The RevOps glossary
84 definitions, written to the standard the series argues for: a term is defined when two people implementing it independently produce the same result.
By layer of the revenue system
Revenue Design
What is sold, to whom, and under what economic logic.
Go to Market
How an offering becomes discoverable, legible and purchasable.
Marketing Operations
How exposure becomes qualified, governed demand.
Sales Operations
How intent becomes commitment, and commitment becomes contract.
Customer Success Operations
How sold revenue stays realized revenue.
Financial Operations
How reported revenue is reconciled with economic truth.
Revenue Operations
How the whole system is governed into coherence.
A to Z
A
- Account-based marketing (ABM)
- ABM is a demand model in which the account, not the contact, is the unit of targeting, measurement and qualification.
- Adoption
- Adoption is the extent to which entitled capability is actually used, measured against what the customer bought rather than against a generic activity benchmark.
- Annual recurring revenue (ARR)
- ARR is the annualized value of contracted recurring revenue at a point in time, a management metric, not a GAAP one.
- Attribution
- Attribution is the rule set that assigns credit for revenue to prior touchpoints, a definitional choice, not a measurement you can discover.
B
- Beachhead market
- A beachhead is the narrowest market segment in which an offering can win decisively, chosen because winning there makes the adjacent segment cheaper to enter.
- Billing schedule
- A billing schedule is the sequence of invoices a contract generates, timing, amounts and triggers, derived from contract shape rather than chosen at invoicing time.
- Bookings
- A booking is the contractual commitment a customer has made, distinct from billings, which is what has been invoiced, and from revenue, which is what has been earned.
C
- Campaign hierarchy
- A campaign hierarchy is the structure that lets spend and response roll up consistently, programme to campaign to tactic to asset, so reporting aggregates without manual mapping.
- Capacity planning
- Capacity planning derives how many productive selling resources are required to hit a revenue target, given ramp time, attrition, productivity and coverage assumptions.
- Cash conversion cycle
- The cash conversion cycle measures the time between spending to acquire and deliver, and collecting the cash that results.
- Change control
- Change control is the governed process for proposing, reviewing, releasing and recording modifications to the revenue system, its fields, definitions, automations and stage criteria.
- Channel conflict
- Channel conflict occurs when two routes to market can legitimately claim the same buyer, and no rule decides which one wins.
- Churn
- Churn is the loss of a customer or of their revenue, and it must be measured with a stated basis, logo or revenue, and a stated recognition point.
- Close reason
- A close reason is a recorded classification used to investigate why one opportunity ended as it did; it is evidence to review, not a proven cause.
- Cohort analysis
- Cohort analysis groups records by a shared start event and follows that fixed group over time, which is the only way to separate mix change from behavior change.
- Contract shape
- Contract shape is the structural form an agreement takes, term length, commitment level, billing frequency, ramp, and the conditions under which any of them change.
- Cost to serve
- Cost to serve is the fully attributed cost of delivering and supporting a specific customer or segment, as opposed to an average cost spread evenly across the base.
- Coverage model
- A coverage model specifies how many accounts of what type each seller or team is responsible for, and what level of attention each account tier receives.
- Customer health score
- A health score is a predictive model of renewal likelihood built from observed signals, and it is only a model if it has been validated against actual renewal outcomes.
D
- Data enrichment
- Enrichment appends third-party attributes to records so that fit can be evaluated from data the buyer did not have to supply.
- Data quality
- Data quality is the measured fitness of records for the decisions made from them, completeness, accuracy, consistency, timeliness and uniqueness, each measured against a stated requirement.
- Deal desk
- A deal desk is the control point where non-standard commercial terms are reviewed, approved and recorded before they become contractual obligations.
- Deduplication
- Deduplication is the ongoing enforcement that one real person or company is represented by exactly one record, across every object that references them.
- Deferred revenue
- Deferred revenue is a liability representing cash collected or invoiced for obligations not yet satisfied.
- Discount policy
- A discount policy states what a discount is exchanged for, who may grant which magnitude, and what the concession costs the company, as distinct from an approval workflow, which only routes the request.
E
- Entitlement
- An entitlement is a specific right a customer has purchased, seats, usage volume, feature access, service level, expressed structurally rather than in contract prose.
