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Terms + Definitions

Revenue Glossary

Productive conversations are impossible if your revenue teams don't speak the same language. This glossary is for revenue teams that need total alignment to run revenue—and fast.

Click on the terms you find most interesting for additional information.

Term TL;DR How it helps you run revenue
ABC - Always Be Closing

A terrible piece of advice from the 1980s that does more harm than good due to its focus on short term gains over building relationships that last.

By telling you what not to do. While this mantra may have worked a lifetime ago, today’s champion sellers focus on creating value for their prospects.

Account Engagement

The touchpoints and responses across all of your accounts.

Everything you need to know about the health and activity of your key accounts.

Track all your touches across prospects and accounts—meetings, emails, mutual action plans, and more.

Answer these questions:

  • Where are reps spending the most time?
  • Are you getting the executive-level engagement you need?
  • Which gaps can you fill to win more business?
B2B - Business to Business

Business to Business, (2 replacing “to” for extra coolness) is a transactional relationship where even a single bad lead can really mess up your quarter. So, you know…no stress.

 
B2C - Business to Consumer

Business to Consumer is when you go to the store to buy toothpaste. Or chocolates. Unless you are buying toothpaste or chocolates in bulk for a chain of hotels or something. Then it’s B2B. Look, it’s a little fuzzy at the edges, ok.

 
Buyer Persona Buyer personas are detailed descriptions of imaginary people who represent your ideal customers. And when I say detailed, I mean George R R Martin-describing-a-dinner level of detail.

How do you sell if you don’t know who your customer is?

Buyer personas help you understand the customer, and refine your pitch.

Call Review

That time of the week when the spotlight is on you, so you can become a lean, mean selling machine.

Regular call reviews help your sales team

level up quickly. Use a conversation intelligence tool to speed up the review process.

Churn The rate at which customers stop doing business with you.

Think of it like a leak in a boat. Can you survive by scooping the water out (that is, getting new customers)? Sure, for a bit.

But sooner or later, you need to fix the leak or James Cameron will make a movie about you.

Clari Revenue Platform The only platform that treats revenue as a process, not just an outcome.

Clari's Revenue Platform enables full collaboration and governance across your go-to-market organization so you execute more consistently to drive predictable revenue.

Automatically gather fragmented data from all your teams into a single point of clarity—then apply AI to adopt efficient workflows and actionable insights.

Coaching

Helping and guiding sales folks grow and become problem solvers in their own right, even as your own approaching deadlines get louder and louder.

By helping your team with attention and advice today, you help them become the champion sellers of tomorrow. And what’s better for revenue than that?

Cold Call The toughest test for an SDR.

Calling up people who don't know you and aren't expecting you to call will never be easy. But take the time to warm them up with some internet detective work, and you will have a full pipeline in no time.

Conversation Intelligence Tech that helps you draw insights from customer conversations, without the need for notes.

Even the most observant listeners can miss things.

Conversation intelligence uses AI to go through customer conversations and unearth hidden insights that can help you cinch those deals.

CRM Automation Let your revenue team spend more time on what they do best instead of ticking boxes and typing notes.

The antidote to manually pulling numbers, combining endless spreadsheets, and chasing reps to update their records.

Automatically capture sales and marketing activity from all of your systems—then populate leads, create contacts, and associate to opportunities without lifting a finger.

That means every meeting invite, email reply, and ABM touchpoint.

CRM Software Archaic tools that were never built to run revenue.

By being a storehouse of business data. However, to actually run revenue efficiently, you definitely need to pair it with a tool purpose-built to run revenue, so that your sales team can skip the soul-crushing drudgery and get to selling.

Discovery Call Your only opportunity to make an amazing first impression on your prospect. No pressure.

Ideally, the first step in a long business relationship, a lot hinges on the discovery call. Putting your best foot forward by being prepared and asking the right questions is one of the most important ways to prevent revenue leak.

Forecasting The revenue number you call each month, quarter, or year.

The process of forecasting predicts revenue for the month, quarter, or year by pressure-testing your numbers, tracking critical changes, and adapting to revenue-health indicators.

Sales forecasts get a bad rap—for the average company, they're usually off by 40%. But that's because they rely on spreadsheets and guesswork based on outdated data.

Forecasting should be based on real-time data, predictive insights, and processes used by best-in-class companies.

Gatekeeper

The person whose job it is to stop you from doing your job.

 
Mutual Action Plan (MAP) A living doc that makes your sales process a collaborative, productive experience between you and your buyer.

A step-by-step timeline that ensures both the sales team and the customer are on the same page.

An effective MAP outlines deal objectives, major milestones, action items, and the expected ROI of the deal.

You're on the right track if you use buyer-centric language, introduce it early, and treat it as a living document.

Pipeline Management Your revenue GPS that delivers real-time insights into account status and engagement.

Pipeline management gives you a real-time look at how deals are moving along, which ones are at risk, and where to put your efforts.

