Evidence-led glossary · Account-free
Sales & RevOps Glossary: 60 Operating Definitions, Formulas, and Boundaries
Sales and RevOps definitions with formulas, boundaries, ambiguity notes, operational consequences, and review dates.
- Method owner
- Anastasiia Krynytska
- Reviewed
- 10 Sep 2026
- Reading
- 16 min read
Practical answer
What this resource does
Use the glossary to settle what a term means before a team calculates, automates, compares, or assigns a decision to it.
- No lead gate. Open, calculate, or download directly.
- Visible method. Definitions, formulas, ownership, and invalid states stay inspectable.
- Human authority. The asset supports a decision; it never owns one.
Sales and revenue terms become useful only when two people can apply them to the same records and produce the same result. This glossary gives each term an operating definition, not merely a synonym. Where common SaaS, PLG, finance, or vendor usage differs from the Luck My Sales definition, the difference is shown instead of being flattened into false consensus.
Use the glossary in three passes. First, find the term and read the direct definition. Second, check the population, period, and source record before calculating anything. Third, follow the boundary note to the guide, calculator, template, or human owner responsible for the decision. A formula with an undeclared denominator is not complete.
Editorial method. House definitions reflect Anastasiia Krynytska’s RevOps architecture specification. External definitions and formulas are checked against current authoritative or first-party material, including Salesforce’s sales-velocity formula, Stripe’s CAC guidance, and the EU text of GDPR Article 28. House thresholds are labeled as such. They are not universal performance claims.
01 / Method
Revenue records and roles
1. Account
House definition: the CRM record representing an organization or buying entity, with a stable identifier, ownership, domain, hierarchy, and relationship history. An account is not interchangeable with a contact. Boundary: one legal entity may require several operating accounts, while several domains may still belong to one buying group. Owner: Data Owner defines merge and hierarchy rules.
2. Contact
House definition: a person-level record tied to an account and a lawful, documented source. A contact record can exist without being marketable, accepted, qualified, or involved in a purchase. Boundary: enrichment confidence is not consent, engagement, or buying intent. Store provenance, verification time, and communication eligibility separately.
3. Accepted Contact
Luck My Sales house definition: a contact that passes hard-bounce validation and ICP fit, then provides a conscious, two-way positive signal such as a reply or request. Common alternative: any enriched contact or sequence enrollee. Why it matters: the alternative measures database or workflow volume; the house definition measures a smaller, dialogue-capable population. Do not compare their rates without relabeling the denominator.
4. Lead
House definition: a person or organization record that may warrant qualification but has not yet been accepted as a qualified opportunity. Common alternative: every new form fill or imported name. Boundary: define whether “lead” is a lifecycle state, a CRM object, or both. Otherwise lead volume cannot be reconciled across marketing and sales.
5. Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
House definition: a lead that satisfies a documented marketing-owned scoring or behavior rule and is ready for an agreed sales acceptance step. An MQL is not a promise of fit, buying authority, or opportunity creation. Metric contract: MQL volume must state the rule version and period. Owner: Marketing Operations owns the rule; Sales and RevOps approve the handoff contract.
6. Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
House definition: a lead accepted by sales after evidence confirms the minimum fit and buying-context gate. Boundary: some systems use SQL for a lifecycle stage, others for a meeting, and others for a qualified opportunity. The field must name the event and evidence required. A booked meeting alone does not prove qualification.
7. Opportunity
House definition: a commercial record opened only after the organization’s minimum qualification gate is met, with an account, owner, amount basis, close-period logic, and next step. Boundary: an opportunity is not a speculative target account or an unverified contact. Opportunity-creation rules determine every downstream pipeline denominator.
8. Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)
House definition: a testable description of the organization type most likely to experience the target problem, buy through the intended motion, realize value, and fit the unit economics. Boundary: a persona describes a person; an ICP describes an organization context. Include exclusions and trigger conditions, not only industry and headcount.
