Glossary

The vocabulary of LinkedIn selling and B2B content, defined plainly. Including the terms everyone uses and most people get wrong.

A

Account Executive (AE)

An Account Executive is the sales rep who owns a qualified opportunity from first real conversation through signed contract. They run the demo, handle pricing and objections, and close the deal, distinct from the SDR who found and qualified the lead in the first place.

Account Mapping

Account mapping is the process of visualizing the organizational structure, key stakeholders, and influence relationships inside a target account, so a seller can see who actually decides, who blocks, and who influences the deal.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

Account-Based Marketing is a coordinated strategy where sales and marketing target a defined list of named companies with tailored outreach and content, instead of casting a wide net for leads. It's a strategy, not a channel or an ad format.

Annual Contract Value (ACV)

Annual Contract Value is the average yearly revenue generated by a single customer contract, normalized for contract length. It is not the total value of the deal.

Attribution Window

An attribution window is the length of time after someone interacts with a touchpoint, like viewing a LinkedIn post or clicking an ad, during which a resulting deal can still be credited to that touchpoint. Set it too short and you erase most of the influence content actually has on a B2B sale.

B

B2B Buyer Journey

The B2B buyer journey is the path a business buyer takes from realizing they have a problem to signing a contract, covering how they discover, research, and evaluate solutions along the way. In practice it is rarely a straight line, and most of it happens before anyone talks to sales.

BANT

BANT is a sales qualification framework built around four checks: Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline. It's used early in the sales process to decide whether a lead is worth pursuing.

Boolean Search

Boolean search is a query technique that combines the operators AND, OR, and NOT with quotation marks and parentheses inside a LinkedIn keyword field to narrow results to a precise buyer persona instead of a loose pile of keyword matches.

Boosted Post

A boosted post is an organic LinkedIn post that you pay to push beyond your existing followers, using a simplified ad interface layered on top of content you already published. It is not the same product as a campaign built in Campaign Manager, and it doesn't offer the same targeting or creative controls.

Brand Voice

Brand voice is the consistent tone, vocabulary, and point of view that shows up across a founder's or company's content. It's not a style guide, it's the recognizable way a specific person or company actually talks.

Broetry

Broetry is the LinkedIn writing style that breaks every sentence, sometimes every clause, onto its own line, creating a tall column of short lines instead of dense paragraphs. The name started as a joke about a certain type of founder post but the format has spread across the whole platform.

Build in Public

Build in Public is the practice of founders sharing real-time metrics, revenue numbers, product decisions, and setbacks openly on platforms like LinkedIn instead of waiting for a polished announcement. It's marketed as radical transparency, but it's really a content strategy with real exposure risk attached.

Buyer Enablement

Buyer enablement is content and assets built to help the people inside a buying committee sell the purchase internally, to their boss, their finance team, and whoever else has to sign off. It is not aimed at your sales reps.

Buyer Persona

A buyer persona is a composite profile of an individual decision maker or influencer, built around job title, day-to-day challenges, and goals. It is not the same as an Ideal Customer Profile, which describes the company, not the person.

Buying Committee

A buying committee is the group of stakeholders inside a company, typically spanning economic buyers, technical evaluators, end users, and procurement, who collectively evaluate, influence, and approve a B2B purchase.

Buying Signal

A buying signal is an observable data point suggesting a company or individual has entered an active purchasing evaluation, such as a job change, funding announcement, or repeated engagement with specific content. It is not the same thing as generic social interaction.

C

Call-to-Action (CTA)

A call-to-action is the single, specific behavior you ask a reader to perform after engaging with your post, comment, or message. It is not a sign-off, it is an instruction with a clear next step.

Case Study

A case study is a structured narrative of a customer's problem, the solution applied, and the measurable outcome. It's built to prove a claim with evidence instead of asserting it.

Challenger Sale

A B2B sales methodology built on teaching customers something new about their own business before pitching a solution, rather than adapting to their stated needs or building relationships first.

Churn Rate

Churn rate is the percentage of customers who stop buying from you over a given period, calculated by dividing customers lost by total customers at the start of that period.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

CTR is the percentage of people who click a link after seeing your post or ad, calculated as clicks divided by impressions. On LinkedIn, a high CTR on an organic post is often a sign the platform is about to bury it, not a sign it worked.

