Almost one out of every eight jobs in the United States is a full-time sales position. That shows just how important sales jobs are to a company’s success. It’s also why many are interested in becoming a salesperson. But before you can launch a successful sales career, you need to know how to speak the language of the industry. Keep reading to learn 15 essential terms every new salesperson should know.
15 Sales Terms You Should Know Before Beginning Your Career
AIDA
AIDA is an acronym that stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. It’s a concise representation of a lead’s journey before becoming one of your paying customers.
Nowadays, most salespeople agree that a customer’s journey is more complex than this. But AIDA is still a useful way to visualize that path at a high level.
BANT
BANT is used in the lead qualification process. It stands for Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline, and it helps salespeople assess how valuable a lead is.
The idea is that a lead needs to have the right budget, authority, need, and timeline before converting. So if you identify a prospect who is missing one of these aspects, you know where you need to focus.
Buyer Persona
A buyer persona is a fictional template of your ideal customer. It usually contains information about customers’…
- Demographic information
- Psychographic factors
- Budget
- Timeline
- Goals
- Pain points
Most companies have multiple buyer personas to account for leads with different motivations, budgets, and backgrounds. These can be useful because they help salespeople visualize their target audience more effectively.
Churn Rate
Your company’s churn rate measures how many customers it retains during a given time frame. You can calculate it by dividing the number of customers you lost during a time frame by the number of customers you had at the beginning.
For example, if you had 100 customers and lost 10, your churn rate would be 10%. If you’re wondering, the average monthly churn rate for SaaS companies is between 3% and 8%
Conversion Rate
A conversion rate is a measurement of the percentage of people who took the desired action.
You might measure the conversion rate of leads becoming paying customers. Or you could look at the conversion rate for people who visited your website and decided to sign up for a free trial.
Conversion rates are crucial metrics to know if you’re in sales. So it’s worth taking a moment to familiarize yourself with the most important ones to your position.
Customer Acquisition Cost
Your customer acquisition cost, or CAC, tells you how much it costs to get a new customer. It encompasses the costs associated with every stage of the sales and marketing processes.
It’s useful to have this measurement because it helps you determine the incremental value that your company derives every time it gets a new customer. Ideally, your customer acquisition cost should form a 3:1 ratio with the lifetime value. In other words, your target should be to make at least three times what it costs you to acquire a customer.
Decision-maker
If you’re in B2B sales, you’ll frequently hear “decision-maker.” It refers to someone within a company who can decide whether or not the company will buy a product or service.
In closing a deal, you may talk to multiple within a company, across departments. But it’s the decision-maker you’ll need to convince to ultimately buy your product or service.
Gatekeeper
Decision-makers are busy people. That’s why companies often make sales calls go through gatekeepers. These folks decide which inbound messages will be shared with a decision-maker and which won’t.
As a B2B salesperson, getting past gatekeepers is very important. You need to do this consistently if you want to reach your sales goals and make progress in your sales career.
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
A company’s net promoter score is the percentage of its customers who would recommend the business to someone else.
It’s calculated by first asking customers how likely they are to recommend your business on a scale of 1-10. You then subtract the number of customers who responded with a 0-6 from the number who gave you a 9 or 10.
A net promoter score is a useful metric because it helps you assess how well you’re delivering to your current customers. If you don’t have a high net promoter score, that’s a good sign you’ll need to change your products or services.
Pain Point
Pain points can describe anything a customer or lead experiences that limit their ability to do something that matters.
Being a good salesperson is about convincing a lead that your product or service is the most effective solution for their pain points. To do that, you first have to understand a person’s pain points, so knowing this term is crucial.
Pipeline
A sales pipeline visualizes the journey a lead goes through before purchasing. The pipeline is typically divided into several distinct stages.
This visualization tool is effective because it helps salespeople figure out their next step in converting a possible client. Following a sales pipeline should help you optimize your interactions with leads in different stages of the buying journey.
Top of the Funnel
The top of the funnel (TOFU) is a term that describes the very first stage of the buying process. Customers are beginning to do some initial research after discovering their problem, need, or pain point.
Your entire sales journey begins by engaging leads at the top of the funnel. If you can do that well, then the rest of the sales process follows.
Qualified Lead
A qualified lead is a lead that’s shown some explicit or proactive interest in your company and its offerings. A qualified lead might have signed up for your email list or recently completed a free trial.
Qualified leads can be easier to convert than regular ones because you already know they care about your company’s offers. You don’t have to convince them that your company’s products or services are the best solutions. You can just go straight into convincing them why and how your company or product can outperform the competition.
Value proposition
Your value proposition encapsulates the benefits that you’re offering potential customers. Common examples of value propositions include:
- More efficiency
- Lower costs
- Opening up new opportunities
Objection
An objection is a prospect’s challenge or rejection of the benefits that you state your product offers. You might say your product can help the lead save time. But they might come back to you and say that the time-saving won’t be enough to offset the costs of your product.
To be successful in your sales job, you need to anticipate leads’ rejections and show them why they don’t matter.
Let’s continue the scenario from above: The lead has just told you that you won’t save them enough time to offset the cost of your product. If you anticipated this objection, you could immediately tell them why it will or highlight other benefits that make it less relevant.
Get more out of your sales job with LeadLander
As you move forward with your sales career, you’ll notice how vital data is to the lead conversion process. You can craft more effective pitches, overcome more objections, and visualize your buyers more effectively if you have good data.
That’s why you should check out LeadLander. Our website visitor tracking software helps you take advantage of the rich data your website is already collecting.
With LeadLander, you can see:
- Who visits your website
- What they do while on it
- Which pages do they leave your site from
- And much more
It could be just what you need to start your new sales career off the right foot.
So why wait? Sign up for a free 14-day trial of LeadLander today to get started.
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