9. Buying Committee
House definition: the set of people who influence, use, approve, secure, finance, procure, or block a purchase. Boundary: titles are proxies, not proof of a role in the decision. Record the person, decision role, evidence, and current position. “Multi-threaded” should mean verified role coverage, not a raw contact count.
10. Economic Buyer
House definition: the person with final authority over the relevant economic commitment or the power to mobilize that authority. Boundary: seniority alone does not prove economic authority. Evidence can include direct confirmation of budget ownership, approval path, or decision rights. The role can change when scope or contract value changes.
11. Champion
House definition: a buyer-side person who has a problem aligned with the proposed change, enough influence to advance the decision, and demonstrated willingness to act when the seller is absent. Boundary: friendliness, response speed, and product enthusiasm are not sufficient. Record observable actions and access created.
12. Revenue Operations (RevOps)
House definition: the operating function that governs shared revenue definitions, systems, data, workflows, handoffs, and measurement across marketing, sales, and customer success. Boundary: RevOps is not merely CRM administration or dashboard production. Its scope depends on explicit decision rights and source authority.
13. Sales Operations
House definition: the function supporting sales-specific planning and execution, including territories, quotas, process, CRM controls, forecasting cadence, compensation operations, and productivity. Boundary: Sales Ops may sit inside RevOps but retains a narrower sales-function remit. Document which shared definitions it can change.
14. Deal Desk
House definition: the controlled review function for nonstandard commercial, pricing, legal, security, and operational terms before commitment. Boundary: Deal Desk is not a late-stage inbox for every exception. Define entry criteria, required evidence, approvers, service level, and an auditable exception record.
15. Data Owner
House definition: the role accountable for a dataset’s definition, allowed values, quality rules, access, lifecycle, and change approval. The Data Owner may delegate administration but not accountability. Boundary: the person who edits a field is not automatically its owner. Each material metric should point to its source owner.
02 / Method
Pipeline and forecasting
16. Pipeline
House definition: the set and amount of open commercial opportunities inside a declared stage, close-period, currency, and inclusion policy. Boundary: “pipeline” without those filters is ambiguous. Report gross pipeline and qualified pipeline separately when both matter. Do not combine currencies or periods without a documented conversion rule.
17. Qualified Pipeline
House definition: open opportunity value that satisfies the organization’s current qualification and evidence standard. In the Luck My Sales operating model, material deals include diagnosed MEDDPICC evidence. Boundary: “MEDDPICC complete” does not mean every field is positive; it means evidence and gaps are visible enough to inspect.
18. Pipeline Coverage
Luck My Sales house definition: MEDDPICC-qualified pipeline for the relevant period divided by the matching sales target.
Qualified pipeline ÷ target. Common alternative: all CRM opportunity amount divided by target. Why it matters: the two measures answer different questions. Keep both if useful, but never label unqualified amount as house coverage.19. Sales Stage
House definition: a mutually exclusive opportunity state tied to observable buyer or process evidence. A stage is not a percentage guess or a seller activity label. Boundary: moving an opportunity requires its exit criteria, not optimism about the close date. Stage history must remain auditable after definitions change.
20. Exit Criteria
House definition: the minimum observable evidence required before a record leaves a stage. Criteria should be reproducible by another reviewer. Salesforce’s pipeline-review guidance likewise emphasizes explicit questions for stage completion. Boundary: an internal task completed is not buyer evidence unless the stage is intentionally internal.
21. Win Rate
House definition: closed-won opportunities divided by all opportunities that reached a comparable decision in the same cohort.
Won ÷ (won + lost) is the preferred closed-decision view. Common alternative: won divided by every created opportunity, including open deals. Boundary: disclose the denominator, cohort start, segment, and amount-versus-count basis.22. Stage Conversion Rate
House definition: records that reached the next declared stage divided by records that entered the starting stage in a defined cohort. Boundary: a snapshot of today’s stage counts is not a cohort conversion rate. Preserve entry dates and allow enough observation time for the cohort to mature.