Cold Calling

Cold calling is outbound sales development where a rep calls a business prospect who has shown no prior buying intent or engagement, with the goal of starting a conversation and booking a next step like a discovery call.

Cold Calling 2.0

Cold Calling 2.0 is Aaron Ross's term for outbound prospecting built on research and signals rather than blind dialing: reps identify a specific trigger or fit reason before reaching out, and the channel (call, email, LinkedIn) is secondary to the reason for contact.

Cold Email

Cold email is unsolicited outbound prospecting sent to someone with no prior relationship or opt-in, distinct from cold calling and LinkedIn cold outreach in its infrastructure, compliance rules, and response benchmarks.

Cold Outreach

Cold outreach is contacting a prospect who has no prior relationship with you and no existing signal of interest in what you sell. It includes cold emails, cold calls, and cold LinkedIn messages, regardless of how the message is dressed up.

Content Batching

Content batching is the practice of writing and scheduling multiple LinkedIn posts in one focused session, rather than composing each post on the day it publishes.

Content Calendar

A content calendar is a schedule of what gets published, where, and when. It is a logistics tool, not a substitute for having something to say.

Content Pillar

A content pillar is a recurring theme you post about because it's tied to a specific business outcome, not a topic bucket you fill to look consistent.

Content Pillar

A content pillar is a strategic theme built around a specific buyer problem, meant to organize proof and perspective around that problem, not a rotating topic bucket for filling a calendar.

Content Repurposing

Content repurposing is the practice of taking one piece of content and rebuilding it for a different platform or format, adapting the hook, structure, and length to match how that platform's audience actually consumes content, rather than just posting the same text everywhere.

Content-Market Fit

Content-market fit is the strategic alignment between what you publish and the actual needs, preferences, and interests of your target market. It is measured by whether the right buyers act on what you post, not by how many people saw or liked it.

Creator Mode

Creator Mode was a LinkedIn profile setting that swapped the Connect button for Follow, unlocked newsletters and content analytics, and moved your posts above your job history. LinkedIn retired the toggle in March 2024, but the features it introduced are now part of the standard profile setup.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

A CRM is the system of record for every interaction your company has with a customer or prospect, across marketing, sales, and service. It is not a contact list and it is not Sales Navigator.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

Customer Acquisition Cost is the total sales and marketing spend required to close one new customer, calculated by dividing all acquisition costs by the number of customers acquired in a given period.

Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

LTV is a forward-looking estimate of the total revenue (or gross margin) a customer will generate over the full length of their relationship with your business. It's the number that tells you what a customer is actually worth, not just what they paid you once.

D

Dark Funnel

The dark funnel is all the buyer research, peer conversation, and internal debate that shapes a purchase decision before anyone fills out a form or shows up in your CRM. It's not a channel, it's everything you can't see.

Dark Post

A dark post is a paid social ad, officially called Direct Sponsored Content on LinkedIn, that runs only in the targeted feeds of an ad audience and never appears on the advertiser's Page or in followers' organic timelines.

Dark Social

Dark social is sharing and engagement that happens in channels your analytics can't see: DMs, Slack, email forwards, group chats. It's called dark because it's untracked, not because it's shady.

Decision Maker

A decision maker is anyone with real authority to approve or kill a purchase. On most B2B deals that authority is split across several people, not held by one person with a single title.

Demand Capture vs Demand Creation

Demand capture targets buyers already actively searching for a solution, while demand creation builds awareness and desire among people who aren't looking yet. Confusing the two is why most LinkedIn content gets judged by the wrong yardstick.

Demand Capture vs Demand Creation

Demand capture is marketing and sales activity aimed at people who already know they have a problem and are actively looking for a solution. Demand creation is activity aimed at people who don't yet see the problem clearly, and its job is to build awareness and trust long before anyone searches for anything.

Discovery Call

A discovery call is the first scheduled, two-way conversation between a rep and a prospect, meant to uncover the prospect's problems, goals, and buying process before any product is discussed. It is a diagnosis, not a pitch.

Document Post

A native LinkedIn post format created by uploading a PDF, which the platform renders as a swipeable slide deck directly in the feed. It is often called a 'carousel,' but it is a distinct upload type with its own file format and swipe mechanics, not just a visual style.