With deal flow, deal activity, and opportunity scoring, you can focus your pipeline discussions on where to go instead of where you are.

Predictable Revenue The ability to call your number accurately every quarter.

Successful companies are built on predictable revenue: what will come in, where it will come from, and which levers the team will need to pull to get there.

Treating revenue as a collaborative, governed process means hitting 96%+ forecast accuracy.

Revenue We'll tell you what it’s not: just the number you measure at the end of the quarter.

Yes, ARR and MRR measure how much $$$ you're bringing in.

But it shouldn't stop there. If it does, you're losing a lot more $$$ through revenue leak, customer churn, and subpar win rates.

Instead, revenue is a cross-functional process that requires collaboration between your employees and governance in your systems.

Revenue-Critical Employees Your team members who directly contribute to revenue via net new sales, renewals, and upsells.

Sales, marketing, customer success, finance, leadership: up to 50% of a company's employees are revenue-critical.

These teams contribute to a company's revenue-generating process—which means they should have visibility into what they need to deliver consistent outcomes collaboratively.

Revenue Collaboration & Governance A strategic framework for running revenue and controlling the end-to-end process.

RevCG is purpose-built to optimize the revenue process at your company.

Collaboration is how you run revenue. Governance is how you control revenue.

By putting both in place, you activate all revenue-critical employees and approach revenue as a process instead of simply an outcome.

Revenue Collaboration The partnership between your sales, marketing, and operations teams.

Revenue collaboration is one of the two pillars of the revenue process.

True end-to-end collaboration enables all revenue-critical employees to easily and effectively work together to run revenue.

At a minimum, it means marketing has what it needs to make informed decisions, sales has the right context on incoming leads, and leadership spends less time on status checks and more time on next steps.

Revenue-Critical Moments  

Your revenue teams face critical moments every single day. Objection response, competitive pressure, commercial conversations, etc. The list is endless.

Winning those moments drives revenue precision. Losing those moments leads to revenue leak.

Revenue-Critical Signals  

Your tech stack collects more data than ever—but most of it is just noise. More distraction than insight.

Revenue-critical signals are the opposite. They're meaningful data points that drive significant action and results.

Revenue Governance How you control and improve your revenue process.

Revenue governance is your ability to control the end-to-end revenue process.

Effective revenue governance allows you to work with a single source of truth for automated, real-time, and team-wide insights.

Then you use those insights to create efficient, documented, and flexible processes for better collaboration.

Revenue Leak The loss of revenue due to breakdowns in the revenue process.

The revenue that you earned—but have not captured—due to breakdowns in the revenue process.

Neglected deals. Clunky handoffs. Low retention. Poor lead quality.

There are dozens of underlying reasons for revenue leak, but they all have one thing in common: you don't usually catch them until it’s too late.

That's why nearly 15% of committed deals are lost because of what the team can't see, and $24B in revenue is lost because of what leadership can't control.

Revenue Operations The critical set of people and capabilities that let you operate revenue as a process.

RevOps gives you accurate data, a single source of truth, automated reporting, accurate tracking, and more.

Collaboration and governance don't just happen on their own: you need shared goals, metrics, processes, and data.

RevOps gets you from "we're winging it" to the visibility, accountability, predictability, and productivity you need for consistent growth.

Revenue Precision The full, predictable, and repeatable capture of revenue.

Instead of throwing more outbound messages or higher call quotas at the problem, revenue precision lets you identify specific opportunities.

In turn, you:

  • Win more
  • Retain more
  • Predict better
Sales Analytics Data visualizations and up-to-date insights that give you a comprehensive view of your revenue process.

Get an accurate view of your revenue—past, present, and future.

See metrics for your entire pipeline—like historical conversion rates—or for specific accounts—like which reps need additional guidance.

With team-wide sales analytics, you make every meeting more productive—from sales 1:1s to QBRs.

Sales Funnel A tool to map out where your prospects are based on how interested they are in doing business with you.

Tells you exactly where your prospects are in relation to you, and how far away they are from converting. This is important information when making your monthly and quarterly forecasts as accurate as possible.

Sales Objections

Sometimes deal killers, but more often, opportunities dressed up as hindrances. Manage them right, and your prospect becomes a loyal customer.

 
Sales Prospecting The art of finding a rich seam of leads to mine.

When looking for leads, every minute you spend going after leads that don’t convert contributes to revenue leak. Prospecting helps you avoid wild goose chases.

Sales Pipeline

The stages a lead goes through to finally become the best news of your week.

Keeps you aware of potential revenue leaks. Use a revenue platform to monitor your pipeline regularly so you can act fast and ensure predictable revenue.

Time to Revenue  

The time your company spends collecting revenue-critical signals, analyzing them, and acting on them to see a lift in revenue.

Run revenue like a pro.

There are multiple ways for you to assess your revenue leak, learn how to achieve revenue precision, and educate yourself on the future of revenue.

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Ready to take your revenue to new heights?