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GLOSSARY

The metrics that matter.

Definitions, formulas, and worked examples for the sales performance metrics that matter.

108 terms · reviewed quarterly against verified CRM data

Metrics

49 terms

Alpha Score: Alpha Score is WinsAbove's CRM-verified composite metric that scores a sales rep against the open market on revenue, win rate, and velocity — not against an internal quota.
Annual Contract Value: Annual Contract Value (ACV) is the normalized 12-month revenue value of a contract — total contract value divided by term length in years — used as the standard unit for quota assignment, territory planning, and deal-size benchmarking in B2B sales.
Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR): Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) is the normalized yearly value of a SaaS company's active subscription contracts, used to measure scale, growth rate, and valuation in recurring-revenue businesses.
Average Deal Size: Average deal size (ADS), sometimes called average selling price (ASP), is total closed-won bookings divided by the number of closed-won deals in a period — a core input for capacity planning, forecasting, and recruiter tiering.
Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA) is total recurring revenue divided by the number of active accounts, measuring how much each customer is worth on average over a given period.
Average Selling Price: Average Selling Price (ASP) is total bookings divided by deal count over the same period, used to track upmarket motion, model sales capacity, and gauge price elasticity in B2B and SaaS.
Bookings: Bookings are the total dollar value of contracts signed in a period, measured at signature regardless of when the revenue is recognized or cash is collected.
Bookings Linearity: Distribution of bookings across a quarter or year. Healthy quarters book roughly evenly across the three months; hockey-stick quarters stack 60%+ of bookings in the final month.
Burn Multiple: Net cash burned per dollar of net new ARR added in a period. Lower is better — below 1x is amazing, 1-1.5x great, 1.5-2x good, 2-3x suspect, above 3x bad.
CAC Payback Period: The number of months a SaaS company needs to recover the sales and marketing cost of acquiring a customer through that customer's gross-margin-adjusted recurring revenue.
Call Coaching Score: A call coaching score is a structured rating applied to a recorded sales conversation, evaluating talk ratio, question quality, discovery depth, objection handling, and next-step clarity to surface coaching opportunities and measure rep skill development over time.
Churn Rate: Churn rate is the percentage of customers or revenue a company loses in a given period, calculated as churned units divided by the starting baseline; it is the primary driver of gross and net revenue retention and the most consequential metric a subscription business can underreport.
Close Rate: Close rate is the percentage of qualified opportunities that convert to closed-won revenue within a defined period, measuring how reliably a seller turns pipeline into bookings.
Commission Accelerator: A commission accelerator is a variable compensation mechanism that increases a sales rep's payout rate once they exceed quota, rewarding overperformance with a progressively higher percentage of bookings on each incremental dollar above plan.
Cost of Sales: Cost of sales is the total fully-loaded expense required to acquire a dollar of new revenue, including AE comp, SDR comp, sales management, tools, and allocated overhead, expressed as a percentage of new bookings.
Cost Per Lead: Cost Per Lead (CPL) is the fully-loaded marketing spend required to generate a single qualified lead, calculated by dividing total demand-gen costs by the number of leads produced in a given period.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Customer Acquisition Cost is the total sales and marketing spend required to win one new customer, calculated as fully-loaded acquisition cost divided by new customers closed in the same period.
Customer Health Score: A customer health score is a composite metric that predicts whether an account will renew, expand, or churn by combining product usage, support signals, and relationship data into a single number.
Customer Lifetime Value (LTV): Customer Lifetime Value is the total gross profit a single customer generates across the duration of their relationship, used to validate whether acquisition spend is economically defensible.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): CSAT is the percentage of customers who rate a specific interaction or product experience favorably, usually 4 or 5 on a 5-point scale, and it's the closest thing sales has to an instant temperature read.
Deal Slippage: Deal slippage is the movement of a forecasted deal from its committed close period to a future period without a win or loss outcome, measured as the percentage of forecasted deals or bookings that shift quarters to diagnose forecast accuracy and rep credibility.
Deal Velocity: Deal velocity measures how quickly opportunities move from creation to closed-won, calculated as the average number of days a deal spends in pipeline before booking — the inverse of cycle time and a leading indicator of forecast reliability.