Dwell Time

Dwell time is the amount of time a viewer spends actually looking at a post or profile before scrolling past, regardless of whether they like, comment, or share. It's a passive attention signal, not an interaction signal.

E

Economic Buyer

The person who controls the budget and has final authority to approve a purchase, as distinct from the champion who advocates for you internally or the users who evaluate the product.

Elevator Pitch

An elevator pitch is a short, persuasive statement of the specific problem you solve for a specific buyer, built to be delivered in 30 to 60 seconds and to open a conversation rather than close one.

Employee Advocacy

Employee advocacy is employees voluntarily sharing and creating content about their company or industry in their own voice, not reposting pre-approved messaging because a manager asked them to.

Employee-Generated Content (EGC)

EGC is content that employees create themselves, in their own words, about their actual work, rather than content the marketing team makes and hands to employees to post. It comes from the employee's own voice and experience, not the brand's.

Employer Branding

Employer branding is how a company is perceived as a place to work, by current employees and by potential applicants. It is a talent metric, not a demand generation one.

Engagement Bait

Engagement bait is a LinkedIn post engineered to generate comments and reactions through cheap tricks (vague questions, manufactured vulnerability, "agree?" statements) rather than through genuine insight or information.

Engagement Pod

A private group of LinkedIn users who agree to like, comment, and share each other's posts immediately after publishing, in order to trick the algorithm into treating the post as high-engagement and pushing it into more feeds.

Engagement Pod

A coordinated group of LinkedIn members who agree to like, comment, and share each other's posts within minutes of publishing, in order to trick the algorithm into treating the content as genuinely popular.

Engagement Rate

Engagement rate is the percentage of people who liked, commented, shared, or clicked on a post relative to how many saw it (impressions) or how many follow the account. On LinkedIn it's the metric most people check first and the one that tells you least about whether you're reaching buyers.

F

Firmographics

Firmographics are company-level attributes, such as employee count, revenue, industry, location, and technology stack, used to identify and segment businesses that match your ideal customer profile.

First-Degree Connection

A first-degree connection is someone who has directly accepted your LinkedIn connection request, or whose request you accepted. It's the innermost tier of LinkedIn's three-tier network structure (first, second, third-degree), and it's the audience your organic posts reach first and most reliably.

Flywheel

A flywheel is a circular growth model where satisfied customers generate momentum that pulls in new business, replacing the linear funnel with a system that gets faster the more energy (advocacy, referrals, content) you put into it.

Founder-Led Growth

Founder-led growth is a go-to-market strategy where the founder's personal visibility, network, and content drive customer acquisition, rather than paid channels or a marketing team.

Founder-Led Sales

Founder-led sales is the stage where the founder personally runs the sales process, from prospecting to close, before a dedicated sales team exists. It refers to actual selling activity, not to the founder's LinkedIn presence.

Founder-Market Fit

Founder-market fit is whether a founder's actual lived experience and credibility line up with the market they're posting about on LinkedIn, not whether they post often or well.

G

Gated Content

Gated content is any asset, usually a PDF, report, or webinar recording, that a visitor can only access after filling out a form. On LinkedIn, gating a native post or document means locking it behind a click-through to an external landing page.

Gatekeeper

A gatekeeper is anyone who controls or filters access to the person with budget and authority to buy, including EAs, ops managers, junior team members, and sometimes procurement. They decide what reaches the decision maker's desk and what doesn't.

Ghostwriting

Ghostwriting on LinkedIn means someone else writes posts under a founder's or executive's name, using that person's real opinions, stories, and voice, with the named author reviewing and approving every word before it goes out.

Golden Hour (LinkedIn)

The first 60 to 90 minutes after a LinkedIn post goes live, during which engagement velocity (likes, comments, shares) has an outsized effect on how far the algorithm distributes the post afterward.

H

Halo Effect

The Halo Effect is the cognitive bias where a positive impression of one thing, like a founder, colors how people judge everything connected to it, including the company they run. In B2B sales it means a founder's personal credibility on LinkedIn can lift trust in their product before a prospect has seen a single feature.

Hook Rate

Hook rate is the percentage of viewers who keep watching a video past the first few seconds, used as a proxy for how well the opening grabs attention.

I

Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)

An Ideal Customer Profile describes the company and buying context most likely to succeed with your product: firmographics, market conditions, triggers. It is not a description of the human who buys.

