Glossary

A/B testing is a controlled experiment that compares two versions of something (A and B) by splitting traffic randomly to learn which performs better on a chosen metric.

Account-Based Marketing: a B2B strategy that targets specific high-value accounts with coordinated, hyper-personalised outreach instead of broad lead generation.

Software that pursues a goal on its own: it plans steps, uses tools and takes actions with limited human input.

Application Programming Interface: a standardised interface that lets applications communicate and exchange data without knowing each other's internal workings.

Annual Recurring Revenue: predictable yearly revenue from subscriptions or contracts, the key health metric for subscription businesses.

A B2B strategy that targets specific high-value accounts with personalised campaigns and content, aligning sales and marketing around named companies instead of broad audiences.

Accrual accounting records revenue and expenses when they are earned or incurred, not when cash changes hands, giving a more accurate picture of financial performance.

Agentic AI refers to AI systems that pursue goals autonomously by planning, taking actions through tools, and adapting based on results, with minimal step-by-step human direction.

Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) is the normalized, predictable revenue a subscription business expects to earn from active contracts over a single year.

Attribution modeling is the method of assigning credit for a conversion across the marketing touchpoints a customer interacted with before buying or signing up.

A framework for assigning credit to the touchpoints that contributed to a conversion, so you can measure which channels and interactions actually drive results.

The percentage of visitors who leave after viewing only one page, often a signal of poor relevance, mismatched intent, or weak user experience.

The degree to which your target audience recognises or recalls your brand, either prompted or unprompted. It measures how present your brand is in people's minds.

The commercial value your brand adds beyond functional product attributes: the price premium, preference and loyalty it generates.

The visual, verbal and cultural elements that define how your brand presents itself: logo, colours, tone of voice, and values.

Your customers' propensity to repeatedly purchase from you and resist competitive offers, driven by satisfaction, habit, trust, and switching costs.

Regular measurement of brand health metrics (awareness, image, preference, and purchase intent) over time, so shifts can be detected and linked to marketing activity.

Burn rate is the speed at which a company spends its cash reserves, usually measured per month, before reaching profitability or raising more funding.

Technologies and processes that turn raw data into actionable insights via reporting, dashboards and analysis, so teams can decide based on facts rather than intuition.

A detailed profile of your ideal buyer: demographics, motivations, objections, buying behaviour and preferred channels.

Customer Acquisition Cost: total sales and marketing spend divided by the number of new customers acquired over the same period.

A Customer Data Platform unifies customer data from all sources into persistent, actionable profiles that other systems can use.

Customer Lifetime Value: the total projected revenue (or profit) from a customer over their entire relationship with you.

Cost Per Acquisition: the total cost to generate one customer or conversion, computed by dividing total spend by the number of acquisitions.

Cost Per Click (CPC) is the average amount you pay each time someone clicks your ad. It is a core pricing metric for paid search and social advertising.

Cost Per Mille: the cost to deliver 1,000 ad impressions. A pricing and benchmarking metric for awareness campaigns where reach matters more than clicks.

Customer Relationship Management: software and strategy to manage and analyse customer interactions throughout their lifecycle.

Customer Satisfaction Score, a direct measure of satisfaction captured right after a specific interaction or experience, usually on a short rating scale.

EU directive requiring large companies to report standardized, audited sustainability data alongside financial results.

Call to Action: a prompt driving users toward a specific action such as sign up, buy, download, or contact us.

Click-Through Rate: clicks divided by impressions. Measures how compelling your ad, email, or link is at driving action.

A button, link, or message that prompts users to take a specific action such as sign up, buy, download, or learn more.

Capital Expenditure (CapEx) is money spent to acquire, upgrade, or extend long-lived assets like equipment, property, or software that deliver value over multiple years.

A prompting technique where a language model is guided to produce intermediate reasoning steps before giving a final answer, improving accuracy on complex tasks.

A technique that detects and delivers only the data that changed in a source system, keeping downstream systems current without reloading everything.

Churn rate is the percentage of customers or revenue lost over a period. It measures how fast a business loses its existing customer base.

