B2B outbound glossary

Appointment setting is the practice of contacting prospects on behalf of a sales team and booking meetings for that team to run. As a business model, it usually means an agency paid per meeting booked.

A B2B buying signal is a clear, checkable sign that a business is about to need something. It could be a company posting a job, raising money, moving into a new office, filing a permit, or facing a deadline. Each event shows the business has a new problem to solve, which makes it the right moment for a seller to reach out.

B2B lead generation is lead generation where the buyer is a business rather than a consumer, which means fewer buyers, longer sales cycles, larger deals, and a decision made by a named person with a job title.

A broker of record letter is a document signed by a business that authorizes a new insurance broker to represent it with its carriers, replacing the previous broker, usually without changing the policies themselves.

CAN-SPAM is the 2003 US federal law on commercial email. It permits unsolicited email to business addresses if the sender is identified, the subject line is truthful, a postal address is included, and opt-outs are honored within ten business days.

A cold email is a one-to-one email sent to a business contact who hasn't interacted with the sender before, written to start a conversation about something specific to the recipient.

Cold email bounce rate is the percentage of sent emails that couldn't be delivered. A hard bounce means the address doesn't exist; a soft bounce means a temporary problem like a full mailbox or a server timeout.

A cold email follow-up is a second or third email sent as a reply to the first one when there's been no response, adding something the first email didn't say rather than repeating the ask.

A cold email formula is a repeatable structure for a first email: name something specific that just happened to the recipient, say what you'd do about it, and ask a question that's easy to answer.

Cold email open rate is the percentage of sent emails recorded as opened, measured by a tracking pixel. Since 2021 it has been unreliable, because Apple Mail Privacy Protection loads pixels automatically whether or not anyone read the email.

Cold email reply rate is the percentage of recipients who reply to a cold email. Positive reply rate counts only replies that express interest, and it should be measured per lead contacted, not per email sent.

A cold email sequence is a planned series of emails to the same person, usually two to four emails over one to three weeks, with each one following up on the first rather than starting over.

Cost per booked meeting is a lead generation program's total cost over a period divided by the qualified meetings it put on the sales team's calendar. Cost per held meeting divides by the ones that actually happened.

A custom audience is a Meta ad audience built from data you provide, such as a customer list, pixel-tracked site visitors, or people who engaged with your page or ads, rather than from Meta's interest and demographic targeting.

The daily feedback loop is checking each morning whether yesterday's outreach hit its target for meetings booked, scaling it if it did, and if it didn't, finding which of four causes is responsible and fixing that one before today's sending.

Deliverability is whether an email was accepted by the receiving mail server. Inbox placement is whether it landed in the inbox rather than the spam folder. An email can be delivered and still never be seen.

Domain reputation is the score a mailbox provider assigns to a sending domain based on its history: authentication, complaint rate, bounce rate, volume patterns, and how recipients have engaged with its email. It's the main input into inbox placement.

Email deliverability is the rate at which your emails reach the recipient's inbox rather than being rejected, bounced, or filtered to spam.

Email warmup is the process of building a sending reputation for a new domain or mailbox by sending a small, gradually increasing volume of email that gets opened and replied to before any real outreach goes out.

An ideal customer profile describes the type of company that gets the most value from what you sell and is most likely to buy, renew, and expand, defined by attributes like industry, size, geography, and situation.

Intent data is any information indicating that a company is researching or preparing to buy a product or service. It ranges from vendor-supplied scores based on web browsing to public events like job postings and permits.

A lead form on Meta is an in-platform form attached to a Facebook or Instagram ad that a user can submit without leaving the app, with fields like name and email prefilled from their profile.

Lead generation is the process of finding people or companies that might buy from you, getting a response from them, and passing them to a sales team as a lead.

Lead qualification is deciding whether a lead is worth a sales rep's time, by checking it against a written set of criteria such as company size, industry, geography, deal size, and who the contact is.

A lookalike audience is a Meta ad audience built by giving Meta a list of people or companies you already do business with and asking it to find others with similar characteristics.

Multi-channel outbound is prospecting that uses email, LinkedIn, and phone together, aimed at the same person about the same thing, in a planned order over a few weeks.

Outbound prospecting is reaching out to potential customers who haven't contacted you, by email, phone, LinkedIn, or paid social, to start a sales conversation.

Inbound lead generation brings buyers to you through search, content, and ads they encounter while looking. Outbound goes to buyers who aren't looking yet, through email, phone, LinkedIn, and targeted paid social.

A positive reply is a response to a cold email that expresses interest in continuing the conversation, as opposed to an unsubscribe, an out-of-office, a referral to someone else, or a no.

A rented sales rep is an outbound agency model: a monthly fee for a named representative who prospects, calls, and books meetings under the client's brand, usually $6,000 to $15,000 a month per rep, dedicated or shared.

Retargeting is showing ads to people who already interacted with you: visited your site, opened an email, watched a video, or filled out a form. On Meta it's built from the pixel, a customer list, or engagement with earlier ads.

A sales accepted lead is a lead that a sales rep has reviewed and agreed is worth pursuing, as opposed to a marketing qualified lead, which met a scoring threshold, or a sales qualified lead, which agreed to a conversation.

A sales development representative is a salesperson whose job is to find and contact prospects, qualify them, and book meetings for account executives to run, rather than to close deals.

A sending domain is a domain used only for outbound email, set up separately from a company's primary domain so that the reputation risk of cold outreach never touches the domain that carries client email, invoices, and support.

A signal audience is a Meta custom audience made of named companies that just showed a public reason to buy, matched by contact and company domain, and rebuilt every day as new signals fire and old ones age out.

Spam complaint rate is the percentage of delivered emails that recipients mark as spam. Google's bulk sender rules require it to stay under 0.3 percent, with 0.1 percent as the target, and a domain over the line gets throttled.

SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are three DNS records that let a receiving mail server confirm an email really came from the domain it claims to. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft require all three from anyone sending email at volume.

A cold email subject line is the one line a recipient sees before deciding whether to open. In B2B, the ones that get opened name something specific to the recipient: an address, a role, a product, or a date.

Total addressable market is the full set of companies that could buy a product or service, expressed as a count or a dollar figure. For most B2B companies with large contracts it's a few thousand accounts, not millions.

A trigger event is something that happens at a company, such as a new executive, a funding round, a move, or a regulatory deadline, that creates a reason to buy. It's another name for a buying signal.