Alexandra Levits Water Cooler Wisdom Do You Know Your Sales Terms

Alexandra Levit's Water Cooler Wisdom Do You Know Your Sales Terms You know the feeling. You’re meeting with someone fromsalesor marketing and you’re listening attentively as they passionately describe their project. You want to understand what they’re talking about, but you don’t have an MBA and some of the vocabulary is just lost on you. However, you don’t want to sound clueless, so you don’t ask. We hope this post with common sales terms definitions offers some relief and can serve as a handy reference in the future! AIDA An acronym that stands for Attention/Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action.These are the individual steps of the sales funnel (see below), in which your pool of potential customers moves from large to small as prospects get closer to a sale. BANT An acronym used for qualifying leads, which stands for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline. Salespeople use this to assess whether a prospect has the money and the decision-making power to result in a sale, and also whether your product or service solves a critical customer problem in the right timeframe. In other words, BANT helps salespeople determine if all the stars are aligned for a deal to take place. Buyer Persona Based on research and outlining what, where, when, why, and how a customer buys. Buyer personas are often provided to salespeople to educate them about the ideal prospect and about the most effective way to approach that prospect. Churn Rate A metric based on the value of the customers you retain. To calculate churn rate, you take the number ofcustomers you lost in a given time period and divide it by the total number of customers you had at the very beginning of the period. For example, if you had 100 customers at the start of the year and only 80 customers at the end of January(discounting brand new customers), your churn rate would be: (100-80)/100 = 20/100 = 20%. Closing Ratio The percentage of prospects thata salesperson closes successfully.This ratio is used for all sorts of things, including individual salesperson performance, evaluation of profits, and sales forecasting.The better qualified a salesperson’s leads are, the less likely they areto be turned down(and the higher their closing ratio generally is). Qualified Lead A prospect that learned about your product or service, was interested, and contacted your organization to receive additional information. This kind of lead is most likely to result in a sale because half of the work is already done! For more where these came from, head on over to Intuits Fast Track blog.