Click-Through Rate (CTR) is the percentage of people who click a link, ad, or call to action out of those who viewed it.

Cohort analysis groups users by a shared starting trait or time (such as signup month) and tracks their behavior over time to reveal retention and lifecycle patterns.

A lasting edge over competitors: a resource, capability or position they cannot easily replicate, letting a firm earn above-average returns over time.

A strategy of creating and distributing valuable content to attract, engage and retain a defined target audience, rather than pitching products directly.

The practice of assembling the right information, rules and tools into an AI model's working memory so it produces accurate, on-brand answers.

The context window is the maximum amount of text (measured in tokens) a language model can process at once, including both the input prompt and the generated output.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the systematic practice of increasing the percentage of users who complete a desired action, using data, testing, and user research.

The percentage of visitors or prospects who complete a desired action (purchase, sign-up, contact form), calculated as conversions divided by total opportunities.

The blended return a company must earn to satisfy everyone who funds it (lenders and shareholders). It sets the bar every investment has to clear.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the total sales and marketing spend divided by the number of new customers gained in a period. It measures how efficiently you grow.

Software that unifies customer data from every source into one persistent profile that marketing, sales and service teams can act on.

The full sequence of touchpoints a customer has with your brand before, during and after purchase, spanning awareness, consideration, decision, retention and advocacy.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is the total net profit a business expects to earn from a customer across the entire relationship, accounting for retention and costs.

The overall perception a customer forms of your brand across every interaction, from first touch to post-purchase support.

A Data Management Platform collects, organizes, and activates (often anonymous) audience data into segments used for ad targeting and personalization across channels.

Traffic from private sharing (messaging apps, email, copy-paste) that can't be tracked by standard analytics tools, so it often gets misattributed as direct traffic.

A centralized inventory of an organization's data assets, enriched with metadata, that helps people find, understand, and trust the data they need.

A formal agreement between the team that produces data and the teams that use it, defining structure, meaning, quality and who is accountable when it breaks.

Data governance is the set of policies, roles, and processes that ensure data is accurate, secure, well-defined, and used responsibly across an organization.

A data lake is a centralized repository that stores large volumes of raw data in its native format, from structured tables to unstructured files, until needed.

Data lineage maps how data moves and transforms across systems, from origin to consumption, showing where it came from, what changed it, and where it goes.

Data Mesh is a decentralized approach to data architecture and organization where domain teams own and serve their data as products, governed by shared standards.

The practice of continuously monitoring the health of your data so you know when it breaks, drifts or goes missing before it reaches a report or a model.

The requirement that data is physically stored and processed in a specific country or region, often driven by law or contract.

A central repository that consolidates data from many source systems into a structured, query-optimized store designed for analytics, reporting, and business intelligence.

A hybrid architecture combining the flexibility of a data lake with the analytical capabilities of a data warehouse, on a single storage layer.

An automated sequence of steps that moves data from source to destination: ingestion, transformation, validation, and loading, so it arrives clean and ready to use.

A data asset managed like a product, with an owner, defined users, guaranteed quality, and measurable business value.

The degree to which data is fit for purpose: accurate, complete, consistent, timely, valid and unique. Poor quality data undermines analytics, reporting and AI.

A business-side owner responsible for the quality, consistency and appropriate use of data in their domain.

An approach where decisions are systematically informed by data analysis rather than intuition alone.

Cash a company has collected for goods or services it has not yet delivered. It sits on the balance sheet as a liability until earned.

Creating and stimulating demand for your offer, often upstream of the buying process to generate interest and awareness before prospects are ready to buy.

Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) is a valuation method that estimates an asset's value by projecting future cash flows and discounting them to present value using a required rate of return.

Automatically adjusting prices in real time based on demand, competition or user behaviour to optimise revenue, margin or conversion.

EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization) measures a company's operating profitability before financing and accounting decisions, used to compare core performance across firms.

ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) is a data integration pattern where raw data is loaded into a target system first, then transformed inside it using the platform's compute power.

A single integrated software backbone that runs core operations: finance, procurement, supply chain, HR and manufacturing on shared data.

