A
<p>An <strong>account</strong> (sometimes called a <strong>company</strong>) is the organization a CRM record represents — the legal entity you sell to, not the individual person. One account typically links to multiple <a href="#contact">contacts</a> and multiple <a href="#deal">deals</a>. B2B CRMs treat the account as the parent record because buying decisions are made by groups, not individuals.</p>
ACV (Annual Contract Value)
#
<p><strong>ACV</strong> is the average annualized revenue from a single customer contract, normalizing multi-year deals to a per-year figure. A 3-year, $90,000 contract has an ACV of $30,000. ACV is most useful for sales teams selling annual or multi-year subscriptions and is often paired with <a href="#arr-mrr">ARR</a> for portfolio-level reporting.</p>
<p><strong>MRR</strong> (Monthly Recurring Revenue) and <strong>ARR</strong> (Annual Recurring Revenue) measure the predictable subscription revenue a business earns per month or year. ARR is usually MRR × 12, after stripping one-time fees and discounts. Both metrics ignore <a href="#churn-rate">churn</a> and expansion until you calculate net new ARR, which subtracts churned revenue from new and expansion revenue.</p>
B
<p>A <strong>buyer persona</strong> is a semi-fictional profile of the person who actually evaluates and signs off on your product — including their role, goals, objections, and information sources. Personas are tactical (how to sell to one human), where the <a href="#icp">ICP</a> is strategic (which companies to target). Most B2B sales motions have 3 to 5 personas spanning the economic buyer, end users, and influencers.</p>
C
CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost)
#
<p><strong>CAC</strong> is the total sales and marketing spend required to acquire one new customer, calculated as <code>(sales + marketing costs) / new customers acquired</code> over the same period. Healthy SaaS businesses target an <a href="#ltv">LTV</a> to CAC ratio of 3:1 or higher, and a CAC payback period under 12 months. CAC is often broken into blended (all customers) versus paid (acquired through paid channels only).</p>
<p>A <strong>cadence</strong> (or <strong>sequence</strong>) is a pre-planned series of sales touches — emails, calls, LinkedIn messages, voicemails — delivered to a prospect over days or weeks. Cadences automate the rhythm of outbound: step 1 on day 1, step 2 on day 3, and so on. Unlike a <a href="#drip-campaign">drip campaign</a>, cadences usually mix automated and manual steps and are operated by a sales rep, not marketing.</p>
<p><strong>Churn rate</strong> is the percentage of customers (or revenue) lost over a given period, usually monthly or annually. Logo churn counts customers; revenue churn counts dollars. A 5% monthly logo churn rate means you lose roughly half your customer base every year — which is why most SaaS businesses obsess over keeping monthly churn under 2%.</p>
<p>A <strong>contact</strong> is an individual person stored in the CRM — name, email, phone, role, and a link to the <a href="#account">account</a> they belong to. Contacts are the building block of B2B selling: deals are won and lost based on which contacts you've reached, what they said, and when. A single account often has many contacts spanning buyers, champions, and blockers.</p>
<p><strong>Conversion rate</strong> is the percentage of records that move from one stage to the next — for example, MQL to SQL, or <a href="#stage">stage</a> 3 to closed-won. It's the single most diagnostic pipeline metric because it isolates where deals get stuck. A pipeline with 40% stage-1 conversion but 5% stage-3 conversion has a discovery-to-demo problem, not a top-of-funnel problem.</p>
CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
#
<p>A <strong>CRM</strong> (Customer Relationship Management) system is a single source of truth for every interaction a company has with its customers and prospects — contacts, deals, emails, calls, meetings, and notes. Modern CRMs add <a href="#pipeline">pipeline</a> tracking, <a href="#forecasting">forecasting</a>, <a href="#workflow-automation">workflow automation</a>, and reporting on top of that contact database. The category started in the 1990s with Siebel and ACT! and now spans HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, and Tonic Desk.</p>
D
<p>A <strong>deal</strong> (called an <strong>opportunity</strong> in Salesforce-flavored CRMs) is a potential sale tracked through a <a href="#pipeline">pipeline</a>, with a value, expected close date, and probability. One <a href="#account">account</a> can have multiple open deals — initial sale, renewal, expansion. Deals are the unit of measurement for <a href="#forecasting">forecasting</a>, <a href="#win-rate">win rate</a>, and <a href="#sales-velocity">sales velocity</a>.</p>
<p>A <strong>drip campaign</strong> is an automated marketing email series sent on a fixed schedule — for example, a 5-email nurture over 21 days after someone downloads a whitepaper. Unlike a sales <a href="#cadence">cadence</a>, drips are wholly automated, owned by marketing, and triggered by behavior or list membership rather than rep effort. Drips are designed for one-to-many nurture; cadences are designed for one-to-one outbound.</p>
F
<p>Sales <strong>forecasting</strong> is the practice of predicting how much revenue will close in a given period, usually by weighting each open <a href="#deal">deal</a> by its <a href="#stage">stage</a> probability. A $50,000 deal in a stage with 40% historical win rate contributes $20,000 to the weighted forecast. Modern CRM forecasting layers in rep judgment ("commit," "best case," "pipeline") on top of the weighted math, and ranges by rep accuracy.</p>