- Expansion revenue
- Expansion revenue is additional revenue from existing customers through seat growth, tier upgrade, usage increase or new product attachment.
F
- Field governance
- Field governance is the control over what fields exist, who may write to each, whether values are constrained, and what depends on them downstream.
- Forecast category
- Forecast category is the seller’s judgement of an opportunity’s likelihood, commit, best case, pipeline, omitted, held deliberately separate from pipeline stage.
- Funnel conversion rate
- Funnel conversion rate is the proportion of records that transition from one governed stage to the next, measured on a consistent cohort basis.
G
- Go-to-market motion
- A go-to-market motion is a repeatable path by which a specific offer reaches a specific segment, including the channel, the qualification standard, the selling model and the economics that make it viable.
- Gross revenue retention (GRR)
- GRR measures how much starting recurring contracted value remains after churn and contraction, before expansion; under that definition it is capped at 100%.
I
- Ideal customer profile (ICP)
- An ICP is a testable specification of the accounts a company can serve profitably and repeatably, expressed in attributes the revenue system can actually evaluate.
- Intent data
- Intent data is third-party or first-party behavioral signal used to infer that an account is actively researching a purchase.
L
- Lead scoring
- Lead scoring is a model that ranks records by expected conversion, and it is only valid when it is calibrated against realized outcomes.
- Lifecycle stage
- A lifecycle stage is a named condition for a declared object, with entry evidence, exit evidence, effective rules, and decision ownership.
- Lifecycle velocity
- Lifecycle velocity is the time records take to move between governed stages, measured as a distribution rather than an average.
M
- Marketing qualified lead (MQL)
- An MQL is a record that has met a documented, enforced threshold of fit and intent, and that marketing is formally handing to sales.
- Metric definition
- A metric definition is the governed specification of a measure, its formula, source fields, filters, grain, owner and known limitations.
- Motion–economics fit
- Motion–economics fit is the test of whether a segment’s average contract value can support the cost of the motion used to sell into it.
- Mutual action plan
- A mutual action plan is a shared, dated sequence of steps both buyer and seller commit to, converting an assumed close date into an agreed one.
N
- Net revenue retention (NRR)
- NRR is ending recurring contracted value for a starting cohort divided by that cohort’s starting recurring contracted value, after churn, contraction, and expansion and excluding new customers.
O
- Offer structure
- Offer structure is the decomposition of what a company sells into priceable, deliverable, and governable components.
- Onboarding
- Onboarding is the governed transition from signed contract to realised value, with defined entry conditions, milestones and an exit criterion.
P
- Packaging
- Packaging is the grouping of capabilities into purchasable units, and the rules governing what a buyer must take together and what they may take separately.
- Partner motion
- A partner motion routes revenue through a third party, reseller, referral partner, systems integrator or marketplace, each with different economics, control and data visibility.
- Performance obligation
- A performance obligation is a distinct promise in a contract, and it is the unit revenue recognition is measured against.
- Pipeline coverage
- Pipeline coverage is the ratio of qualified open pipeline to the target it must produce, evaluated for the period the pipeline can actually close in.
- Pipeline hygiene
- Pipeline hygiene is the ongoing enforcement that open opportunity records reflect current reality, dates, amounts, stages and next steps included.
- Positioning
- Positioning is the decision about what a buyer should compare the offering to, and therefore which criteria they will judge it on.
- Price realisation
- Price realisation is the net commercial amount on a declared basis after applicable discounts, credits, and concessions, divided by the relevant pricing or billing quantity when useful.
- Pricing logic
- Pricing logic is the governing rule set that determines what any given customer pays, as distinct from a price list, which is only its output.
- Product-led growth (PLG)
- Product-led growth is a motion in which the product itself performs qualification and conversion, and sales engages only where the product cannot close the gap alone.
Q
- Qualification logic
- Qualification logic is the explicit, shared rule set that determines when a record is worth advancing, and it must resolve to the same answer in marketing, sales and the CRM.
- Quota
- Quota is the revenue target assigned to a seller or team, derived from capacity and territory potential rather than from dividing the company target by headcount.
