The sales glossary.

A lead has shown a signal of interest but has not been qualified. An opportunity is a qualified potential deal with a named buyer, an identified problem, and a plausible path to a decision. Conflating the two is the single most common cause of a fictional forecast, because a pipeline full of polite conversations looks identical to a pipeline full of real deals until the quarter ends.

It depends entirely on whether the agreement you are confirming is real. A tie-down is a short question appended to a statement to check you are still together. Used honestly, that is just verification, and it saves both people time. Used dishonestly, it stacks trivial forced agreements so that refusing later feels socially awkward. The technique is neutral. The intent behind it is not, and buyers detect the difference even when they cannot name it.

Sit rate is the percentage of booked appointments that actually happen with the right people present. It matters because a low sit rate hides inside a bad close rate and gets misdiagnosed as a selling problem. If half your appointments do not happen, or happen with only one of two decision makers present, no amount of closing technique will fix the number. Sit rate is almost always a confirmation-process failure, and it is the cheapest thing in field selling to repair.

Because you cannot manage it directly. Close rate is a lagging indicator: by the time it moves, the causes are one full sales cycle old. What you can manage today are the behaviors that produce it, chiefly next-step booking rate, discovery call length, talk-to-listen ratio, and average discount given. Manage those relentlessly for a quarter and close rate moves on its own.

The stated objection is what comes out of the buyer's mouth, usually a socially acceptable version of the truth. The real objection is what sits underneath, which they may be unwilling to say, unable to articulate, or genuinely unaware of. Answering a stated objection with an argument wins the argument and loses the sale. Answering it with a question finds the real one, which is usually far easier to solve than the fake one.

The books, materials, and brand names are protected. The underlying methods and ideas are not, because facts and procedures cannot be copyrighted. That is why this glossary describes what each approach actually contributes in its own words and names the trademark holder plainly, and why you can learn the substance of every major sales methodology for free. Anyone charging you for the concept alone is selling something you already had access to.

Because tens of thousands of people sell at kitchen tables every day and no major glossary defines their vocabulary. Set rate, sit rate, one-call close, turnover, be-back, and price drop are the working language of home improvement, HVAC, roofing, windows, and similar categories. Some of those practices are legitimate and some are the reason the industry has the reputation it has, and the entries here say which is which rather than pretending the words do not exist.

Yes. Quote them, adapt them, print them, put them in your onboarding binder. A credit and a link back is appreciated and not required. What gets sold here is the version built specifically around your product, your buyer, and the objections your team actually hears, which is a meaningfully different thing from a general glossary however good the general glossary is.