Volume 3 · The Revenue Operations Series

Marketing Operations — the glossary

All 102 terms from the book’s appendix, defined exactly as the volume uses them. Published in full.

Account: The durable buying organization, household, or other commercial entity used by the business.
Account association: The link between a Person and the Account used for ownership.
Acquisition source: The recorded channel, program, referral, product surface, event, or other path through which the interaction was captured.
Admissibility rule: The rule stating whether a signal may influence a named lifecycle or routing decision.
Admission: The decision allowing an eligible interaction to create or enter a Demand Instance under the current policy.
Application programming interface (API): A defined mechanism through which software applications exchange data.
Attribution: A published policy that assigns reporting credit to eligible observed touchpoints for a named outcome.
Audience: The population the business is willing to process as potential demand.
Audience architecture: The admission policy applying inclusion, exclusion, temporary suppression, minimum-data, and downstream-handling rules.
Backfill: Evidence loaded after its original occurrence, with both occurrence and capture times retained.
Behavioral, declarative, and contextual evidence: Recorded behavior, buyer-stated information, and surrounding account or relationship facts evaluated as separate forms of evidence.
Campaign or program: A versioned initiative with an objective, eligible audience, owner, configuration, signals, measures, and operating period.
Change request: The record of the current and proposed rule, affected objects and consumers, evidence, specialist decisions, test cohort, trade-off, effective date, and rollback.
Commercial purpose: The purchase, renewal, expansion, reactivation, or other commercial decision being evaluated.
Customer relationship management (CRM) platform: The system that stores the authoritative objects and fields named by the business; it is not automatically authoritative for every fact.
Data integrity: The condition in which records represent intended entities and events well enough for the approved rules and decisions.
Decision dashboard: A view that connects one due decision to its included records, rule version, result, missing evidence, owner, and available actions.
Decision-bearing demand: A recorded interaction whose admitted evidence is sufficient to support a published demand-state or work-creation decision.
Deduplication key: The field combination that identifies one underlying event occurrence and distinguishes it from repeated delivery.
Definition window: The period during which decision-bearing rules retain one effective version for comparison.
Demand Context: Four separate entry facts: initiation mechanism, relationship status at entry, commercial purpose, and acquisition source.
Demand decision chain: The ordered decisions that admit an interaction, treat signals as evidence, qualify demand, assign work, accept the handoff, create an Opportunity, and allocate reporting credit.
Demand Instance: One commercial inquiry or evaluation, separate from the durable Person, Account, campaign, and Opportunity.
Disqualification: A recorded decision that the current Demand Instance does not satisfy the current sales-work rule.
Duplicate: A second record representing the same entity or evaluation under the applicable identity rule.
Eligibility: Whether a Person, Account, or interaction may enter demand processing under current commercial, capacity, consent, and suppression rules.
Entry condition: The rule determining whether an interaction creates a Demand Instance and in which initial state.
Escalation: Invocation of a named attention, fallback, or intervention rule when assignment or response remains unresolved.
Evergreen program: A continuing initiative with a start date, review cadence, versioned configuration, and explicit pause or retirement rule.
Evidence: One or more signals admitted by a rule to support a decision or state change.
Exception review: A review of admitted, routed, rejected, missing, duplicate, or late records that require an owner and action now.
Exclusion criteria: The facts that block a category from demand processing under the current policy.
Feedback contract: The record of handoff outcomes, reasons, return evidence, review cadence, rule-change evidence, decision owners, and version history.
Feedback loop: A procedure that captures downstream outcomes, classifies observations, tests competing explanations, and changes an upstream rule only when evidence supports it.
Field contract: The record of a decision-bearing field's meaning, object, values, authority, time behavior, consumers, tests, ownership, and version.
First-touch attribution: Assignment of all credit to the earliest eligible recorded touchpoint.
Fit: Whether the Person and Account satisfy the current eligibility and serviceability rules.
Fit gate: The published rule for the eligibility and serviceability evidence a Demand Instance must satisfy.
Gate: The rule that must pass before a record advances.
Handoff: The timestamped event at which a receiving owner accepts responsibility under stated expectations.
Idempotent behavior: Repeating the same input without creating an unintended second record or action.
Identity resolution: The procedure for attaching an event or field change to the correct Person, Account, Demand Instance, or Opportunity.
Inclusion criteria: The minimum supported-buyer, serviceability, and identity facts required for admission.
Incrementality: Whether an exposure caused an outcome that would not otherwise have occurred.
Initiation mechanism: The recorded party or event that caused the commercial interaction to begin.
Instrumentation: The platform configuration, code, integration, or manual procedure that performs signal capture.
Intent: Whether current admitted evidence justifies seller action under the published gate.
Intent gate: The published rule for the current behavioral or declarative evidence required to justify seller action.
Interaction: An observed event such as a form submission or reply.
Key performance indicator (KPI): A defined measure tied to a named business decision.