Impressions

An impression is one instance of a post rendering in someone's feed, whether or not they stopped scrolling to look at it. It counts renders, not people, and one person can generate dozens.

InMail

InMail is LinkedIn's paid messaging feature, available to Premium and Sales Navigator accounts, that lets you message people outside your network without a connection request. It is not email and it does not behave like email.

Intent Data

Intent data is evidence that a person or company is actively researching a problem or solution outside of your own platforms, gathered from things like search queries, content consumption on third-party sites, and review site activity. It is not the same as engagement on your own posts or profile.

J

Job Change Notification

A LinkedIn alert that fires when someone in your network changes employer, title, or role. It's one of the strongest free buying-intent signals available, marking a window where the person is actively re-evaluating vendors and tools.

L

Land and Expand

Land and expand is a go-to-market motion where you win a small initial deal with a customer, then grow the account's value over time by adding seats, products, or use cases. It's a strategy for account growth, not a single sales tactic.

Lead Gen Forms

LinkedIn's native ad format that pre-fills a user's profile data (name, email, job title, company) into a form when they click a call-to-action, letting them submit without leaving the platform. A high fill rate here measures form friction, not buyer intent.

Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is any piece of value, content, tool, or access you offer in exchange for a prospect's attention or contact information. On LinkedIn that value doesn't have to sit behind a form: it can be a free resource, a webinar, or a post that does the same job without a gate.

Lead Nurturing

Lead nurturing is the ongoing sequence of touchpoints that moves a prospect from initial interest to sales-readiness, without pushing for a close before the prospect has the context to say yes.

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is a system that assigns numerical points to prospects based on how well they fit your ideal customer profile and how they behave, so sales knows exactly who to call first.

LinkedIn Algorithm

The LinkedIn algorithm is not one piece of code but a series of ranking systems that filter, score, and re-score content before it reaches a feed. It decides which posts a given viewer sees based on their past behavior, their network, and how a post performs in its first minutes and hours.

LinkedIn Audience Network (LAN)

LinkedIn Audience Network (LAN) is an ad delivery extension that pushes sponsored content off LinkedIn and onto third-party apps and websites in LinkedIn's partner network, similar to how the Google Display Network or Meta Audience Network work.

LinkedIn Company Page

A LinkedIn Company Page is the branded profile an organization runs on the platform, distinct from any individual's personal profile. It can publish content and run ads, but it does not carry the same algorithmic reach or trust signals as a real person posting.

LinkedIn Endorsement

A one-click tap where a connection adds their name to one of your listed skills, with no comment required. It is the lightest possible form of social proof LinkedIn offers, and buyers largely ignore it.

LinkedIn Events

LinkedIn Events is a feature for promoting and organizing the lead-up to a webinar, launch, or virtual meetup. It handles invitations and pre-event visibility, not the actual hosting.

LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn Groups are topic-based communities within LinkedIn where members post, comment, and message each other outside the main feed. They stopped functioning as a distribution channel years ago but remain active as private forums where practitioners compare notes and vet vendors.

LinkedIn Insight Tag

A piece of JavaScript code you install on your website to track visits, conversions, and ad performance from LinkedIn Ads. It has nothing to do with tracking who liked, commented on, or scrolled past your organic posts.

LinkedIn Live

LinkedIn Live is a broadcast feature that lets approved accounts stream real-time video to their network, distinct from uploading a native video post. It runs through a live streaming tool (like Restream or StreamYard) connected to LinkedIn, not a simple record-and-post action.

LinkedIn Message Request

A LinkedIn Message Request is a direct message sent by someone who isn't yet a 1st-degree connection. It lands in a separate 'Other' inbox folder rather than the main Focused inbox, and most users never check it.

LinkedIn Newsletter

A recurring content series published on LinkedIn that subscribers get notified about, not a private email list. It looks like email marketing but distributes through LinkedIn's notification and feed systems instead of an inbox.

LinkedIn Pulse

LinkedIn Pulse was the standalone long-form publishing platform LinkedIn launched in 2014, later merged into native Articles and the main feed. The name persists in sales and marketing advice, but there is no separate Pulse platform, feed, or algorithm to publish to anymore.

