Sales Intelligence Glossary
60 terms covering sales signals, AI personalization, data enrichment, and B2B intelligence. Each definition includes real-world context and how Autobound applies the concept.
Signal Types(13)
Intent Data
Intent data is market intelligence that identifies which companies are actively researching topics, products, or solutions relevant to your business.
Buying Signals
Buying signals are observable actions or behaviors that suggest a prospect or account is moving toward a purchase decision.
Sales Signals
Sales signals are any data points or events that provide actionable intelligence for sales teams about a prospect's likelihood to buy, current business priorities, or organizational changes.
Technographic Data
Technographic data is intelligence about the technology products, platforms, and tools that a company has adopted.
Firmographic Data
Firmographic data is the set of attributes that describe a company's organizational characteristics — including industry, employee count, annual revenue, headquarters location, founding year, ownership structure, and growth trajectory.
Trigger Events
Trigger events are specific, time-bound business changes that create a window of opportunity for sales outreach.
Job Change Signals
Job change signals are real-time notifications that a target prospect or key contact has moved to a new company, been promoted, or taken on a new role.
Funding Signals
Funding signals are real-time alerts that a company has raised venture capital, secured private equity investment, received a grant, or completed a debt financing round.
Hiring Signals
Hiring signals are data points derived from a company's active job postings, headcount changes, and recruiting activity that indicate strategic priorities, growth areas, and potential technology needs.
Website Visitor Identification
Website visitor identification is the process of determining which companies and, in some cases, which individual contacts are visiting your website — even when they do not fill out a form or identify themselves.
First-Party Data
First-party data is information that an organization collects directly from its audience through owned channels — website interactions, CRM records, email engagement, product usage, support tickets, event attendance, and form submissions.
Third-Party Data
Third-party data is information collected by organizations that do not have a direct relationship with the data subjects — external data providers, publisher cooperatives, data aggregators, and public records databases.
Dark Funnel
The dark funnel refers to the portion of the B2B buyer journey that occurs outside of a vendor's tracking and attribution systems — activities like word-of-mouth referrals, private Slack and Discord conversations, anonymous content consumption, podcast listening, dark social shares (links copied and pasted in private channels), and peer consultations.
Sales Methodologies(11)
Cold Email
Cold email is the practice of sending an unsolicited email to a prospect with whom you have no prior relationship, with the goal of starting a sales conversation.
Sales Personalization
Sales personalization is the practice of tailoring sales outreach — emails, calls, social touches, and presentations — to the specific context of each individual prospect.
Outbound Sales
Outbound sales is a go-to-market strategy where sales representatives proactively initiate contact with potential customers through cold email, cold calling, social selling, and direct messaging.
Sales Enablement
Sales enablement is the strategic function of providing sales teams with the content, tools, training, data, and processes they need to engage buyers effectively at every stage of the sales cycle.
Signal-Based Selling
Signal-based selling is a sales methodology where reps prioritize accounts and personalize outreach based on real-time data signals rather than static lists or arbitrary cadences.
Account-Based Selling
Account-based selling (ABS) is a strategic sales approach where the entire revenue team coordinates personalized engagement across multiple stakeholders within a target account, treating each account as a market of one.
Inbound Sales
Inbound sales is a methodology where sales reps prioritize and engage prospects who have already expressed interest through marketing channels — website visits, content downloads, demo requests, webinar registrations, or product signups.
Sales Development
Sales development is the specialized function within a B2B sales organization responsible for the top of the pipeline: identifying, contacting, qualifying, and converting prospects into meetings or opportunities for account executives.
Social Selling
Social selling is the practice of using social media platforms — primarily LinkedIn in B2B — to identify prospects, build relationships, share relevant content, and engage with potential buyers as part of the sales process.
Sales Ops
Sales ops (sales operations) is the organizational function responsible for optimizing the processes, technology, data, and analytics that enable a sales team to sell more efficiently and effectively.
Pipeline Generation
Pipeline generation (pipe gen) is the set of activities, strategies, and processes that create new qualified sales opportunities in a company's revenue pipeline.
Data & Enrichment(16)
Data Enrichment
Data enrichment is the process of enhancing existing data records by appending additional information from external sources.
Lead Enrichment
Lead enrichment is the specific application of data enrichment to inbound and outbound sales leads — appending missing firmographic, technographic, contact, and signal data to a lead record at the moment it enters your funnel.
B2B Data
B2B data is any business information that describes companies, contacts, relationships, and behaviors in the business-to-business market.
Sales Intelligence
Sales intelligence refers to the technologies, data, and insights that help sales professionals find, qualify, monitor, and engage potential customers.
ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a detailed description of the type of company that is most likely to purchase your product, derive significant value from it, and become a long-term customer.
Contact Data
Contact data is the set of personal and professional information associated with individual business contacts — including email addresses, phone numbers, job titles, departments, seniority levels, social media profiles, and company affiliations.
Data Hygiene
Data hygiene refers to the ongoing processes of cleaning, standardizing, deduplicating, validating, and maintaining data records across an organization's databases and CRM systems.
CRM Enrichment
CRM enrichment is the process of automatically appending missing or outdated information to contact and company records in your Customer Relationship Management system using external data sources.
Predictive Lead Scoring
Predictive lead scoring uses machine learning algorithms to analyze historical conversion data and assign a probability score to each lead, indicating how likely they are to convert to a customer.
