Outbound sales, defined properly.
Every term on this site, in plain English, with the practical consequence rather than the textbook wording. 36 definitions covering roles, prospecting, cold email, deliverability, data, compliance, and measurement.
Roles & models
SDR (Sales Development Representative)
A salesperson whose job is the front half of the sales process: identifying target accounts, finding the right contact, making first contact, and qualifying interest. An SDR hands a qualified opportunity to an account executive rather than closing it.
Sometimes called a BDR (business development representative). Where the two are distinguished, SDR usually means inbound follow-up and BDR means outbound prospecting, but most companies use the terms interchangeably.
AI SDR
Software or a managed service that automates the research and first-contact writing an SDR does: identifying the decision-maker, verifying contact details, researching a reason to reach out, and drafting the first email. It does not run the sales conversation after a reply.
Done-for-you outbound
An outbound sales arrangement where the provider runs the research, list building, and message drafting, and the client's only job is to define the target market and approve the output. The distinguishing feature is that the client is a reviewer, not an operator.
Fractional SDR
A part-time or shared sales development resource, engaged for a fraction of a full-time role. Used by companies whose outbound volume does not justify a full headcount but who want a named person accountable for it.
Outbound vs inbound
Outbound means the seller initiates contact with a prospect who has not asked to be contacted. Inbound means the prospect initiates, usually by responding to content, search, advertising, or a referral. The two have different economics, different compliance rules, and different skills.
Prospecting
ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
A written description of the type of company most likely to buy and succeed with what you sell, defined by attributes you can verify from outside: industry, size, geography, technology in use, business model, and stage.
An ICP that cannot be checked from public information is a wish, not a targeting rule. If you cannot look at a company's website and decide within a minute whether it qualifies, the definition is not operational yet.
Buying signal (trigger event)
A public, dated event that changes what a company needs and therefore makes now a better time to contact it than last month. Common examples: a relevant new hire or open role, a funding round, a product launch, a leadership change, a merger, or adoption of a complementary tool.
Signals decay. Most are worth acting on for weeks rather than months, and referencing a stale one signals that the research is old rather than current.
Prospect research
The work of establishing, before writing anything, that a company fits your ICP, who inside it owns the problem you solve, what is currently happening there that makes contact timely, and how to reach that person.
Prospect research brief
A one-page, point-in-time summary of one account: the company, the contact and their role, the current signal, the fit rationale, verified contact details, and a source for every claim. Written to be read in under a minute immediately before contact.
Buying committee
The set of people who together decide on a B2B purchase: typically an economic buyer who controls budget, a functional owner who lives with the problem, and one or more influencers or blockers such as security, legal, or finance.
At companies under roughly 50 people the committee is often one or two people wearing several of these hats at once, which is why title-based targeting fails at that size.
Account-based outbound
An approach that treats a named company, rather than an individual contact, as the unit of targeting: research is done per account, and multiple people at that account may be approached as part of one coordinated effort.
Cold email
Cold email
An unsolicited email sent to a business contact who has had no prior relationship with the sender, for the purpose of starting a commercial conversation. Distinct from marketing email sent to a list that opted in.
Personalisation
Including at least one specific, current, verifiable fact about the recipient's company that could not be true of another company. Inserting a first name or a company name from a database field is formatting, not personalisation.
The practical test: replace the company name with a competitor's. If the email still makes sense, it was never personalised.
Merge field (merge tag)
A placeholder in an email template, such as {{first_name}} or {{company}}, replaced at send time with a value from a contact record. Merge fields make a template addressable; they do not make it relevant.
Sequence (cadence)
A predefined series of outreach steps to one prospect over time, typically several emails with optional calls or social touches, sent on a schedule unless the prospect replies.
Suppression list
A record of addresses, domains, and individuals who must never be contacted again: people who opted out, objected, complained, or belong to a company that asked to be excluded. It is checked before every send.
Under UK and EU rules, maintaining and honouring suppression is a legal obligation, not a courtesy, and it survives a change of tool or provider.