LinkedIn Reactions

LinkedIn Reactions are the six response options a user can leave on a post (Like, Celebrate, Support, Love, Insightful, and Curious), and they are not interchangeable upvotes: LinkedIn's feed algorithm appears to weigh them differently as signals of content quality.

LinkedIn Recommendation

A written testimonial that a named connection posts to your LinkedIn profile, describing a specific working relationship or result. It is not the same as a skill Endorsement, which is a one-click, unattributed tap on a skill tag.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator is LinkedIn's paid B2B sales tool built for individual sellers and sales teams to track buyer signals and build relationships at scale, not just a search box for finding leads.

LinkedIn Shadowban

A LinkedIn shadowban is the informal term for a sudden, unexplained drop in post reach, used to describe a supposed hidden penalty on an account. LinkedIn has never confirmed a content-visibility shadowban mechanism comparable to Instagram or TikTok; most cases attributed to it are actually rate limiting, spam filtering, or an engagement collapse the poster hasn't diagnosed.

LinkedIn Top Voice

A badge LinkedIn awards for consistent participation in Collaborative Articles and general platform engagement, not a certification of sales skill or industry expertise.

Lookalike Audience

A lookalike audience is a targeting segment that an ad platform builds by matching the attributes of a source list, such as your customers or engaged followers, against its own user base to find similar people. On LinkedIn, the concept works the same way, but the match quality is limited by a much smaller and narrower data set than what Facebook or Google run their lookalike models on.

M

Marketing Qualified Account (MQA)

An MQA is a target account, not an individual, that has reached enough collective engagement across its buying center to signal it's worth sales attention. It's the account-based equivalent of an MQL, and treating the two as interchangeable is a reporting mistake.

Matched Audiences

Matched Audiences is LinkedIn's ad targeting system that lets advertisers upload lists of companies or contacts, or pull in site visitors, and match them against LinkedIn's own user data to serve paid ads to those specific people. It is a paid retargeting tool, not a way to control who sees your organic posts.

MEDDIC

MEDDIC is a B2B sales qualification framework built on six criteria: Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, and Champion. It's used to assess whether a deal is real before you spend more time chasing it.

MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead)

An MQL is a lead that has taken an action specific enough to suggest real buying intent, judged worthy by marketing to pass to sales for follow-up. It is a qualification stage, not a vanity metric.

Multithreading

Multithreading is the practice of building relationships with multiple stakeholders inside a target account at the same time, instead of routing an entire deal through one champion.

N

Native Video

Native video is footage uploaded directly into LinkedIn's own player, rather than posted as a link to YouTube, Vimeo, or another host. The distinction is about where the file lives, not what the content is about.

Net New Pipeline

Net new pipeline is the dollar value of opportunities created with accounts that had no prior sales relationship or open deal, as opposed to expansion, upsell, or renewal revenue from existing customers.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net Promoter Score is a customer loyalty metric based on one question: how likely are you to recommend us? Promoters minus detractors gives you the score, and in B2B it should signal retention and growth risk before revenue actually moves.

Net Revenue Retention (NRR)

Net Revenue Retention measures how much revenue you keep and grow from your existing customer base over a given period, including expansion and contraction, but excluding any revenue from new customers.

Newsjacking

Newsjacking means attaching a sharp, specific opinion to a breaking news story or trending topic while it's still moving, so your brand borrows the attention already flowing to that story. The term was coined by marketing expert David Meerman Scott in 2011.

North Star Metric

A North Star Metric is the single number a team tracks because it best represents the value being delivered to the customer, not just activity or output. For LinkedIn sellers and B2B content teams, it's the metric that ties content or outreach directly to pipeline behavior, not to how many people scrolled past a post.

O

Objection Handling

Objection handling is the practice of surfacing and diagnosing the real reason a prospect is hesitant, then addressing that reason directly, rather than deploying a rehearsed rebuttal to win the exchange.

Open Profile

Open Profile is a LinkedIn setting that lets any member send you a message for free, without spending an InMail credit or needing a prior connection. It only affects messages coming to you, not messages you send to others.

P

Pain Point

A pain point is a specific business problem that costs the buyer money, time, or risk, and that they would pay to eliminate. It is not a feature they lack or a trend they're worried about.

Personal Brand

A personal brand is the market's shorthand for what you're reliably good at and whether they trust you to be right about it. It is a perception held by other people, not a posting habit or a tone of voice.

