Glossary

Every tech sales term, explained.

Last reviewed 10 August 2026·74 terms·By Issy Hardwick

Every tech-sales acronym, methodology, and pipeline term defined in plain English. Written for Australian SDRs entering the field in 2026, useful for anyone learning the language of B2B SaaS.

Roles & titles

SDRSales Development Representative: A salesperson focused on creating or qualifying sales opportunities. Responsibilities can include account research, phone and email outreach, LinkedIn prospecting, inbound qualification, meeting booking and CRM records. Scope varies by employer.
BDRBusiness Development Representative: A sales-development title often associated with outbound prospecting, although employers use BDR and SDR differently. The live responsibilities, quota and level are more reliable than the acronym.
AEAccount Executive: A salesperson who owns some or all of a deal cycle, which can include discovery, demonstrations, stakeholder management, forecasting, negotiation and closing. Scope and seniority vary by segment and employer.
AMAccount Manager: The post-sale relationship owner for a customer. Focused on retention, expansion, and renewals rather than new logo acquisition. Often paired with a CSM at SaaS companies.
CSMCustomer Success Manager: The post-sale role that ensures customers actually adopt and get value from the product. CSMs handle onboarding, training, and ongoing health-check conversations. Typically not commission-driven in the same way AEs are.
SESales Engineer / Solutions Engineer: The technical counterpart to an AE. Owns the technical side of the sale: deep demos, integration questions, security reviews, proof-of-concept setup. Often paid on the same comp plan as the AE they pair with.
Sales manager: A people manager responsible for a sales team, which may include SDRs, AEs or both. Responsibilities can include coaching, hiring, forecasting and team performance.
VP Sales / CROVice President Sales / Chief Revenue Officer: Senior leadership responsible for the sales or broader revenue function. Scope can include strategy, organisation design, hiring, targets, forecasting and cross-functional alignment.

Compensation

OTEOn-Target Earnings: Base salary plus target variable pay at the plan's defined target performance. OTE is not guaranteed earnings, so compare the quota, credit rules and payment conditions as well as the headline number.
Base salary: The fixed portion of compensation, distinct from target variable pay. Check whether the quoted figure includes super and any other package components.
Variable comp / commission: The performance-based portion of your pay, paid against attainment of quota (meetings booked, pipeline generated, deals closed). Typically paid monthly or quarterly with a one-cycle lag.
Pay mix: The ratio of base salary to target variable pay in a compensation plan, expressed as base/variable. Calculate it from the written offer because there is no universal Australian SDR split.
Quota: A performance target used by an employer. It may relate to credited meetings, accepted opportunities, pipeline, revenue or another defined outcome, over a stated measurement period.
Attainment: Performance expressed as a percentage of quota. Reaching 100% means meeting the defined target; payment above or below that point depends on the written plan.
Accelerator: A rule that increases the commission rate after a defined performance threshold. The threshold, multiplier, scope and cap are employer-specific.
Ramp: An employer-defined onboarding period that may use reduced quota, guaranteed variable pay or another transition arrangement. Duration and payment rules are not universal.
Clawback: A reversal of commission or credit under conditions defined in a compensation plan, such as a meeting not meeting eligibility rules or a deal changing status. Read the trigger and time window in writing.
SPIFFSales Performance Incentive Fund: A short-term incentive offered on top of a normal compensation plan to encourage a defined outcome. Eligibility, measurement and payment rules should be documented.

Revenue metrics

MRRMonthly Recurring Revenue: A measure of recurring subscription revenue normalised to a monthly period. Companies may define inclusions and exclusions differently.
ARRAnnual Recurring Revenue: A measure of recurring subscription revenue normalised to an annual period. It is often calculated from MRR, but company definitions and inclusions can differ.
ACVAnnual Contract Value: The annualised value of a customer contract. A three-year A$300,000 contract has an illustrative ACV of A$100,000 before any employer-specific exclusions.
TCVTotal Contract Value: The contracted value across the full term of an agreement. A three-year A$300,000 contract has an illustrative TCV of A$300,000 before any employer-specific exclusions.
NRRNet Revenue Retention: A retention measure that includes expansion, contraction and churn from an existing customer cohort over a defined period. Above 100% means expansion exceeded contraction and churn for that calculation.
GRRGross Revenue Retention: A retention measure for an existing customer cohort that excludes expansion and reflects contraction and churn over a defined period. The exact formula should be stated with the metric.
Churn: Customers who cancel or downgrade in a given period. Tracked as logo churn (number of customers) and revenue churn (dollars lost). Lower is better.
CACCustomer Acquisition Cost: How much the company spends to acquire one new customer. Used in tandem with LTV to assess unit economics. Healthy SaaS targets a CAC payback under 18 months.
LTVLifetime Value: An estimate of the economic value a customer will generate over the relationship. The model depends on assumptions such as margin, retention and discounting.