23. Sales Cycle Length
House definition: elapsed calendar days from a declared starting event to a declared commercial outcome, summarized for a comparable closed cohort. Boundary: opportunity-created-to-won and first-touch-to-won are different metrics. Report median alongside mean when a few long deals distort the average.
24. Sales Velocity
House definition: an average-based pipeline throughput estimate:
(qualified opportunities × average deal value × win rate) ÷ average sales-cycle days. The result is currency per day when the inputs share a population and period. Boundary: it is not a deal-level forecast. Use the Sales Velocity Calculator to test definitions and scenarios.25. Forecast Category
House definition: a declared management judgment about an opportunity’s expected contribution to a forecast period, governed by evidence requirements. Categories commonly include pipeline, best case, commit, closed, and omitted, but names vary. Boundary: forecast category is not the same as sales stage or probability.
26. Commit
House definition: the subset of forecasted business the responsible seller and manager explicitly commit to for the stated period under the current evidence standard. Boundary: commit is a management claim, not a guarantee. Record who committed, when, what changed, and the evidence gap if the deal later moves.
27. Best Case
House definition: opportunities that could close in the period under a plausible, stated path but do not meet the commit threshold. Boundary: “possible” is not enough. Name the missing event, owner, latest acceptable date, and effect on the period. Best case must not inflate committed revenue.
28. Forecast Accuracy
House definition: error between a timestamped forecast and the comparable actual result for the same scope and period. One transparent expression is
1 − |forecast − actual| ÷ actual, with an explicit policy when actual equals zero. Boundary: also retain signed error so under- and over-forecasting do not cancel invisibly.29. Deal Slippage Rate
House definition: opportunities expected to close in a period but moved beyond it, divided by opportunities included in the original comparable closing cohort. Boundary: moving a date before the snapshot cannot erase slippage. Freeze the baseline, define whether lost deals count separately, and review both count and amount.
30. Mutual Action Plan (MAP)
House definition: a shared buyer-seller record of outcomes, milestones, owners, dependencies, and dates required to reach an agreed decision or implementation state. Boundary: an internal close plan is not mutual. Buyer-side ownership and explicit agreement are required under the house method.
03 / Method
Sales AI, automation, and data
31. Sales AI
House definition: an AI-enabled system used to support or execute bounded sales work such as research, drafting, routing, summarization, scoring, forecasting support, coaching, or workflow actions. Boundary: the label says nothing about autonomy, evidence quality, security, or business fit. Specify the task and decision authority.
32. AI Agent
House definition: software that can observe state, select actions, use tools, and pursue a bounded objective across more than one step. Boundary: a single generated answer or fixed automation is not automatically an agent. Record allowed tools, data access, stop conditions, human gates, and rollback behavior.
33. Sales Copilot
House definition: an assistive AI interface that proposes information or actions while a human retains execution authority. Boundary: if the system can send, write to the CRM, change price, or advance a stage without review, it has crossed from assistance into delegated action and needs different controls.
34. Conversation Intelligence
House definition: systems that capture, transcribe, structure, search, and analyze customer conversations. Boundary: transcript generation is not proof that a scoring model understands context. Evaluate consent, capture coverage, transcription quality, language support, evidence traceability, and the effect of missing calls.
35. Intent Signal
Luck My Sales house definition: a first-party action on an owned property that shows observable interest, such as a deep pricing-page session, documentation download, or demo request. Common alternative: purchased third-party activity or topic surges. Boundary: label source and confidence. A signal is a trigger for inspection, not proof of purchase intent.
36. First-Party Intent
House definition: behavior collected through the organization’s own properties or direct interactions under its data policy. Examples include authenticated product use, form submission, reply, and owned-site activity. Boundary: first-party does not automatically mean lawful, complete, or deterministic. Consent, identity resolution, and tracking limits still apply.
37. Third-Party Intent
House definition: a provider’s inferred signal based on activity outside the buying organization’s owned properties. Boundary: source coverage, identity resolution, aggregation window, topic model, and baseline method determine usefulness. Treat it as probabilistic prioritization data and test lift against a controlled holdout where practical.