Expansion Revenue: Expansion revenue is new recurring revenue generated from existing customers through upsell, cross-sell, seat growth, or tier upgrades, excluding new-logo and flat renewals.
Forecast Accuracy: Forecast accuracy measures how close a sales team's predicted bookings come to actual closed revenue, usually expressed as the percentage variance between forecast and actuals at the end of a quarter.
Gross Revenue Retention: Gross Revenue Retention (GRR) measures the percentage of starting recurring revenue a company keeps from existing customers after churn and contraction, excluding expansion — the floor of a subscription business, capped at 100%.
Lead Velocity Rate: Lead velocity rate (LVR) measures the month-over-month percentage growth in qualified leads, used by SaaS leaders as a real-time leading indicator of future revenue growth before any deal closes.
Logo Retention: Logo Retention is the percentage of customers retained over a given period, counted by customer count rather than revenue — measuring how many accounts stay regardless of how much they spend.
LTV:CAC Ratio: Ratio comparing customer lifetime value to customer acquisition cost; 3:1 is the conventional benchmark for healthy SaaS unit economics.
Magic Number: A SaaS efficiency metric that divides annualized net new ARR by trailing sales and marketing spend, showing how much recurring revenue each dollar of go-to-market investment produced.
Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR): Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) is the normalized monthly value of active subscription contracts — the operating heartbeat of a SaaS business, used to track growth, churn, and forecast accuracy.
Net New ARR: Net New ARR is the change in a SaaS company's recurring revenue base over a period, calculated as new logo ARR plus expansion ARR minus contraction ARR and churn ARR.
Net New Logo: Net New Logo counts first-time customers won in a period — brand-new accounts only, excluding renewals, expansions, and existing-customer upsells.
Net Promoter Score (NPS): NPS measures the percentage of customers who'd recommend you minus the percentage who'd actively warn people away, on a scale from -100 to +100, and it's the most over-cited number in B2B sales.
Net Revenue Retention: Net Revenue Retention (NRR) is the percentage of recurring revenue retained from an existing customer cohort over a period after accounting for expansions, contractions, and churn — a number that exceeds 100% when expansion revenue outpaces losses from the same base.
No-Decision Rate: No-Decision Rate is the percentage of qualified sales opportunities that close as lost to no decision — the buyer chose neither you nor a competitor, just the status quo.
On-Target Earnings (OTE): On-Target Earnings (OTE) is the total annual compensation a sales rep earns at exactly 100% of quota — base salary plus variable commission — used as the headline number in offers and benchmarks.
Pipeline Coverage Ratio: Pipeline coverage ratio is open pipeline value divided by remaining quota — the metric every RevOps team treats as a constant when it should be a function of win rate.
Pipeline Velocity: Pipeline velocity measures how fast revenue moves through your sales pipeline, calculated as opportunities × win rate × deal size divided by sales cycle length.
Quota Attainment: Quota attainment is the percentage of an assigned sales target a rep closed in a given period — a number set inside one company that does not travel between employers.
Ramp Time: Ramp time is the number of months from a sales rep's start date to consistent full-quota productivity, used to model sales capacity, comp plan accelerators, and hiring ROI.
Renewal Rate: Renewal Rate is the percentage of customers or contract value up for renewal in a period that actually renews, measured before any expansion is counted.
Rule of 40: The Rule of 40 is a SaaS health benchmark stating that a company's revenue growth rate plus its profit margin should sum to 40% or more.
Sales Capacity: Sales Capacity is the total bookings a sales team can theoretically produce in a given period, calculated by multiplying the number of fully-ramped reps by their average quota and expected attainment.
Sales Cycle Length: Sales Cycle Length is the average elapsed time from first qualified opportunity to closed-won, measured in days and used as a leading indicator of forecast risk and pipeline health.
Sales Quota: A sales quota is the revenue, bookings, or activity target assigned to a rep or team over a defined period, used to set expectations, calculate commission, and measure performance.
Sales Velocity: Sales velocity is the dollars-per-day a rep or team produces, computed from opportunity count, deal size, win rate, and cycle length — the closest thing sales has to a throughput equation.
Stage Conversion Rate: Stage conversion rate measures the percentage of opportunities that advance from one CRM pipeline stage to the next, exposing exactly where in the funnel deals stall or die.
Total Contract Value (TCV): Total Contract Value (TCV) is the complete dollar amount of a signed contract over its full term, including all recurring fees, one-time charges, and professional services—distinct from ACV, which annualizes the recurring component only.
Win Rate: Win rate is closed-won opportunities divided by closed-won plus closed-lost — the cleanest single signal of seller skill, and the one most often computed against the wrong denominator.