Deliverability
Sending domain
The domain that outbound email is sent from and whose reputation mailbox providers score. Cold outbound is normally sent from a secondary domain similar to the company's primary one, so that damage to sending reputation cannot affect the mail the business depends on.
SPF (Sender Policy Framework)
A DNS record listing which mail servers are authorised to send email on behalf of a domain. A receiving server checks it to decide whether the sending server had permission.
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail)
A cryptographic signature added to outgoing email and verified by the receiving server against a public key published in DNS. It proves the message genuinely came from the domain and was not altered in transit.
DMARC
A DNS policy that tells receiving servers what to do with mail claiming to be from your domain that fails SPF and DKIM checks, and where to send reports about it. It is what turns SPF and DKIM from checks into enforcement.
Mailbox warm-up
Gradually increasing sending volume from a new mailbox or domain over several weeks, so that mailbox providers observe a steady, credible sending history before any campaign volume arrives.
Bounce (hard and soft)
A message the receiving server refuses. A hard bounce is permanent, usually because the mailbox does not exist. A soft bounce is temporary, such as a full mailbox or a server outage. Hard bounces damage sending reputation; soft bounces mostly do not.
Spam complaint rate
The proportion of delivered messages that recipients mark as spam. It is the signal mailbox providers weigh most heavily, and it is the fastest way to move future mail from the inbox to the spam folder.
Data
Email verification
Confirming that an address is genuinely deliverable before sending: valid syntax, a domain with MX records, and a mailbox the receiving server accepts. Distinct from pattern guessing, which produces plausible addresses that bounce.
Catch-all domain
A domain configured to accept mail addressed to any mailbox, whether or not it exists. Because the server accepts everything, verification cannot distinguish a real address from an invented one, so addresses at catch-all domains should be treated as unverified.
Role account
A shared, function-based address such as info@, sales@, or hello@ rather than one belonging to a named person. Usually deliverable, rarely read by a decision-maker, and in some jurisdictions subject to different marketing rules than a named individual's address.
Data enrichment
Adding attributes to a contact or company record from external sources: job title, company size, industry, technology in use, funding, contact details. Enrichment fills in fields; it does not decide whether a company is worth contacting.
Waterfall enrichment
Querying multiple data providers in sequence for the same record, moving to the next only when the previous one returns nothing, to raise coverage without paying every provider for every lookup.
Compliance
GDPR (and UK GDPR)
The data protection regime governing processing of personal data in the EU and, in its retained UK form, in the United Kingdom. It applies to B2B outreach whenever the contact data identifies a person, which a named work email address does.
It does not prohibit cold outreach. It requires a lawful basis, usually legitimate interests for B2B, plus transparency about where data came from and a straightforward way to object.
PECR
The UK Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, which govern unsolicited electronic marketing. Its consent requirement for marketing email applies to individual subscribers, and the ICO treats sole traders and most partnerships as individual subscribers; corporate subscribers such as limited companies and public bodies are treated differently.
Legitimate interests
One of the lawful bases for processing personal data under GDPR, and the one most commonly relied on for B2B outreach. Relying on it requires a documented three-part assessment: the interest, the necessity of the processing, and the balance against the individual's rights and reasonable expectations.
Corporate subscriber
Under PECR, a subscriber that is a corporate body such as a limited company, limited liability partnership, or public authority, as distinct from an individual subscriber. The distinction determines whether prior consent is required for marketing email.
Measurement
Reply rate
The proportion of delivered outbound emails that receive any human reply, including negative ones. The most honest headline metric in cold outreach, because unlike open rate it cannot be inflated by image-proxy prefetching.
Positive reply rate
The proportion of delivered emails that receive a reply expressing interest, as opposed to a decline or an out-of-office. The metric that actually predicts pipeline, and the one most rarely quoted, because it is much lower than reply rate.
Open rate
The proportion of delivered emails recorded as opened, measured by a tracking pixel. Widely reported and largely unreliable since mail privacy features began prefetching images on the recipient's behalf, which registers opens that never happened.
Deliverability rate
The proportion of sent messages that reach the inbox rather than bouncing or landing in spam. Distinct from delivery rate, which only counts whether the receiving server accepted the message at all.