Buyer Persona
A buyer persona is a semi-fictional, data-driven representation of a specific type of buyer within your target market.
Total Addressable Market
Total addressable market (TAM) is the total revenue opportunity available to a product or service if it achieved 100% market share with zero competition.
Data-Driven Sales
Data-driven sales is the practice of using quantitative data, analytics, and intelligence to inform every aspect of the sales process — from account selection and prioritization to messaging strategy, deal forecasting, and resource allocation.
Waterfall Enrichment
Waterfall enrichment is a data enrichment strategy where multiple data providers are queried sequentially for each record, with each subsequent provider attempting to fill fields that previous providers could not.
Data Orchestration
Data orchestration is the automated coordination of data collection, transformation, enrichment, routing, and activation across multiple systems in a go-to-market technology stack.
Reverse IP Lookup
Reverse IP lookup is a technology that maps a website visitor's IP address to the company or organization that owns or uses that IP range.
Data Append
Data append is the process of adding missing data fields to an existing record by matching it against external databases.
AI & ML in Sales(8)
AI Personalization
AI personalization in sales refers to the use of artificial intelligence — particularly large language models and machine learning — to automatically tailor outreach messages, content recommendations, and sales interactions to individual prospects based on their data profile and current context.
AI Sales Tools
AI sales tools are software applications that use artificial intelligence — including large language models, machine learning, natural language processing, and predictive analytics — to automate, augment, or optimize sales activities.
AI SDR
An AI SDR (Sales Development Representative) is an autonomous AI agent designed to perform the core functions of a human SDR: identifying target prospects, crafting personalized outreach, sending multi-channel sequences, handling initial responses, and qualifying leads for handoff to account executives.
AI-Powered Outreach
AI-powered outreach is the practice of using artificial intelligence to automate and enhance the end-to-end process of reaching out to prospects — from research and signal detection to message generation, timing optimization, and follow-up sequencing.
Predictive Analytics for Sales
Predictive analytics for sales is the application of statistical modeling and machine learning to historical sales data to forecast future outcomes — which deals will close, which accounts will churn, which prospects are most likely to convert, and which territories will exceed or miss quota.
Machine Learning in Sales
Machine learning in sales refers to the application of ML algorithms to sales data to automate pattern discovery, prediction, and decision-making across the revenue process.
AI Agents
AI agents are autonomous software systems that perceive their environment through data inputs, reason about goals and context using large language models or other AI architectures, and take independent actions to accomplish objectives with minimal human supervision.
Sales Copilot
A sales copilot is an AI-powered assistant that works alongside sales representatives to augment their capabilities in real time — researching prospects, drafting emails, suggesting talking points, summarizing meetings, and providing coaching during live conversations.
Industry Terms(12)
Email Outreach Tool
An email outreach tool is software designed to automate the creation, sending, tracking, and management of personalized sales email sequences at scale.
ABM Platform
An ABM (Account-Based Marketing) platform is an integrated software solution that enables marketing and sales teams to execute coordinated, personalized campaigns targeting specific named accounts across multiple channels.
Revenue Intelligence
Revenue intelligence is a category of sales technology that automatically captures, analyzes, and surfaces insights from buyer-seller interactions across email, phone, video meetings, and CRM activity to provide complete visibility into deal health, pipeline risk, and forecast accuracy.
Conversation Intelligence
Conversation intelligence is a category of AI-powered sales technology that records, transcribes, and analyzes sales conversations — phone calls, video meetings, and demos — to extract actionable insights about deal health, rep performance, competitive dynamics, and buyer sentiment.
Sales Acceleration
Sales acceleration is the strategic use of technology, data, and optimized processes to increase the speed and efficiency of the sales cycle — moving prospects from initial contact to closed-won faster while maintaining or improving conversion rates.
Buyer Intent Platform
A buyer intent platform is a specialized data technology that identifies which companies are actively researching products, solutions, or topics relevant to your business — revealing in-market accounts before they visit your website or contact your sales team.
GTM / Go-to-Market
Go-to-market (GTM) is the comprehensive strategy and operational plan a company uses to bring its product to customers and generate revenue.
Sales Tech Stack
A sales tech stack is the complete set of software tools, platforms, and technologies that a sales organization uses to manage the end-to-end revenue process — from prospecting and lead management through engagement, pipeline management, closing, and customer expansion.
Sales Engagement Platform
A sales engagement platform (SEP) is software that enables sales teams to execute, manage, and optimize multi-channel outreach at scale — coordinating email sequences, phone tasks, LinkedIn touches, and other engagement activities through a single workflow.
Sales Intelligence Platform
A sales intelligence platform is a comprehensive data and analytics solution that provides sales teams with the information they need to find, understand, and engage potential buyers.
Intent Data Provider
An intent data provider is a company that collects, processes, and sells behavioral data indicating which businesses are actively researching products, services, or topics relevant to a buyer's category.
B2B Data Provider
A B2B data provider is a company that collects, maintains, and sells business data — including company profiles, contact information, technographic data, intent signals, and financial intelligence — to other businesses for use in sales, marketing, and operational workflows.
See These Concepts in Action
Autobound combines 400+ signals and AI personalization to generate outreach that books meetings. See how these concepts work together.