Market sizing & ICP

ICPIdeal Customer Profile: The specific company type the product is designed to serve best, defined by industry, size, geography, tech stack, and other firmographic criteria. SDR list-building starts here.
TAMTotal Addressable Market: The full revenue opportunity if every potential customer in the world bought the product. The biggest market-sizing number, used for vision-level planning.
SAMServiceable Available Market: The portion of TAM the company can actually reach with its current product, geography, and channels. Smaller than TAM, more relevant operationally.
SOMServiceable Obtainable Market: The portion of SAM the company can realistically capture in the near term given competitive dynamics, sales capacity, and resources. The most operational of the three.
Persona: A specific role or buyer type within an ICP company that the seller targets. E.g. "VP of Engineering at a 200-person Series C SaaS." Used for personalising outreach and tailoring messaging.
Champion: A person inside the prospect company who actively advocates for the deal internally, even when the seller isn't in the room. A real champion has authority, motive, and access to the decision-maker.
Decision-maker: The person who can actually approve the purchase. Often above the champion in the org chart. Identifying and reaching the decision-maker is the central skill of AE-level selling.
Economic buyer: The person whose budget the deal comes out of. Usually senior to the decision-maker. In MEDDIC, identifying the economic buyer is one of the six core qualification criteria.

Pipeline stages

Lead: A person or company with some signal of interest in the product. Lead is the loosest term in the funnel, usually meaning "not yet qualified."
MQLMarketing Qualified Lead: A lead that has met marketing-defined engagement criteria (e.g. downloaded a whitepaper, attended a webinar). Marketing hands MQLs to SDRs for qualification.
SQLSales Qualified Lead: A lead that an SDR has qualified through a discovery conversation as fitting ICP and showing real intent. SQLs progress to a meeting with an AE.
SALSales Accepted Lead: A lead that the AE has accepted from the SDR as worth a discovery meeting. Used at companies that want a tight handshake between SDR and AE before committing AE time.
SQOSales Qualified Opportunity: An opportunity that has progressed beyond initial discovery and is being actively worked toward close. SQO criteria typically include ICP fit, identified need, and timeline.
Opportunity: A specific deal in the pipeline at a defined stage with a target close date and dollar value. The unit of measure for an AE's pipeline.
Top of funnel (TOFU): Early-stage activity: prospects becoming aware of the product, leads being captured, SDR outreach happening. The widest, least-qualified part of the funnel.
Middle of funnel (MOFU): Mid-stage: discovery calls, demos, technical evaluation. Prospects engaged but not yet committed. Most pipeline gets stuck here.
Bottom of funnel (BOFU): Late-stage: pricing conversations, procurement, legal review, contract signing. Closer to revenue but typically a smaller share of total opportunities.
Closed won / closed lost: The terminal pipeline stages. Closed won = signed deal, revenue recognised. Closed lost = the prospect chose another path (competitor, internal build, no-decision).
Pushed / slipped: When a deal that was forecasted to close in one quarter moves to the next. Common at AE level. Repeated slippage on the same deal is a red flag for forecasting accuracy.