Pipeline Attribution

Pipeline attribution is the practice of tracing closed deals or open opportunities back to the marketing and sales touches that influenced them, including specific LinkedIn posts, comments, or DMs. In B2B, this is genuinely hard because deals involve multiple people and multiple touches over months, not one clean click path.

Pipeline Coverage

Pipeline coverage is the ratio of open pipeline value to quota, typically targeted at 3x to 4x, used to gauge whether enough opportunities exist to hit a revenue number.

Pipeline Velocity

Pipeline velocity is a measure of how fast qualified opportunities move through your sales process and turn into closed revenue. It's calculated from four inputs: number of opportunities, average deal size, win rate, and length of sales cycle.

Product Qualified Lead (PQL)

A PQL is a prospect who has shown buying intent through actual usage of your product, like activating a key feature or hitting a usage threshold in a trial, rather than through form fills, downloads, or content engagement.

Psychographics

Psychographics are the values, motivations, fears, and internal pain points that drive a buyer's decisions, distinct from firmographic data like company size or technographic data like tech stack.

R

Reach

Reach is the number of unique LinkedIn accounts that saw a given post at least once. It is different from impressions, which count every time the post loaded on a screen, including repeat views from the same person.

Reply Rate

Reply rate is the percentage of outreach messages that get any response, out of the total number sent. On its own it says nothing about whether those responses are good news.

Revenue Operations (RevOps)

Revenue Operations (RevOps) is the function that aligns sales, marketing, and customer success on one data and process layer to maximize revenue across the full customer life cycle. It is not a rebrand of sales ops, it is a merger of three functions that used to run on separate systems and separate definitions of success.

S

Sales Accepted Lead (SAL)

A Sales Accepted Lead is a marketing-qualified lead that sales has formally reviewed and agreed to work, confirming it meets fit and intent criteria before it becomes active pipeline.

Sales Cadence

A sales cadence is a predefined sequence of outreach touches, spread across set intervals and channels, that a salesperson follows from first contact through to a decision. It defines when to reach out, how often to follow up, and which channel to use at each step.

Sales Champion

A sales champion is an internal advocate inside the buying company who believes in your solution and works to sell it to their own colleagues. They have influence, not budget authority, which means their enthusiasm is a leading indicator, not a guarantee.

Sales Cycle Length

Sales cycle length is the time it takes a prospect to move from first contact to closed deal. It's a measure of process, not a scorecard, and it only means something when read against deal size and ICP fit.

Sales Development Representative (SDR)

An SDR is a frontline sales role focused on prospecting and qualifying leads, not closing them. Their job ends when a qualified meeting lands on an account executive's calendar.

Sales Enablement

Sales enablement is the set of resources, content, and systems a company gives its sales team to make selling more effective and efficient. It used to mean decks and one-pagers from marketing. It now includes the personal brand assets and social proof reps pull into live conversations.

Sales Funnel

A staged model, usually Awareness, Interest, Evaluation, Intent, Purchase, and Retention, that maps how a business prospect moves from first hearing about your company to becoming a paying customer. It exists to give sales and marketing measurable checkpoints for where prospects advance or drop off.

Sales Playbook

A sales playbook is a documented, living reference that codifies who to target, what to say at each stage, how to handle objections, and how deals move through the process. It is not a script and not a guarantee reps will follow it.

Sales Qualified Account (SQA)

A Sales Qualified Account (SQA) is an entire target account, not an individual lead, that sales and marketing have jointly vetted as a fit and ready for active sales-led outreach. It's the account-based equivalent of a qualified lead, but the unit of qualification is the company, not the person.

Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)

A Sales Qualified Lead is a prospect that a sales rep or sales team has vetted as having real budget, authority, need, and timeline, and has agreed to work. It sits after the Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) stage and before an opportunity.

Sales Qualified Opportunity (SQO)

An SQO is a deal that a sales rep has personally vetted and confirmed has budget, decision-making authority, and a real timeline, distinct from a lead that simply matched some qualifying criteria.

Sandler Selling System

Sandler is a sales methodology built on the idea that the salesperson should never want the sale more than the buyer does. Instead of pitching, the rep uncovers pain, budget, and decision process early enough to let unqualified buyers disqualify themselves before real effort is wasted.