38. Data Enrichment
House definition: adding or refreshing attributes from a declared external or internal source. Boundary: enrichment is a claim with provenance, not verified truth. Store provider, field-level timestamp, confidence where available, overwrite rule, and source authority. Never overwrite a stronger first-party value silently.
39. Match Rate
House definition: source records that are linked to the correct target entity under a declared matching rule, divided by eligible source records. Boundary: vendor “match rate” may mean any returned result rather than a verified correct match. Separate coverage from precision and audit a sample for false matches.
40. Latency
House definition: elapsed time between a declared input event and a declared usable output, reported with percentile, load, region, network path, and measurement boundary. The Luck My Sales voice-workflow target is below 800 ms under the stated test. Boundary: an average alone hides tail latency and does not describe conversational quality.
41. Guardrail
House definition: a technical, policy, or human control that constrains an AI system’s inputs, outputs, tools, or actions. Boundary: a prompt instruction is not a complete guardrail. Pricing controls should bind outputs to approved data and block unsupported commercial terms before they reach a buyer.
42. Human Gate
House definition: a required human decision before a workflow can take a material action. A gate names the reviewer, evidence required, decision options, service expectation, and fallback. Boundary: “human in the loop” is too vague. A reviewer who cannot inspect evidence or stop the action is not an effective gate.
43. Personally Identifiable Information (PII)
House definition: operational shorthand for information that identifies or can reasonably be linked to a person. Legal definitions vary by jurisdiction. Boundary: do not use this glossary as a legal classification. Inventory actual data fields, purpose, location, recipients, retention, and applicable law with the Security/Legal Reviewer.
44. Data Processing Agreement (DPA)
House definition: a contract governing processing roles, instructions, security, subprocessors, data categories, duration, return/deletion, and related obligations where required. GDPR Article 28 provides binding requirements for controller-processor arrangements. Boundary: a generic vendor privacy page is not necessarily the executed DPA. This is not legal advice.
45. CRM Hygiene
House definition: the recurring control system that keeps CRM records complete enough, unique enough, current enough, and governed enough for the decisions they support. Boundary: a one-time cleanup is not hygiene. Define critical fields, owners, validation, deduplication, stale-record review, and audit cadence.
46. Duplicate
House definition: two or more records that represent the same governed entity under the organization’s identity rule. Boundary: shared names or domains do not prove duplication. Merge logic must preserve source history, consent, ownership, relationships, and the surviving identifier. Potential duplicates require review when confidence is insufficient.
47. System of Record
House definition: the authoritative system for a declared field or business object at a defined lifecycle state. Boundary: an organization can have several systems of record, but each governed attribute should have one source authority at a time. Synchronization does not make every copy equally authoritative.
48. Source Authority
House definition: the precedence rule that decides which source may create, update, or override a value. Boundary: recency alone is not authority. A verified buyer response can outrank enrichment; an executed contract can outrank CRM amount; Finance can outrank a sales forecast for recognized revenue.
49. Hard Bounce
House definition: a delivery failure classified as permanent under the provider’s declared event taxonomy.
Hard-bounced messages ÷ attempted delivered-scope messages is one rate expression. Boundary: define whether suppressed, blocked, and invalid-address events are included. The Luck My Sales house target below 0.5% is an operating control, not a universal guarantee.50. Speed-to-Lead
Luck My Sales house definition: elapsed time from a high-intent form event to the first live or voice contact attempt capable of starting a dialogue. An automated email does not count. Common alternative: time to any automated response. Boundary: report median and tail percentiles, business-hours policy, routing failures, and accepted-contact outcome. The house target is below 30 seconds.
04 / Method
Unit economics and performance
51. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
House definition: fully loaded Sales and Marketing acquisition cost divided by new paying customers attributed to the compatible period and scope.
