinely worth their time. Done badly it means a newsletter nobody opens.
Outbound
Seller-initiated contact. Lower conversion per touch, but controllable, which makes it the only reliable lever when inbound is thin.
Pattern Interrupt
An opening that breaks the script the prospect expects from a salesperson, buying you a few more seconds of attention. Effective in proportion to how unlike a pitch it sounds.
Prospecting
The work of finding and initiating contact with potential buyers. The least glamorous and most reliably predictive activity in selling, because a great closer with an empty calendar produces nothing.
Referral
A warm introduction from an existing customer or contact. The cheapest and highest-converting lead source available, and the one most companies leave entirely to chance instead of asking for at a defined moment.
Single-Threaded Deal
An opportunity dependent on exactly one relationship. The most common cause of a large deal evaporating without explanation.
Social Selling
Using professional networks to research, warm, and initiate conversations. Effective when it is genuine engagement, useless when it is templated messages sent at volume.
Territory Penetration
The share of accounts in a defined territory that have been meaningfully contacted. Low penetration with high activity usually means a rep is recycling the same comfortable accounts.
Trigger Event
An observable change that creates a reason to reach out now: a funding round, a new hire in a relevant role, a location opening, a regulation change. Outreach timed to a trigger converts far better than outreach timed to your quarter.
Value Proposition
A specific statement of the outcome you produce for a defined buyer, in their language. Distinct from a description of your product. If it could appear on a competitor's website unchanged, it is not one.
Warm Call
Outreach to someone with prior context — a referral, a previous inquiry, a shared connection. Converts several times better than cold, which is why referral systems are worth building deliberately rather than hoping for.
Pricing & Negotiation
22 termsMoney conversations, from how you set a number to how you defend it without buying the deal.
Anchor Price
The first number introduced, which shapes perception of every subsequent number. Why a casual ballpark without stated variables is one of the most expensive sentences in selling.
Auto-Renewal
A clause continuing an agreement unless cancelled by a deadline. Where competitive displacement attempts most often die, which is why notice periods matter more than expiry dates when targeting a competitor's account.
BATNA
Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement — what each side does if no deal happens. Knowing yours prevents desperate concessions; estimating theirs tells you how much leverage you actually have.
Concession
Something given in negotiation. The rule that protects margin: never concede without receiving. A concession given freely signals the original terms were padded.
Contract Term
The committed duration of an agreement. Buyers resist length because of the exit, not the entry, which is why explaining the exit clause before being asked removes most of the objection.
Cost-Plus Pricing
Setting price by adding a margin to cost. Simple, defensible, and structurally incapable of capturing the value of anything you do unusually well.
Discount Authority
The written policy governing who may discount, by how much, and under what conditions. Without one, every rep sets your pricing strategy independently.
Discounting
Reducing price to win. Comes off the bottom line at full margin, teaches the market your prices are soft, and is what happens when a sales skill is missing. Distinct from restructuring, which changes terms rather than total.
Financing
Third-party or in-house payment terms spreading cost over time. Questions about it are usually buying signals rather than price objections, and should be answered then immediately followed by a closing question.
Good-Better-Best
Offering three tiers. Works because it shifts the question from whether to buy to which to buy. Fails when the tiers are not genuinely differentiated, because buyers detect a manufactured middle.
Margin
Revenue minus cost, as a percentage. The number that makes discounting expensive: at 20% margin, a 10% discount surrenders half your profit on that deal.
Payback Period
How long until the investment returns its cost. Often more persuasive than a percentage return, because a period is intuitive and a percentage requires belief in your math.
Phasing
Breaking a large engagement into stages the buyer can afford and evaluate. The single most useful response to a genuine budget constraint, provided the first phase is large enough to produce a real result.
Price Bracketing
Presenting a range with the variables that move it, so the buyer understands what drives the number rather than fixating on the low end.
Price Increase
Raising rates on new or existing customers. Handled by explaining the driver without apologizing. Apologizing for a price increase invites negotiation of it.