A framework for measuring a company on environmental, social and governance factors, used by investors, regulators and buyers to judge non-financial performance.

ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) is a data integration process that pulls data from sources, reshapes it into a consistent format, and writes it into a target system.

Unpaid media exposure such as press coverage, word-of-mouth, social shares and customer reviews generated organically rather than bought or self-published.

An embedding is a numerical vector that represents data (text, images, or items) in a way that captures meaning, so similar items sit close together in space.

The ratio of interactions (likes, comments, shares) to reach for a given piece of content, used to gauge how well audiences respond relative to how many people saw it.

The finance function that builds budgets, forecasts and analysis to guide business decisions and connect strategy to numbers.

Using financial contracts to lock in exchange rates so currency swings do not erode revenue, margins or the value of foreign assets.

A centralised repository managing ML features, ensuring consistency between training and serving environments.

Fine-tuning adapts a pre-trained model to a specific task or domain by continuing training on a smaller, targeted dataset, improving accuracy and style for that use case.

Data collected directly from your own customers and prospects through your own channels: your most reliable and privacy-compliant source.

Free Cash Flow is the cash a company generates from operations after funding the capital expenditures needed to maintain and grow its asset base.

The customer journey from awareness to purchase, typically Awareness, Interest, Consideration, Decision, Action, with prospects narrowing at each stage.

Funnel analysis tracks how users move through a sequence of steps toward a goal, revealing where they drop off and which stages need improvement.

The standard set of accounting rules companies follow to prepare consistent, comparable financial statements, dominant in US reporting.

EU regulation governing how organizations collect, store and use personal data, with fines tied to global revenue for breaches.

The practice of making your brand and content visible and citable inside AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity.

The strategy defining how you'll launch a product: target segments, channels, value proposition and coordinated action plan.

Gross margin is the share of revenue left after subtracting the direct cost of producing goods or services, expressed as a percentage of revenue.

An experimental, data-driven approach to rapid growth by identifying and scaling the most efficient acquisition levers.

Rules and controls that keep an AI system inside safe, legal and on-brand boundaries, blocking outputs and actions that cross the line.

A hallucination is when an AI model generates output that is fluent and confident but factually wrong, fabricated, or unsupported by its source data.

Ideal Customer Profile: a precise description of the company or customer type that gets the most value from your product and is most likely to buy and retain.

The global accounting rulebook that governs how companies report financial results, used across the EU and 140+ jurisdictions.

The first sale of a private company's shares to public investors on a stock exchange, converting private ownership into publicly traded stock.

The total number of times an ad or piece of content is displayed, regardless of clicks. Each display counts as one impression, even to the same person.

A strategy that attracts prospects organically via valuable content (blog, SEO, social) rather than interrupting them.

The share of results (sales, conversions, revenue) that only happened because of a marketing action, not what would have occurred anyway.

The moment a trained AI model is put to work: it takes a new input and produces an answer, prediction or generated output.

The Internal Rate of Return is the discount rate that makes a project's net present value equal zero. It expresses an investment's expected annualized return.

Key Performance Indicator, a measurable value that shows how effectively you're achieving a specific objective, tracked over time against a target.

Lifetime Value: the total revenue (or profit) a customer generates throughout their entire relationship with your business.

A standalone web page built for a single campaign goal, designed to maximise conversions by removing distractions and focusing visitors on one action.

A Large Language Model is an AI system trained on vast text data to predict and generate language, enabling tasks like writing, summarizing, and answering questions.

Marketing activities designed to attract and capture contact information from prospects interested in your offer, creating a pipeline of potential customers.

The process of building relationships with prospects at every stage of the funnel, educating them until they're ready to buy.

An audience created by ad platforms to target new prospects who resemble your best existing customers, based on shared traits and behaviors.

An open standard that lets AI assistants connect to your company's tools and data in a consistent, governed way, instead of one custom integration at a time.

Master Data Management: ensuring a single, authoritative version of key reference data (customers, products, suppliers) across all systems.

Machine Learning Operations: combining ML and DevOps practices to industrialise, deploy, monitor, and retrain models reliably in production.