Concepts

35 terms

Account-Based Marketing (ABM): Account-Based Marketing is a go-to-market strategy that targets a finite list of named, high-value accounts with coordinated sales and marketing rather than chasing broad inbound lead volume.
BANT: BANT is a sales qualification framework — Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline — that assesses whether a prospect has the minimum conditions for a deal to close.
Battle Card: A battle card is a one-page sales enablement document that arms reps with the positioning, objection handling, and competitive intelligence needed to win against a specific competitor.
Bookings vs. Revenue: Bookings is the total contract value a customer commits to in a given period; revenue is the portion recognized under GAAP accounting rules — in subscription businesses these two numbers diverge sharply, and conflating them causes forecast errors, comp disputes, and investor misstatements.
Buying Committee: The group of stakeholders inside a B2B prospect that collectively approves a software purchase — averaging 6 to 10 people on deals over $50,000.
Challenger Sale: The Challenger Sale is a B2B methodology that segments reps into five behavioral profiles and finds Challengers — who teach, tailor, and take control — win 54% of complex enterprise deals.
Champion: A champion is an internal advocate inside a prospect account who has personal motivation to close your deal, sells on your behalf when you're not in the room, and holds enough political capital to move the purchase forward.
Clawback: A commission plan provision that reclaims previously paid sales commission when a deal churns, refunds, or fails to collect within a defined window — most commonly 90 to 365 days after booking.
Commission Decelerator: A commission decelerator is a comp-plan mechanism that pays a reduced commission rate on bookings produced below a defined quota-attainment threshold.
Commission Draw: A commission draw is an advance payment against future earned commissions, used to provide income stability for sales reps during ramp periods or seasonal slow patches.
Economic Buyer: The economic buyer is the single person in a B2B deal with discretionary authority to spend the budget — the one signature that can move a contract from procurement to legal to wire transfer.
Forecast Category: Forecast category is the CRM tag — Omit, Pipeline, Best Case, Commit, Closed — that reps apply to each open opportunity to signal how likely it is to close this quarter.
Ideal Customer Profile (ICP): Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a documented description of the company most likely to buy, retain, and expand — defined by firmographics, technographics, and behavioral signals — used to filter pipeline and prioritize go-to-market spend.
Land and Expand: Land and expand is the go-to-market strategy of closing a small initial contract with a customer to prove value, then systematically growing the account through new users, modules, business units, and use cases—measured in net dollar retention and expansion ARR.
MBO (Management by Objectives): MBO is a slice of a sales rep's variable pay tied to completing defined strategic or qualitative objectives rather than closing revenue.
MEDDIC: MEDDIC is a six-step B2B sales qualification framework — Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, Champion — used to qualify enterprise opportunities and reduce no-decision losses.
MEDDPICC: MEDDPICC is a B2B sales qualification framework with eight checkpoints — Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Paper Process, Identify Pain, Champion, Competition — used to score whether a deal is real.
Mobilizer: A mobilizer is the buyer-side stakeholder who drives internal consensus to make a complex purchase happen, identified by Gartner/CEB research as the strongest predictor of complex deal closure.
MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead): An MQL is a lead that marketing has scored above a threshold—based on behavioral signals and firmographic fit—and formally passed to sales as worth a rep's time; the MQL-to-SQL conversion rate determines whether that designation means anything.
OTE (On-Target Earnings): OTE is the total cash a rep earns at exactly 100% of quota — base salary plus variable commission — and the figure most often inflated on resumes and job posts.
Pay Mix: The split between fixed base salary and variable commission inside a sales rep's on-target earnings, expressed as a ratio like 60/40 or 50/50.
President's Club: President's Club is the annual recognition program — almost always a destination trip with partners — that sales orgs award to reps who exceed a defined performance threshold, typically 100%+ of quota for the year.
Product-Qualified Lead: A user who has demonstrated buying intent through product usage signals — activation depth, team invites, paywall encounters — in a freemium or free-trial product. The PLG counterpart to an MQL.
Recoverable Draw: A recoverable draw is a guaranteed minimum commission payment to a sales rep that must be paid back from future commissions once they exceed the draw amount, creating a deficit balance the rep works off over time.
Replacement-Level Rep: Replacement-level rep is the WinsAbove benchmark for the median seller at the same role, segment, and tenure who could be hired this quarter for the same comp — sales' answer to baseball's replacement-level value.
Sales Accepted Lead (SAL): A Sales Accepted Lead (SAL) is a marketing-generated lead that a sales rep has reviewed and formally accepted as qualified to work, marking the contractual handoff between marketing-sourced pipeline and the sales team's pursuit list.
Sales Compensation Plan: A sales compensation plan is the documented structure defining how a rep gets paid — base salary, variable commission, quota, accelerators, and clawbacks — designed to align rep behavior with company revenue goals.
Sales Enablement: Sales enablement is the function inside a revenue org that equips reps with content, training, tooling, and certifications designed to shorten ramp time and lift win rate.
Sales Qualified Opportunity: A lead that an AE has qualified into a real buying opportunity — past the conversation stage and into the pipeline with buyer, budget, need, and timeline confirmed.
Sandler Selling System: The Sandler Selling System is a sales methodology built on mutual qualification and buyer-seller equality, designed to disqualify bad-fit deals early and prevent reps from chasing prospects who will never buy.
SPICED: SPICED is a six-stage discovery and qualification framework — Situation, Pain, Impact, Critical Event, Decision — used by sales teams to anchor deals to a buyer's measurable business outcome and a hard deadline.
SPIFF: A SPIFF (Sales Performance Incentive Fund) is a short-term cash bonus paid to sales reps for completing a specific selling behavior — closing a target product, segment, or deal type — separate from standard commission.
SPIN Selling: SPIN Selling is a discovery framework that structures sales conversations around four question types — Situation, Problem, Implication, and Need-payoff — to build buyer urgency in complex deals.
SQL (Sales Qualified Lead): A Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) is a prospect that a sales rep has contacted and confirmed meets the organization's criteria for active selling, distinguishing it from an MQL by requiring human judgment rather than automated behavioral scoring.
Total Addressable Market: Total addressable market (TAM) is the maximum annual revenue available if every viable buyer in a category bought at current pricing — a ceiling for capacity planning and fundraising, not a forecast.