Renewal
Continuation of an existing agreement. Won or lost during the service period rather than at the renewal conversation, which is merely where the result gets recorded.
Return on Investment
Also known as: ROINet gain relative to cost. Most credible when built live with the buyer using their numbers and deliberately conservative assumptions. An ROI model handed over as a finished document is a model the buyer distrusts.
Scope Creep
Gradual expansion of deliverables without corresponding price change. Usually begins in the sale, when a rep says yes to small additions to avoid friction.
Total Cost of Ownership
Also known as: TCOThe full cost of a purchase across its life: acquisition, installation, downtime, maintenance, replacement cycle, and staff time. The cheaper option is frequently more expensive, and TCO is how you show it without disparaging anyone.
Trade
Exchanging a concession for something of value — a faster decision, a longer term, a reference, a larger scope. Converts a discount from a loss into a transaction.
Value-Based Pricing
Setting price according to the outcome delivered rather than the cost to produce. Requires knowing what the outcome is worth to the buyer, which requires discovery, which is why weak discovery and weak pricing usually appear together.
Walk-Away Point
The terms below which you decline. Defining it before the negotiation, in writing, is what keeps you from discovering it afterward with regret.
Methodologies & Frameworks
22 termsThe named systems. Methods are not copyrightable, only the books and the marks — so the substance of every one of these is free to learn.
AIDA
Attention, Interest, Desire, Action — a sequence attributed to advertising pioneer Elias St. Elmo Lewis around 1898 and long in the public domain. A hundred and twenty-eight years old and still the skeleton of every landing page and pitch deck. The lesson is that sequence matters: you cannot create desire in someone whose attention you never had.
Call Review
Listening to a recorded call against a written scorecard. The foundation of real coaching, because what a rep describes doing and what a rep actually does are frequently different things.
Challenger Objection Handling
Responding to concerns by reframing the buyer's understanding of their own situation rather than defending your position. Requires genuine domain expertise and fails badly without it.
Consultative Selling
An approach in which the seller functions as an advisor, diagnosing before prescribing. The defining behavior is willingness to conclude and say out loud that there is no fit.
Do The Right Thing Sales Perfect
The training course by Zach Wennstedt built on a single standard: only sell what genuinely helps the buyer, and once you are certain it does, be as persuasive as you know how to be. Covers the five buyer self-interests, self-selling questions, tie-downs, trial closes, price conditioning, and the psychology of buying as conditioning.
Gap Selling
Focusing the entire sale on the distance between current and desired state, and on quantifying that distance. Aligns closely with the discovery-first approach and works well in operational and process-driven sales.
Land and Expand
Starting with a small initial engagement and growing it after delivering results. Lowers the buyer's risk and shifts the burden onto your delivery, which is the right place for it.
Miller Heiman-Style Stakeholder Mapping
Categorizing the people in a complex deal by the kind of influence they hold — economic approval, technical evaluation, end use, and internal advocacy. A trademarked methodology; the durable idea is that different stakeholders need different arguments.
Qualification Framework
Also known as: BANT and successorsA checklist of what you must learn to know whether a deal is real: originally budget, authority, need, and timeline, later extended with metrics, decision criteria, decision process, identified pain, and an internal advocate. The failure mode is running it as an interrogation instead of learning the same things through conversation.
Question-Sequence Selling
Also known as: SPIN-style sellingA method built on research into what high performers do differently in complex sales, progressing from situation, to problem, to the implications of that problem, to the payoff of solving it. The insight worth taking: the implication questions do the persuading. SPIN is a trademark of its publisher; this describes the underlying idea, not their materials.
Ride-Along
A trainer or manager accompanying a rep on live appointments, observing and coaching between calls. The fastest way to find what is actually happening in the field, for the same reason: self-reporting is unreliable.
Role Play
Rehearsing a sales conversation with a colleague playing the buyer. The most effective and least popular training method in existence. Skills form under mild pressure, and role play is the only way to manufacture pressure safely.