Acquisition cost ÷ new customers. Include compensation, bonuses, software, agencies, advertising, and attributable acquisition infrastructure. Use the CAC calculator and declare allocation and conversion lag.52. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
House definition: expected customer contribution over the defined relationship horizon, not simply revenue. A steady-state shortcut is
ARPU × gross margin ÷ positive periodic churn, but it relies on stable compatible inputs. Boundary: when net churn is zero or negative, this ratio method is invalid; use a cohort contribution model instead.53. LTV:CAC Ratio
House definition: comparable contribution LTV divided by fully loaded CAC.
Contribution LTV ÷ CAC. Boundary: the numerator and denominator must use compatible customer scope, currency, and economics. Luck My Sales may show 3:1 or 4:1 as contextual reference bands, never as automatic health grades.54. CAC Payback Period
House definition: months required for customer contribution margin to recover acquisition cost.
CAC ÷ monthly contribution per customer. Boundary: billing schedule, implementation cost, gross margin, churn, expansion, and cash collection affect real recovery. A 12-month comparison band is context, not a verdict.55. Average Revenue per User or Account (ARPU/ARPA)
House definition: revenue from the declared active customer or account population divided by that population for the same period. Boundary: user and account are not interchangeable. State whether the value includes services, usage, discounts, credits, expansion, and nonrecurring revenue.
56. Gross Margin
House definition: revenue less the direct cost to deliver the product or service, divided by revenue, under the organization’s accounting policy.
(Revenue − COGS) ÷ revenue. Boundary: hosting, support, infrastructure, and third-party API costs require a documented classification. Consult Finance for binding treatment.57. Gross Churn
House definition: customer or recurring-revenue loss from the opening cohort before expansion offsets it. Boundary: logo churn and revenue churn answer different questions. Use a fixed cohort and exclude new customers from the denominator. Gross churn is often safer than net churn for a simple lifetime approximation.
58. Net Revenue Retention (NRR)
House definition: ending recurring revenue from the opening customer cohort after contraction, churn, and expansion, divided by opening recurring revenue.
(Opening recurring revenue − churn − contraction + expansion) ÷ opening recurring revenue. Boundary: exclude new-logo revenue and declare FX and acquisition treatment.59. Quota Attainment
House definition: credited sales result divided by assigned quota for the same person/team, period, currency, and compensation rule.
Credited result ÷ quota. Salesforce describes the same core ratio. Boundary: attainment does not independently measure quota quality, territory opportunity, margin, or repeatability.60. Average Deal Size
House definition: total comparable closed-won contract value divided by the number of closed-won deals in the same cohort. Boundary: ACV, TCV, ARR, bookings, and recognized revenue are different value bases. State which one is used and inspect the median or distribution when large deals skew the mean.
05 / Method
How to adopt these definitions
Do not replace every CRM label at once. Start with the five metrics that currently drive decisions. For each, record the business question, formula or rule, population, period, source fields, owner, missing-data behavior, and review date. Run the definition against a small historical sample. If two operators produce different results, the definition is not complete.
Then connect the vocabulary to controls. The Sales KPI Formulas page provides formula contracts, the calculators test scenarios without uploading data, and the Sales & RevOps Checklists page turns definitions into recurring reviews. The glossary remains the concise source; implementation detail stays in the relevant guide or artifact.
06 / Method
Frequently asked questions
Why not use the most common market definition?
Common usage is useful context, but popularity does not make a definition reproducible. Luck My Sales leads with a house definition and shows alternatives whenever they change the records, denominator, or decision.
Are these definitions industry standards?
No. They are governed operating definitions informed by current authoritative sources and the author’s RevOps methodology. Legal, accounting, security, and compensation definitions require the responsible specialist.
Should every term have its own page?
Not initially. A single searchable page prevents thin duplicate pages and makes related definitions easier to compare. A future term page should exist only when it can support a distinct task and substantial evidence.
How often should the glossary be reviewed?
Review the affected entry whenever a source system, data model, policy, vendor behavior, or regulatory requirement changes. The public record should also show a scheduled editorial review date.
Reviewed 10 September 2026. Definitions are editorial and operational guidance, not legal, accounting, tax, security, or investment advice.
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