Process

16 terms

Deal Desk: A cross-functional approval function that reviews non-standard sales deals — discounts, custom terms, multi-year structures — before they're signed.
Demand Generation: Demand generation is the set of marketing and sales activities that create awareness and interest in a product, building the qualified pipeline that revenue teams convert into bookings.
Discovery Call: A discovery call is the structured first conversation between a seller and a qualified prospect to identify business pain, decision criteria, and whether to advance the opportunity.
Lead Scoring: Lead scoring is the practice of assigning numeric values to leads based on fit and behavior so sales prioritizes the prospects most likely to convert.
Multithreading: Multithreading is the deliberate practice of building substantive relationships with multiple stakeholders inside a single buying account so a B2B deal survives turnover, reorgs, and shifting priorities.
Mutual Action Plan (MAP): A Mutual Action Plan is a jointly-owned, dated document listing every step required to move a B2B deal from verbal commitment to signed contract, with named owners on both buyer and seller sides.
Opportunity Stage: An opportunity stage is the named step in a sales pipeline that marks how far a deal has progressed toward a close, defined by buyer actions and exit criteria rather than rep optimism.
Pipeline Generation: Pipeline generation is the systematic creation of qualified sales opportunities through outbound prospecting, marketing-sourced inbound, partner referrals, and account-based motions—measured in dollars of qualified pipeline created and pipeline-to-quota coverage ratios.
Pipeline Hygiene: Pipeline hygiene is the discipline of keeping CRM opportunity data accurate and current, measured against close-date staleness, next-step recency, and required-field completion.
Quarterly Business Review: Recurring 90-day meeting between a vendor and customer to review value delivered, surface risks, and align on the next quarter — the primary forum where renewals get won or lost.
Sales Cadence: A sales cadence is a predefined sequence of outreach touches — emails, calls, LinkedIn messages, voicemails — spaced across a fixed number of days to systematically pursue a prospect until they respond or exit.
Sales Capacity Planning: Sales capacity planning is the headcount math that works backward from a revenue target to determine how many ramped, quota-carrying reps an org needs to hit it.
Sales Forecasting: Sales forecasting is the process of predicting how much revenue a sales team will close in a given period, built from pipeline data, historical conversion rates, and rep-level judgment.
Territory Design: Territory design is the systematic carving of an addressable market into rep-owned books of business based on account count, revenue potential, geography, or vertical, with the goal of balancing opportunity equally across the sales team.
Whitespace Analysis: Whitespace analysis is the exercise of mapping what a customer currently buys against what they could buy across your product line, used to plan account expansion.
Win/Loss Analysis: Win/loss analysis is the systematic post-decision review of why B2B deals closed or didn't — interviewing buyers and reps to surface the real reasons behind outcomes, separate from CRM dispositions.

Roles

5 terms

Account Executive (AE): An Account Executive is a quota-carrying B2B sales rep who owns opportunities from qualified pipeline through closed-won, running discovery, demos, negotiation, and contract close.
Business Development Representative (BDR): A Business Development Representative (BDR) is an outbound sales role responsible for prospecting cold accounts and generating qualified pipeline for account executives, measured primarily on meetings booked and opportunities created.
Revenue Operations (RevOps): Revenue Operations (RevOps) is the centralized function that aligns sales, marketing, and customer success around shared data, process, and tooling to deliver predictable revenue growth.
Sales Development Representative (SDR): An SDR is the rep who books qualified meetings for closers — they don't carry a revenue quota, they carry a meetings-set quota, and they're the entry point into B2B sales for most careers.
Sales Engineer: A sales engineer is the technical counterpart to the account executive on a B2B sales team, owning demos, technical discovery, and proof-of-concept design to win the technical evaluation.

Anti-patterns

3 terms

Happy Ears: Happy ears is the sales anti-pattern where a rep hears commitment the buyer never gave, producing inflated Commit forecasts and 40-60% slip rates that show up only after the quarter is lost.
Pipeline Padding: Pipeline padding is the practice of inflating CRM opportunity counts or dollar values with weak, stale, or fictional deals to hit coverage ratios and avoid pipeline reviews.
Sandbagging: Sandbagging is the deliberate timing of deal close dates to maximize commission, accelerator, or attainment outcomes — a CRM gaming pattern WinsAbove detects from deal-event timestamps.

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