Sales Enablement
The function that equips salespeople with content, training, tools, and process. Effective when it is built from what reps actually need; theatre when it is content produced to be counted.
Sandler-Style Disqualification
A school of thought treating ‘no’ as an acceptable and useful answer and encouraging aggressive disqualification rather than pursuit. Sandler is a trademark of its owner; the transferable principle is that chasing unqualified deals costs more than losing them.
Social Style Adaptation
Adjusting communication pace and detail to the buyer's apparent preference. Useful as a reminder that not everyone wants the same amount of detail; unreliable when applied as rigid personality typing.
Solution Selling
Framing the offering as the answer to a diagnosed problem rather than as a set of features. Now so widely adopted that the term describes a default rather than a differentiator.
Spaced Repetition
Distributing practice across time rather than concentrating it. The reason a two-day workshop produces a binder and eight weeks of short drills produces a different salesperson.
Systematic Selling
The practice of documenting the sale as a staged, gated, teachable process rather than leaving it to individual talent. The goal is that your third-best rep can execute what your best rep does instinctively.
Teaching-Led Selling
Also known as: Challenger-style sellingAn approach arguing that top performers in complex B2B sales teach buyers something surprising about their own business, tailor it to the individual, and take assertive control including of money. The takeaway: bring an insight, not a brochure. Challenger is a trademark of its publisher.
Upfront Contract
Agreeing at the start of a conversation on the agenda, the time, and the possible outcomes including a mutual no. Removes almost all of the awkwardness from a sales call by making the rules explicit.
Value Selling
Building the case in the buyer's financial language: cost of the current state, quantified benefit, payback period, risk of inaction. Essential wherever a committee must approve, because your champion has to argue it without you in the room.
Win-Loss Analysis
Structured interviews with buyers after a decision, won or lost. Uncomfortable, consistently undervalued, and the single most accurate source of information about why you win and lose.
Roles, Team & Comp
22 termsWho does what, who decides what, and how the way you pay people quietly overrides whatever you trained them to do.
Accelerator
An increased commission rate above a threshold. Effective at motivating overperformance; occasionally produces end-of-period discounting as reps buy their way over a line.
Account Executive
Also known as: AEA rep who owns opportunities from qualification through close. In a split model, receives qualified opportunities rather than generating them.
Account Manager
Owner of the relationship after the sale, responsible for retention and expansion. Where the promises made during the sale are either honored or quietly abandoned.
Blocker
Someone who can prevent the deal without being able to approve it. In consensus environments, a single blocker is functionally a decision maker, which is why you sell to the skeptic first.
Champion
An internal advocate who wants the deal to happen and will argue for it in rooms you are not in. Your job is not to convince the room; it is to equip your champion to convince the room.
Clawback
A provision recovering commission when a customer churns or fails to pay within a defined window. Aligns the seller with the quality of the sale rather than only its existence.
Commission
Variable pay tied to sales results. Structure drives behavior more reliably than any training does, which is why a comp plan that rewards volume will quietly defeat a training program about qualification.
Decision Maker
The person with authority to commit. Verified by asking how decisions like this have actually been made before, not by asking whether they are the decision maker — almost everyone says yes.
Economic Buyer
The person who can approve the money, regardless of title. Frequently not the person you have been talking to, and finding this out late is one of the more expensive discoveries in selling.
Influencer
Someone who shapes the decision without holding authority. Discarding a non-decision-maker is a common error, because recommenders and blockers both control outcomes.
OTE
Also known as: On-Target EarningsTotal expected compensation at full quota attainment, combining base and variable. The number that matters in hiring conversations and the one most often quoted optimistically.
Player-Coach
A manager who also carries a quota. Common in small business and structurally difficult, because coaching is the first thing sacrificed when the manager's own number is at risk.
Quota
An assigned revenue target. Should be set so that a solid majority of the team can reach it; when most of the team misses, the quota is a statement about management rather than about the reps.
Sales Coach
Someone who develops individual sellers through observation and feedback on specific behaviors, rather than managing them to a number. A coach asks to hear the call; a manager asks where the deal stands.