Outbound & prospecting

Outbound: Seller-initiated outreach to potential customers who have not requested contact. Channels can include phone, email and professional social platforms.
Inbound: Prospect-initiated engagement: form fills, demo requests, content downloads, free-trial signups. Triaged by SDRs at marketing-led SaaS companies.
Cold call: An unscheduled phone call to a potential customer who has not requested the call. Applicable consent, identification, calling-time and do-not-call rules must be followed.
Cold email: A commercial email sent to a potential customer who has not directly requested that message. In Australia, Spam Act requirements include consent, sender identification and a functional unsubscribe facility.
Cadence / sequence: A planned series of outreach attempts across one or more channels. Length, spacing and channel choice should reflect the audience, evidence and applicable communications law.
Multi-thread: Engaging more than one stakeholder at the same prospect company. Multi-threading reduces deal risk because no single contact leaving stalls the deal.
Single-thread: Engaging only one stakeholder at the prospect company. Common for SDRs at the qualification stage but a deal-stage red flag for AEs.
Trigger event: A specific signal that suggests the prospect is more likely to buy now than usual. New funding rounds, new executive hires, expansion into a new market, layoffs. Strong outbound leads with the trigger event in the subject line.
ABM / ABSAccount-Based Marketing / Account-Based Selling: A go-to-market motion that targets a finite list of named accounts with coordinated marketing and sales effort, rather than chasing volume. Common at enterprise SaaS.
Connect rate: The percentage of call attempts that produce a conversation under the team's stated definition. Compare rates only when the audience, data source, time period and denominator are comparable.
Reply rate: The percentage of delivered messages that receive a response under the team's stated definition. Positive replies, total replies and automated replies are different measures.
Show rate: The percentage of booked meetings that meet the team's attendance definition. State the time period, exclusions and whether rescheduled meetings count.

Sales methodologies

BANTBudget, Authority, Need, Timeline: An older qualification framework that asks four questions: does the prospect have budget, decision authority, an identified need, and a defined timeline? Considered too rigid by modern SaaS but still in use.
MEDDICMetrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify pain, Champion: A widely-used B2B SaaS qualification framework. Stronger than BANT for complex enterprise sales because it pushes sellers to identify the economic buyer and the actual decision process, not just budget.
MEDDPICCMEDDIC + Paper process + Competition: MEDDIC extended with two additional criteria: the procurement and legal paper process (which can take longer than the rest of the sale) and competitive context. Standard at enterprise SaaS.
SPIN sellingSituation, Problem, Implication, Need-Payoff: A discovery framework structured as a sequence of question types. Originally from Neil Rackham's 1988 book; still widely taught. Useful for early-career sellers running their first discovery calls.
Challenger sale: A sales approach that emphasises teaching prospects something new about their business rather than asking what they need. Based on the 2011 book by Matt Dixon and Brent Adamson.
Solution selling: A sales approach focused on diagnosing a prospect's problem before proposing a solution. Employers may combine it with other discovery and qualification methods.
Consultative selling: A buyer-centric approach where the seller acts as an advisor, asking questions and shaping recommendations rather than pushing product. Common at high-ACV enterprise SaaS.
Discovery call: A conversation used to understand a prospect's current state, needs, stakeholders, decision process and timing. Ownership and length vary by employer and sales motion.

Company segmentation

SaaSSoftware as a Service: Software delivered over the internet, commonly through a subscription or usage-based arrangement, rather than installed and licensed solely on the customer's own infrastructure.
B2BBusiness-to-Business: Selling to other companies rather than consumers. Most SDR roles are B2B because B2B sales cycles are long enough to need an outbound prospecting layer.
SMBSmall and Medium Business: A company-size segment used in go-to-market planning. Employee and revenue thresholds are defined by each business, so one company's SMB segment may differ from another's.
Mid-market: A customer segment between an employer's SMB and enterprise definitions. Thresholds, deal sizes and sales cycles are company-specific.
Enterprise: A customer segment used for larger or more complex accounts. Employers define it using their own employee, revenue, account and buying-complexity criteria.
Strategic / global: A label some employers use for a selected group of large or strategically important accounts. Account criteria and role scope are employer-specific.
PLGProduct-Led Growth: A go-to-market motion where the product itself drives acquisition (free tier, free trial, viral loops) and sales is overlaid on top of users who self-onboard. Atlassian and Canva are classic AU examples.
SLGSales-Led Growth: A go-to-market motion in which salespeople play the central role in moving potential customers from outreach or qualification through to purchase.

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