The B2B go-to-market glossary

A buyer committee is the group of people inside a target account — typically 5 to 11 in modern B2B — who collectively decide whether to buy, including the economic buyer, champion, blocker, and end users.

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional profile of an individual decision-maker — their role, goals, pains, objections, and information sources — used to tailor messaging and outreach.

The champion is the internal advocate who wants your product and sells it inside the account; the economic buyer is the person who controls the budget and ultimately signs off — they are almost never the same person in mid-market and enterprise deals.

Firmographics are the descriptive attributes of a company — industry, size, revenue, geography, tech stack, growth stage — that B2B teams use to segment markets and qualify accounts.

An Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a written description of the type of company that gets the most value from your product and is easiest for you to sell to, broken down into firmographics, jobs-to-be-done, pains, and buying triggers.

Jobs-to-be-Done (JTBD) is a framework that describes customers by the underlying job they're trying to get done — the progress they want to make in a specific situation — rather than by demographics or product preferences.

A 30/60/90 plan is a phased GTM rollout broken into three 30-day windows — learn and ship the first wedge, expand channels and measure, then double down on what works and cut what doesn't.

A go-to-market (GTM) plan is the playbook for how a company will reach, win, and retain customers — covering target segments, positioning, channels, pricing, messaging, sales motion, and the milestones for the first 30, 60, and 90 days.

Messaging pillars are the three to five core themes that every piece of marketing, sales, and product copy ladders up to — the consistent claims, proof points, and language your team uses everywhere a customer encounters you.

Positioning is the deliberate choice of the market category you compete in, the customers you're best for, and the unique value you deliver — the answer to "who is this for, what is it, and why should they care?"

A value proposition is the specific, measurable benefit a customer gets from your product — the answer to "what do I get, how much, and how is it better than what I'm doing today?"

A wedge strategy is the deliberate choice to enter a market by serving one narrow, underserved segment exceptionally well — using that beachhead to earn trust, generate referrals, and expand into adjacent segments.

Buying triggers are the specific events inside a target company that create urgency for the problem you solve — a new executive, a regulatory change, a competitor switch, a missed quarter, a funding round.

A cold outreach sequence is a structured multi-touch campaign — typically 5 to 9 emails, LinkedIn messages, and calls over 2 to 4 weeks — designed to start a conversation with a prospect who has never heard of you.

Discovery questions are the structured questions a salesperson asks early in a deal to qualify fit, surface pain, identify the buyer committee, and uncover budget and timeline — turning a meeting into a deal plan.

Intent signals are observable behaviors — job changes, hiring, funding, technology adoption, content consumption — that suggest a company is actively in-market for a solution like yours.

MEDDIC is a B2B sales qualification framework — Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify pain, Champion — used to assess whether a deal is real and worth working.

A sales cycle is the average elapsed time and the sequence of stages a deal goes through from first contact to closed-won — the heartbeat that determines hiring plans, pipeline coverage, and cash-flow forecasting.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a B2B strategy where marketing and sales jointly target a defined list of high-value accounts with personalized campaigns, instead of running broad demand-generation programs.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the fully loaded cost of acquiring one new paying customer — sales salaries, marketing spend, tools, contractors — divided by the number of new customers won in the same window.

Product-Led Growth (PLG) is a go-to-market motion where the product itself drives acquisition, activation, and expansion — usually through a free tier, free trial, or self-serve checkout — instead of relying primarily on a sales team to open accounts.

Product-market fit is the state where a product satisfies a strong market demand — customers buy without heroic selling, retain without heroic support, and refer others unprompted.

TAM (Total Addressable Market) is everyone who could theoretically buy; SAM (Serviceable Addressable Market) is the slice you can actually reach with your product and model; SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market) is the realistic share you can win in a defined window.