Sales Culture
The unwritten norms governing how selling actually happens: whether people share what works, whether failure is discussed, whether the process is followed when nobody is watching. Beats any documented process it conflicts with.
Sales Development Rep
Also known as: SDR / BDRA rep dedicated to prospecting and qualification who hands qualified opportunities to closers. Specialization improves both activities; the risk is a lossy handoff between the two.
Sales Engineer
A technical specialist supporting complex sales with domain depth. Frequently the most trusted person in the room precisely because they are not perceived as selling.
Sales Huddle
A short recurring team meeting for drilling, sharing, and alignment. Most valuable when it includes actual practice rather than only status reporting.
Sales Manager
The person accountable for a team's results, typically promoted for selling ability — which is roughly like promoting the fastest runner to coach the track team. Selling and developing sellers are different skills, and almost nobody is taught the second.
Sales Onboarding Curriculum
The structured, sequenced program bringing a new hire to productivity. Its existence is the difference between a six-month ramp and a three-month one.
Sales Trainer
A specialist who builds selling capability in a team through instruction, drilling, and reinforcement. Distinguished from a motivational speaker by whether behavior is still different eight weeks later.
Shadowing
A new hire observing an experienced rep. Useful only when the experienced rep is genuinely good and can explain what they are doing; otherwise it transmits accidental habits at full speed.
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Which Methodology Should You Actually Use?
People ask me this constantly, usually after reading three articles that each declared a different framework to be definitive. The honest answer is that none of them is complete and all of them contain something true, and the correct move is to assemble a process from the parts that fit your specific deal rather than adopting anyone's system wholesale.
Here is the practical mapping. If your sale is complex, consultative, and multi-stakeholder — long cycles, several people involved, a real evaluation process — the question-sequence approach is the backbone. The progression from situation to problem to implication to payoff does the persuading for you, because the buyer articulates the cost of their own problem and nobody argues with themselves. Layer stakeholder mapping on top so you know which argument each person needs.
If your sale is high-volume and transactional — many conversations, shorter cycles, smaller deals — the leverage is almost entirely in qualification and disqualification. A tight qualifying framework and the willingness to say no fast will outperform any closing technique, because your constraint is time rather than persuasion. Aggressive disqualification is not pessimism here; it is arithmetic.
If you sell to skeptical technical buyers — engineers, clinicians, specialists — teaching-led selling is the fit. These buyers respond to learning something they did not know about their own domain and react badly to enthusiasm without substance. The requirement is genuine expertise; without it, teaching-led selling fails faster than anything else on this list.
If your problem is that buyers agree with everything and then vanish, the upfront contract is your fix. Agreeing at the start on the agenda, the time, and the acceptable outcomes — explicitly including a mutual no — removes the social pressure that produces false politeness. You will get more nos and far fewer ghosts, which is a trade worth making.
And underneath all of it, whichever you pick, sits the same question: should this person buy this? That question is the foundation of the Do The Right Thing Sales Perfect Training Course, and it is not decoration. The techniques in this glossary genuinely work. They work on people making decisions about their family's safety and their own health, which is serious business, and being handed tools that effective without a rule for when to stop using them is how salespeople do damage they never intended.
A note on the old books
A useful antidote to methodology hype: most of what gets sold as a breakthrough was published before the First World War and is now in the public domain. Norval Hawkins was explaining the psychology of organized selling to Ford dealers in 1920. William Walker Atkinson wrote on the mechanics of attention and desire in 1912. Marden and MacGrail argued in 1916 that a sale which fails to serve the buyer is a failure regardless of whether money changed hands — which is the same argument I make today, a hundred and ten years later, with better examples. All of it is free to download and worth reading.
Learning the vocabulary is not the same as being able to use it.
Reading a definition of a trial close produces recognition. Being able to deliver one, at the right moment, on a real call, under pressure, comes from drilling it. That is what the training packages do — your product, your buyer, your team, drilled until it holds.
See sales training packages →Or start free with the objection engine and the objection wheel.