Glossary

The vocabulary, defined honestly

Every term you'll hit in GTM operations and engineering, in plain language with the practitioner's take. Not a textbook: what the word means, and what it means when it goes wrong.

Pipeline & forecasting

Pipeline coverage: Open pipeline divided by the target it has to produce. The honest number is not a flat 3x, it is 1 divided by your win rate: at a 20% win rate you need 5x, not 3x.
Weighted pipeline: Each deal multiplied by its stage probability. Useful for a roll-up, dangerous as a forecast: a $500K deal at 20% forecasts the same as five $100K deals at 20%, and they behave nothing alike.
Commit: The deals a rep is willing to bet on this period. A commit is only real if the close date is in-period and you can name what has to be true for it to land.
Slippage: A committed deal that pushes to a later period. Two close-date pushes on a commit deal is a tell, not a coincidence.
Stage exit criteria: The observable facts required to advance a deal: economic buyer confirmed, next meeting booked, decision process documented. If the criteria are vibes, weighted pipeline is fiction.
Forecast accuracy / variance: How close the called number lands to actuals. Elite teams hold inside 5% variance; most miss by 10%+, usually from missing cadence, not a bad model.

Metrics

NRR / net revenue retention: Starting ARR plus expansion minus churn and contraction, over starting ARR. Above 100% the book grows on its own; below 100% new sales refill a leak before they add anything. Median is ~102%, best-in-class 120%+.
GRR / gross revenue retention: Retention before any expansion is counted. Caps at 100%. The honest floor metric; NRR can hide churn that GRR exposes. Median ~84%.
CAC payback: Months to recover the cost of acquiring a customer. Under 12 is efficient, 12 to 18 is normal, past 24 you are buying revenue faster than it pays you back. PLG runs 6 to 9; enterprise 24+.
Magic number: Net-new ARR over prior-period sales and marketing spend. Above 0.75 you should spend more; below 0.5 you should fix the funnel before adding budget.
Pipeline velocity: Number of opps times win rate times average deal size, divided by cycle length. One number for the whole engine. Shortening the cycle compounds; adding raw opps is the slowest lever.
Quota attainment: Bookings against quota, and the share of reps hitting it. Report the share, not the mean: in 2025 the average was ~43% and most reps missed. When most miss, the quota model is guessing, not the reps.

Data & systems

Source of truth: The one system that owns a given field. The problem is never having a source of truth, it is having three that each think they are it.
Idempotency: A job you can run twice without corrupting data or double-charging. Most ops automations are not idempotent, and that is a data-integrity bug hiding in plain sight.
Order of execution: The sequence automations fire on a record save. Turn one off and the survivors re-order, so a flow that ran third now runs second and reads a field before another has written it.
Reverse ETL: Syncing modeled data from the warehouse back into operational tools. It is plumbing beneath identity resolution and activation, not a dumb pipe; writeback has no undo button.
Field history: The audit trail of who changed what, when. Riddled with gotchas: sandbox history resets, formula fields are not tracked, and there is a hard limit on tracked fields. If inputs are unreliable, dashboards are fiction.
Data decay: B2B contact data goes stale at roughly 22 to 30% a year. Your enriched CRM is quietly rotting; enrichment is a subscription, not a one-time append.

Outbound & enrichment

Enrichment waterfall: Chaining data providers so a miss from one becomes a hit from the next, and you pay mostly on verified data. A 4-tool waterfall tops out around 68% coverage; anyone quoting 92% is counting catch-alls that bounce.
Catch-all: A domain that accepts any address, so a provider calls it a hit even when the mailbox does not exist. About 9% of domains, 20 to 30% at enterprises. Treat it as risky, not valid.
Signal: An event that marks an account entering a buying window: funding, a key hire, a usage spike. A high-intent list in a spreadsheet is not a signal until it is wired to a workflow.
Deliverability: Whether your mail reaches the inbox at all. A trust system: cross 0.30% spam complaints and providers throttle you. Delivered is not inboxed; 98% delivery can still be 40% placement.
Signal-based outbound: Firing outreach off a real trigger instead of a static list. Signal-triggered replies run 10 to 20% versus 1 to 3% for spray, a 3 to 10x lift from timing alone.

Lifecycle & handoffs

The bowtie: The recurring-revenue replacement for the funnel: acquisition narrows to Commit, then retention and expansion widen back out. Most orgs instrument the left side heavily and the right side not at all, which is why NRR is a mystery.
MQL / SQL / SAL / SAO: The lead lifecycle stages. Only 8% of companies define them the same way across marketing and sales, which is why the handoff leaks: 53% of MQLs never become SALs.
Handoff: Any point where a record, owner, stage, or responsibility changes. Every handoff is a leakage point: 30 to 50% of B2B revenue leaks at the seams unless you instrument each one.
Speed-to-lead: Time from inbound lead to first outreach. Under 5 minutes is far more likely to qualify than 30. The leak is rarely fairness; it is the median latency nobody measures. 44% of leads are never contacted at all.
Lead-to-account matching / L2A: Tying an inbound lead to the right account before routing. Email-domain matching catches ~70%; fuzzy company-name adds 15 to 20%. Without it, 15 to 25% of leads misroute.

Comp & planning

Pay mix: The base-to-variable split of on-target earnings. It should track how much of the outcome the role controls: AE 50/50 up to 55/45 at enterprise, SDR 65/35, CSM 75/25 to 80/20.
Quota-to-OTE ratio: Quota divided by on-target earnings. 4 to 5x is standard, enterprise runs 5.5 to 6x, and above 6x the plan is structurally broken.
Ramp: The months before a rep carries full quota. If you plan capacity on nominal quota and ignore ramp, you overstate capacity badly: 12 reps at a 6-month ramp carry half of nominal, not all of it.
Capacity planning: Deriving how much a team can actually produce from reps, ramp, quota, and attainment. It is a RevOps problem wearing a finance costume; the inputs all live in the CRM.
Territory design: Carving accounts so every rep gets a fair shot at the number. Most territory fights are really quota fights in a costume; balance the quota-to-pipeline ratio first and half the complaints disappear.

The slang

Sandbagging: A rep hiding upside to beat a soft number later. When commit accuracy is above 90%, that is not discipline, it is sandbagging.
Zombie deal: An opportunity that will never close but still sits in the pipeline inflating coverage. A 4x pipeline with 30% zombies is really 2.8x.
Agent graveyard: The pile of AI pilots that died at 90 days because no one owned them, the data was dirty, and there was no rollback. 88% of teams use AI; only 38% scale past the pilot.
Automation debt: The accrued weight of redundant, dormant, and self-fighting automations. It charges interest in save latency and order-of-execution bugs. One real org ran faster after cutting 282 automations to 82.
Dumpster fire: The state of a CRM instance nobody governed for three years: duplicate rules set to block, 47 required fields, six flows writing the same owner. The affectionate term for the thing RevOps is hired to put out.
Hockey stick: The forecast shape where nothing closes until the last two weeks of the quarter, then everything supposedly does. Usually a slippage problem wearing optimism.