Marketing Qualified Lead: a prospect deemed ready to be handed off to sales, based on pre-agreed qualification criteria.

Monthly Recurring Revenue: the predictable, normalized monthly revenue from active subscriptions, the baseline metric for SaaS and subscription businesses.

The percentage of total industry sales your company captures in a given period. It measures competitive position relative to rivals in a defined market.

A statistical approach that estimates how each marketing channel and other factors drive sales, guiding budget allocation.

A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a prospect whose engagement and fit signals indicate they are more likely to become a customer, justifying handoff toward sales.

Using software to automate repetitive marketing tasks and campaigns, enabling personalisation at scale across channels like email, web, and social.

The connected set of software tools a marketing team uses to plan, run, measure and automate campaigns across channels.

Master Data Management (MDM) is the discipline of creating and maintaining a single, consistent, trusted version of an organization's core business entities like customers, products, and suppliers.

Model distillation trains a smaller student model to mimic a larger teacher model, transferring its behavior into a faster, cheaper, and more deployable form.

The process of measuring whether an AI model performs well enough, and safely enough, for the business decision it is meant to support.

A method that distributes conversion credit across all marketing touchpoints in the customer journey, rather than crediting only the first or last interaction.

AI that works across several input and output types at once: text, images, audio, video and data, instead of one format only.

Net Promoter Score: a loyalty metric asking how likely customers are to recommend you (0 to 10). NPS = % Promoters minus % Detractors.

Net Revenue Retention measures the percentage of recurring revenue retained and grown from existing customers over a period, including upsell and expansion, net of downgrades and churn.

Net Present Value is the sum of an investment's future cash flows discounted to today, minus the initial outlay. A positive NPV signals value creation.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer loyalty by asking how likely customers are to recommend a brand, then subtracting detractors from promoters.

OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) is a technology for fast, multidimensional analysis of large data sets, letting users slice, dice, and aggregate metrics across business dimensions.

An integrated approach connecting all customer touchpoints (physical, digital, mobile) into a seamless experience, with shared data and consistent context across channels.

The degree to which a company's cost base is fixed rather than variable, which magnifies how profit reacts to changes in revenue.

The number of people reached without paid promotion, through content shared naturally via feeds, search, and word of mouth.

Visitors arriving via non-paid (unpaid) search engine results, earned through content relevance and SEO rather than advertising spend.

Proactive outreach that pushes your message to targeted audiences through advertising, email, or direct prospecting, initiated by the seller rather than the buyer.

Media channels a company owns and controls directly, such as its website, blog, newsletter, social accounts and mobile app. No per-use payment to a publisher is required.

Pay Per Click (PPC) is a digital advertising model where you pay only when a user clicks your ad, not when it is merely displayed.

Any media you pay for: display ads, search ads, social ads, and sponsorships. You buy access to someone else's audience on a per-click, per-impression, or flat-fee basis.

Visitors arriving via paid ads or sponsored placements, where you pay a platform to display your message rather than earning visits organically.

A semi-fictional, research-based representation of your ideal customer: their goals, frustrations, behaviours and decision criteria.

OECD-backed rules imposing a 15% minimum effective tax rate on large multinational groups, jurisdiction by jurisdiction.

All active sales opportunities across the stages of the sales process, together with their combined potential value and probability of closing.

The mental space you want your brand to occupy in your target customer's mind relative to alternatives.

How sensitive demand is to a price change. High elasticity means customers react strongly to price increases.

The moment your product genuinely solves a real problem for a well-defined market, so users retain, refer and pay willingly.

Programmatic advertising is the automated buying and selling of digital ad inventory through real-time auctions and software, replacing manual negotiation with data-driven decisions.

Prompt engineering is the practice of designing and refining text inputs to guide large language models toward accurate, relevant, and reliable outputs.

A method that lets an AI model answer using your own documents, retrieving relevant passages before generating a response instead of relying only on training data.

Return on Ad Spend: revenue generated per dollar spent on advertising. A ROAS of 4x means $4 revenue per $1 spent.

Return on Investment: the ratio of net profit to the cost of an investment. A 300% ROI means each dollar invested returns $3.

