Plain-English definitions of the terms you'll actually run into in sales, outbound, deliverability, lead generation, and CRM — each linking to a deeper guide.
An AI SDR (AI sales development representative) is software that automates the repetitive parts of sales development: finding and scoring prospects, personal…
Outbound sales is the practice of proactively initiating contact with potential customers who haven't expressed interest yet — through cold email, cold calli…
Cold email is sending a business email to a prospect you have no prior relationship with, to start a conversation. Unlike spam, effective cold email is targe…
A sales cadence is the planned sequence of outreach touches — emails, calls, voicemails, or social messages — spaced over time to reach a prospect until they…
A/B testing (or split testing) is the practice of comparing two versions of something — a subject line, an opening line, an ask — that differ by a single var…
Sales prospecting is the work of identifying potential customers, qualifying whether they fit, and initiating contact to start a sales conversation. It's the…
An email sequence is a series of pre-written emails sent automatically on a set schedule until the recipient replies or opts out. Instead of remembering to f…
Cold email deliverability is the measure of whether your emails actually land in the recipient's inbox rather than the spam folder or nowhere at all. It's de…
Sender reputation is the trust score that mailbox providers (like Gmail and Outlook) assign to your sending domain and IP address, based on how recipients re…
Email warmup is the process of gradually increasing email volume from a new sending domain or address to build a positive reputation with mailbox providers b…
Email authentication is a set of DNS records — SPF, DKIM, and DMARC — that prove an email genuinely comes from the domain it claims to, rather than a spoofer…
Bounce rate is the percentage of emails you send that can't be delivered and are returned by the receiving server. A hard bounce is a permanent failure (the …
A spam trap is an email address that exists solely to catch senders with poor list-building and hygiene practices. Mailbox providers and anti-spam organizati…
A suppression list is the record of email addresses you must never send to — people who unsubscribed, marked you as spam, hard-bounced, or are already custom…
Open rate is the percentage of delivered emails that recipients open. In cold email it's a rough gauge of two things: whether you're landing in the inbox (de…
Reply rate is the percentage of cold emails that receive a response of any kind. Unlike open rate, it's hard to game and reflects whether your outreach actua…
List hygiene is the ongoing practice of keeping your email list clean and current: verifying addresses before you send, removing invalid and hard-bounced add…
Lead scoring is the practice of ranking prospects with a number or grade that reflects how well they fit your ideal customer and how likely they are to conve…
An ideal customer profile (ICP) is a short, specific description of the type of company that gets the most value from what you sell and converts the fastest …
Lead enrichment is the process of automatically filling in missing information about a lead — such as company size, industry, revenue, role, contact details,…
Lead nurturing is the practice of staying in relevant, helpful contact with prospects who aren't ready to buy yet, so that you're the obvious choice when the…
AI lead generation uses software agents to continuously surface and score businesses that match your ideal customer, so instead of manually researching prosp…
Intent data is information that suggests a prospect may be in the market for what you sell — signals like recent hiring for a relevant role, opening a new lo…
Total addressable market (TAM) is the entire universe of potential customers — and the total revenue — available for your product if you captured everyone wh…
Demand generation is the set of activities that create awareness of and interest in your product across a market — building future demand rather than only ca…
Account-based marketing (ABM) is a focused strategy that concentrates sales and marketing effort on a specific, defined set of high-value target accounts rat…
A warm lead is a prospect who already has some awareness of, or interest in, your business — perhaps they engaged with your content, were referred, replied t…
A CRM (customer relationship management) system is software that centralizes every contact, conversation, and deal so a business can manage its relationships…
A sales pipeline is a visual representation of where every deal stands in your sales process, organized into stages from first contact to closed-won. It lets…
MQL and SQL are two stages of lead qualification. A marketing qualified lead (MQL) has shown enough interest — downloading something, engaging with content, …
Sales conversion rate is the percentage of prospects that successfully move from one stage of your process to the next — or all the way from first contact to…
A sales funnel is a conceptual model of how a large pool of potential customers narrows, stage by stage, down to a smaller number of actual customers — wide …
A discovery call is the first substantive sales conversation with a prospect, focused on understanding their situation, needs, and goals to determine whether…
BANT is a classic sales qualification framework that stands for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing. It's a quick checklist for judging whether a lead is a r…
Customer lifetime value (LTV, sometimes CLV) is the total revenue you expect to earn from a customer over the entire length of your relationship with them, n…
JYNI brings lead discovery, outreach, CRM, documents, and content into one workspace. Explore the industry and use-case hubs for the niches you serve.
JYNI combines AI lead discovery, compliant cold email, and a CRM in one workspace — the whole outbound motion in one place.
Book a Call →