Last-touch attribution: Assignment of all credit to the final eligible touchpoint before the outcome.
Latency: Delay between an event's occurrence and its availability for evaluation.
Lifecycle state: The Demand Instance’s current operating condition, such as evaluating, sales-ready, routed, accepted, recycled, or rejected.
Lifecycle transition: A permitted movement between Demand Instance states supported by retained entry or exit evidence, actor, time, rule version, and exception treatment.
Linear attribution: Equal division of credit across all eligible touchpoints.
Lookback window: The period before an outcome during which a touchpoint remains eligible for credit.
Manual override: A separately authorized qualification decision with a reason, evidence, actor, expiration, and downstream treatment.
Marketing Operations: The function that turns recorded interactions into consistently classified, routed, and measurable demand.
Marketing Operations decision rights: The explicit boundary between rules Marketing Operations may implement or maintain and meanings another commercial, Sales, privacy, Finance, or platform owner must approve.
Marketing-qualified lead (MQL): An optional local label for a sales-ready Demand Instance that points to the same published qualification decision used by routing.
Measurement contract: The record of a measure's event, population, calculation, time rules, exclusions, missing-data treatment, version, owner, and action.
Minimum viable record: The smallest set of identifiers and context needed to preserve an interaction and reach an admission decision.
Multi-touch model: Any declared allocation rule that spreads reporting credit across more than one touchpoint.
Operating records: The linked, versioned records for objects and lifecycle, context and admission, signals and capture, qualification and routing, feedback and correction, and measurement and attribution.
Operational segment: A subset of eligible records whose qualification, routing, response, or decision-bearing reporting differs.
Opportunity: A Sales-owned pursuit created only after the opportunity-entry rule passes.
Opportunity stage: The current state of a Sales-owned pursuit, maintained on the Opportunity rather than used as a demand lifecycle state.
Person: The durable identity of one individual.
Policy review: A decision on whether commercial inputs, capacity, acceptance behavior, and evidence still support the current admission and handoff rules.
Position-based attribution: Assignment of published weights to selected touchpoint positions with the remainder distributed under the rule.
Program-to-lifecycle contract: The record connecting each program event to its subject, signal treatment, lifecycle effect, attribution treatment, owner, expiration, and version.
Qualification: Application of fit, intent, timing, and data-quality rules to decide whether a Demand Instance may be offered to Sales.
Re-entry: Reopening evaluation after the specified new evidence or qualifying fact appears.
Re-qualification: Application of the current gate after materially new evidence or a changed qualifying fact.
Reason code: A controlled value identifying the first rule or operating condition to inspect after an outcome.
Reassignment: A change in the responsible owner after the initial route.
Recycling: Movement of routed or accepted work to a non-sales state under a reason, destination, and return condition.
Referential integrity: Correctness of the required associations among commercial objects.
Relationship status: The durable Person or Account relationship category kept separate from a Demand Instance's lifecycle state.
Relationship status at entry: The Person or Account's durable relationship with the business when the Demand Instance was admitted.
Release review: A pre-release decision on whether a proposed field, workflow, integration, gate, route, or report behaves correctly and can be rolled back.
Remediation record: The record of a violated rule, affected population, correction, preserved history, downstream effect, owner, validation, and prevention change.
Response clock: The measured interval from a named start event to a permitted logged response for the population subject to the rule.
Response time: Elapsed time between a defined handoff start event and a defined permitted response event for an eligible record.
Responsibility record: The record that assigns each material rule, approval, effective date, and implementation location to a named owner.
Right-censored record: An open record whose elapsed time is measured only through the review date because its exit has not yet occurred.
Routing: Assignment of a sales-ready Demand Instance to one responsible owner or queue under ordered rules.
Sales acceptance: The receiving seller’s recorded decision to work a routed Demand Instance.
Sales rejection: The receiving seller's recorded decision not to accept routed work; a missing outcome is neither acceptance nor rejection.
Sales-ready: The state reached when the published gate permits a Demand Instance to be offered to Sales.
Service-level agreement (SLA): The approved commitment for a named service or handoff, including its eligible population, clock, action, and owner.
Signal: A timestamped fact about a named Person, Account, Demand Instance, or Opportunity.
Signal capture: Recording a defined event or data change against the correct subject and time.
Signal catalog: The versioned record of signal meaning, source, time behavior, permitted uses, owners, and tests.
Signal reliability: Fitness of a signal for the particular decision the rule asks it to support.
Source-precedence rule: The rule identifying which application or retained event is authoritative when representations disagree.
Suppression: A temporary block with a release date, event, or new-evidence condition.
Suppression rule: A temporary block on an otherwise eligible record with a stated release condition.
Targeting: Selection of who receives an exposure; it does not itself admit the recipient to demand processing.
Threshold: The minimum evidence required for a named decision.
Time-decay attribution: Assignment of more credit to touches nearer the outcome under a published function.
Touchpoint: An observed interaction eligible for attribution credit under the published policy.