B2B Marketing: terms & concepts
Marketing feeds and shapes pipeline. This hub gathers the demand-generation, attribution, segmentation, and positioning concepts that connect marketing effort to revenue — the vocabulary where marketing and sales meet.
These are the ideas; for how Outsales turns marketing-sourced interest into booked meetings, follow the product and AI SDR links.
Marketing terms
BOFU (Bottom of Funnel)
BOFU, or bottom of funnel, is the final, decision stage of the buyer's journey, where a prospect has defined their problem and evaluated options and is choosing what to buy. BOFU efforts aim to convert that decision into a purchase.
Chat Widget
A chat widget is the embedded chat window in the corner of a website that lets visitors start a conversation without leaving the page. In sales it is a direct line to a high-intent visitor and a tool for capturing and qualifying leads.
Direct Competition
Direct competition refers to companies offering essentially the same product or service to the same target market, solving the same problem for the same buyers, so a prospect chooses between them on a like-for-like basis.
Firmographic Data
Firmographic data is the set of company-level attributes used to describe and segment businesses, such as industry, company size, revenue, location, and structure. It is to organizations what demographic data is to individuals.
Funnel Optimization
Funnel optimization is the practice of improving the rate at which prospects move from one stage of the sales or marketing funnel to the next, finding where people drop off and fixing those points to convert more of the traffic and leads you already have.
Lead Funnel
A lead funnel is the staged path a potential customer travels from first awareness to becoming a qualified opportunity, narrowing in volume at each stage from top of funnel through middle to bottom of funnel.
Market Development
Market development is a growth strategy that takes an existing product into new markets, new geographies, industries, or customer segments, rather than building something new. The product stays the same; the audience changes.
Market Fragmentation
Market fragmentation is a condition in which a market is divided among many small competitors or split into many distinct customer segments, with no single player or product dominating.
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a lead that marketing has judged ready to pass to sales, based on fit and engagement, but who is not yet ready to buy. It sits earlier in the journey than a sales qualified lead.
Multi-Touch Attribution
Multi-touch attribution is a model for crediting revenue across all the marketing and sales touchpoints a buyer interacted with, rather than just the first or last, to fairly assess which efforts contributed to the win.
Referral Marketing
Referral marketing is the practice of deliberately encouraging existing customers to recommend you to others, making word-of-mouth systematic by giving happy customers a reason and an easy way to refer, often with a reward.
Website Personalization
Website personalization is the practice of adapting what a visitor sees, headlines, offers, content, and calls to action, based on who they are and how they behave, so each visitor gets a more relevant experience than a one-size-fits-all page.