Return on Invested Capital measures how much after-tax operating profit a company generates for every euro of capital put to work in the business.

The number of unique people exposed to your message in a given period. Unlike impressions, reach counts each person once, no matter how often they see it.

A training method that fine-tunes AI models using human preference judgments, aligning their outputs with what people find helpful, safe, and high quality.

Showing ads to users who have previously visited your site or interacted with your brand, to bring them back and drive conversion.

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) measures the revenue generated for every unit of currency spent on advertising, calculated as revenue divided by ad cost.

The practice of copying data from your central data warehouse back into everyday business tools like CRM, ad platforms and support desks so teams can act on it.

A SaaS health check: revenue growth rate plus profit margin should reach or exceed 40%. It balances how fast you grow against how much you burn.

Serviceable Addressable Market: the slice of TAM you can realistically reach given your current business model, geography, and distribution channels.

Search Engine Marketing: reaching audiences through search engines, combining organic SEO and paid search (SEA) to capture user intent at the moment of search.

Search Engine Optimization: the practice of improving your pages' natural (unpaid) rankings in search engine results pages to attract more organic traffic.

A formal commitment defining the service level a provider guarantees to a customer, with measurable targets and consequences if they are missed.

Serviceable Obtainable Market: the share of your SAM you can realistically capture given current resources, channels, and competitive position.

Sales Qualified Lead: a prospect the sales team has validated as ready for direct outreach and a proposal, having passed clear qualification criteria.

A schema is the formal blueprint that defines how data is structured, named, typed, and related within a database, file, or message.

Dividing a market into distinct groups of customers who share similar needs, characteristics or behaviours, so each group can be served with a tailored approach.

A shared business definitions layer that sits between raw data and reports, so everyone uses the same numbers for revenue, churn or margin.

Search that matches on meaning and intent rather than exact keywords, so a query and a result can connect even when they share no words.

Your brand's share of total advertising or conversation volume in your category, measured against competitors over a defined period.

The proportion of searches in your category that mention your brand, a leading indicator of market share.

A Slowly Changing Dimension (SCD) is a data warehousing technique for managing dimension attributes that change over time, preserving history or overwriting values based on chosen rules.

The tendency of people to look at others' choices to guide their own. In marketing, it means using reviews, testimonials, ratings and case studies to reassure and persuade prospects.

A set of financing methods that let suppliers get paid early while buyers keep longer payment terms, using the buyer's stronger credit.

Artificially generated data that mimics the statistical patterns of real data, used when real data is scarce, sensitive or expensive to collect.

The hidden set of instructions that defines how an AI assistant behaves before any user types a question: its role, tone, limits and rules.

Total Addressable Market: the total revenue opportunity if you captured 100% of potential customers in your target market.

A setting that controls how random or predictable an AI model's output is: low keeps it safe and consistent, high makes it more varied and creative.

Data purchased from external aggregators, collected from audiences you don't own. It is bought or licensed rather than gathered through your own direct relationships.

A token is the basic unit of text that language models process, often a word fragment, whole word, or punctuation mark rather than a single character.

The prices charged when units of the same company trade goods, services or IP across borders, set to satisfy tax authorities and reflect market value.

A Transformer is a neural network architecture that uses self-attention to process sequences in parallel, powering most modern language and generative AI models.

Unique Selling Proposition: the one thing that makes your offer distinctly better than the competition in your target customer's mind.

A clear statement of the benefits your product delivers, the problems it solves and why customers should choose you over alternatives.

Variance analysis compares actual financial results against budgeted or planned figures to quantify differences and explain why they occurred.

A vector database stores data as high-dimensional numeric vectors (embeddings) and retrieves items by similarity rather than exact matches, powering semantic search and AI applications.

The average number of new users each existing user generates through referrals. Above 1.0, growth compounds on itself and becomes exponential.

The blended rate a company pays to finance itself through debt and equity. It sets the minimum return an investment must clear to create value.

Working capital is the difference between a company's current assets and current liabilities, measuring short-term liquidity and the funds available to run daily operations.

A budgeting method where every expense is justified from zero each cycle, rather than carrying last year's spend forward.