- Quote to cash (QTC)
- Quote to cash is the end-to-end chain from configured quote through contract, order, invoice and collection, and the point where sales structure meets financial truth.
R
- Renewal management
- Renewal management is the governed process by which a contract term ends and a new one begins, with the renewal treated as a forecastable pipeline event.
- Revenue architecture
- Revenue architecture is the structural definition of how a company produces revenue: what it sells, to whom, under what constraints, and through which economic logic.
- Revenue data model
- The revenue data model is the set of objects, relationships and required fields that every revenue-facing process reads from and writes to.
- Revenue leakage
- Revenue leakage is a management label for a documented gap between an authorized commercial or accounting amount and the amount billed, recognized, collected, or retained; the subtype must be named.
- Revenue model
- A revenue model is the mechanism by which value delivered converts into money received, subscription, consumption, transaction fee, licence, service, or a defined combination.
- Revenue operations (RevOps)
- Revenue operations is the governing function that enforces coherence across marketing, sales, customer success and finance by owning shared definitions, data models, process boundaries and change control.
- Revenue recognition
- Revenue recognition is the determination of when earned revenue may be recorded, governed by performance obligations rather than by cash timing.
- Revenue tech stack
- The revenue tech stack is the set of systems the revenue process runs on, and more importantly the integration topology connecting them.
- Routing
- Routing is the deterministic assignment of a record to an owner based on registered rules, segment, territory, coverage, and existing account relationship.
- Runbook
- A runbook is the documented set of reviews and maintenance tasks required for named decisions, with owners, evidence, outputs, and retirement conditions.
S
- Sales accepted lead (SAL)
- A SAL is an MQL that the receiving sales function has explicitly accepted as workable, creating the only honest measurement of demand quality.
- Sales cycle length
- Sales cycle length is the elapsed time from a defined start event to close, measured on won deals, lost deals and stalled deals separately.
- Sales forecast
- A sales forecast is a derivation from pipeline state under a stated method, not a negotiated commitment collected up the management chain.
- Segmentation boundary
- A segmentation boundary is an enforced rule that assigns an account to exactly one segment and governs which motion, pricing and coverage model applies to it.
- Semantic layer
- A semantic layer is the single place where metric definitions are implemented, so every dashboard and report derives from one implementation instead of restating it.
- Service tiering
- Service tiering assigns post-sale coverage, named CSM, pooled, or digital-only, by account value and risk rather than by who asks loudest.
- Single source of truth
- A source-of-truth designation names the authority for one object, field, event, artifact, role, or decision within a stated scope and effective period.
- Sourced vs. influenced pipeline
- Sourced pipeline credits the origin of an opportunity to a single first cause; influenced pipeline credits every qualifying touch, so the two must never be summed.
- Stage integrity
- Stage integrity is the property of a pipeline in which every stage change corresponds to a verifiable change in buyer commitment, evidenced on the record.
- System of record
- A system of record is the designated authoritative source for a given entity or field, the one place where, if two systems disagree, this one is right.
T
- Territory design
- Territory design is the allocation of accounts to sellers such that each territory contains comparable attainable opportunity, not merely a comparable account count.
- Time to value
- Time to value is the elapsed time from contract signature to the customer’s first realised outcome, measured against a defined outcome, not against go-live.
- Total addressable market (TAM)
- TAM is the total revenue opportunity available for a product if every qualifying buyer purchased, useful only when built bottom-up from the ICP definition.
U
- Unit economics
- Unit economics is the per-unit relationship between what it costs to acquire and serve a customer and what that customer returns over their lifetime.
- Unit Map
- The Unit Map distinguishes how the customer evaluates benefit, how price is calculated, what is billed, what the customer may access, and what drives delivery work.
- Usage-based pricing
- Usage-based pricing applies a price rule to measured consumption; the billing quantity, customer-value evidence, delivery cost, and accounting treatment remain separate questions.
- UTM governance
- UTM governance is the enforced convention for tagging inbound links so that traffic source resolves to one value rather than to a family of near-duplicates.
W
- Win rate
- Win rate is the proportion of a defined cohort of opportunities that reached closed-won, measured from a fixed entry stage.