Save Rate

Save rate is the percentage of people who bookmarked a LinkedIn post relative to how many saw it, calculated as saves divided by impressions. It is one of the few engagement metrics that correlates with someone finding a post genuinely useful enough to revisit.

Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM)

SAM is the slice of the Total Addressable Market you can realistically reach and win with your current product, pricing, and distribution, sitting between the theoretical TAM and the SOM you'll actually capture this year.

Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM)

SOM is the slice of your Serviceable Addressable Market you can realistically capture in the near to mid-term, given your actual sales capacity, budget, and competitive position. It is the number a pitch deck or a revenue plan should actually be built on.

Share of Search

Share of Search is the percentage of category-related search queries that go to your brand instead of competitors, tracked over time as a proxy for where buyer intent is heading. It moves before market share does, which is what makes it useful.

Share of Voice

Share of voice is the percentage of a category's total visibility that belongs to your brand, measured against your named competitors, not against some abstract benchmark of your own past performance.

Signal-Based Selling

Signal-based selling is a B2B sales approach that prioritizes outreach based on observable buying signals, such as funding rounds, job changes, hiring surges, or content engagement, rather than working a static list in alphabetical or arbitrary order.

Social Proof

Social proof is evidence that other credible people or companies have trusted and benefited from what you sell, used to reduce a buyer's risk before they ever talk to you. In B2B it works because it borrows judgment from someone the buyer already respects.

Social Selling Index

The Social Selling Index (SSI) is a LinkedIn-generated score from 0 to 100 that tracks how much you use the platform's own social selling features. It measures activity, not whether any of that activity closes a deal.

Social Selling Index

LinkedIn's Social Selling Index (SSI) is a proprietary score, updated daily, that measures how much a member does on the platform in four categories: building a professional brand, finding the right people, engaging with insights, and building relationships. It is an activity metric, not a measure of pipeline generated or deals closed.

Speed to Lead

Speed to lead is the time between a prospect showing buying intent and a human responding with a meaningful next step. It is usually discussed as a web form metric, but it applies to any channel where someone signals interest, including LinkedIn DMs.

SPIN Selling

SPIN Selling is a consultative questioning framework built on four question types, Situation, Problem, Implication, and Need-Payoff, designed to help a buyer surface their own problem before you present a solution.

Spray and Pray

Spray and pray is the practice of sending the same generic outbound message, on LinkedIn or cold email, to a large list of prospects with little or no personalization, hoping volume alone produces replies.

T

Technographics

Technographics is data about the specific hardware, software, and technology tools a company uses to run its operations. It's used for targeting and timing outreach, not for describing company size or industry.

Thought Leader Ads

A LinkedIn Campaign Manager ad format that pays to boost distribution of an organic post from a person's personal profile, not a company page post. The ad runs as if it came natively from that individual in the feed.

Thought Leadership

Thought leadership is the trust a buyer places in you or your company before a sales conversation even starts, trust that shortens the sales cycle because objections and vetting have already happened in the buyer's head. It is an outcome, not a content format.

Total Addressable Market (TAM)

TAM is the total revenue or number of accounts a business could capture if it achieved 100% market share within a clearly defined segment. It's a ceiling on opportunity, not a plan for reaching it.

Trigger Event

A trigger event is a specific, dated change in a prospect's business or role that creates a real reason to reach out now rather than any other time. It is a change in circumstance, not a change in newsfeed activity.

V

Value Proposition

A value proposition is a specific, quantifiable statement of the outcome a defined customer segment gets from your product, stated in terms of their economics. It is not a tagline, a mission statement, or a line of ad copy.

Value Selling

Value Selling is a sales methodology built around quantifying the specific financial or operational outcome a deal will produce for the buyer, rather than describing product features or being generically helpful. It is a discipline for turning a company's generic value proposition into a customer specific, defensible number.

Vanity Metric

A vanity metric is a number that looks good on a report but has little correlation with pipeline, revenue, or margin. It measures activity, not impact.

Vanity URL

A vanity URL is the customized web address for your LinkedIn profile, the part after linkedin.com/in/ that you choose yourself instead of the random string LinkedIn assigns by default. It's the link you put on a resume, an email signature, or a business card.

Video Completion Rate

Video completion rate is the percentage of viewers who watched a video all the way through, as opposed to view count or view rate, which only measure whether someone watched for a few seconds.