Glossary
The outbound
dictionary.
Thirty-seven B2B lead generation terms, defined plainly.
Orientation
What is B2B outbound, in one paragraph?
B2B outbound is the practice of starting sales conversations with companies that have not contacted you first. A working system needs five parts: a defined ideal customer profile, a verified lead list, sending infrastructure that reaches the inbox, a message sequence worth replying to, and a pipeline that catches every reply. The terms below name the moving parts.
Outbound terms: A to C
A
ABM (Account-Based Marketing)
Account-based marketing concentrates research, personalisation and multi-channel touches on a named list of high-value companies instead of a broad market. It suits deals above roughly $25,000 where a buying committee of five or more people must be reached. See the Account-Based Marketing Sprint.
A/B test
An A/B test sends two versions of a message to comparable segments to see which produces more replies. In outbound the useful variables are the opening line and the offer, not the subject line alone, and a test needs enough volume before the difference means anything.
Allowlist
An allowlist is a register of senders a mail server accepts without extra filtering. In outbound it usually refers to asking a prospect to add your address, or to an internal IT allowlist that keeps legitimate campaign mail out of quarantine.
B
BANT
BANT stands for Budget, Authority, Need and Timing — a qualification checklist for deciding whether a lead is worth a sales meeting. It is a blunt instrument for modern committee buying, but it remains a common shorthand for meeting-ready criteria.
Bounce rate
Bounce rate is the share of sent emails rejected by the receiving server. Hard bounces mean the address does not exist; soft bounces are temporary. High bounce rates damage sender reputation quickly, which is why every vozume lead list is email-verified before delivery.
Buying committee
The buying committee is every person involved in approving a B2B purchase — typically an economic buyer, a technical evaluator, an end user and a blocker such as procurement or security. Reaching only one of them is the most common reason enterprise outbound stalls.
C
Cadence
A cadence is the schedule of touches in an outbound sequence — how many messages, on which days, across which channels. Most replies arrive on the second and third touch, so a single-message campaign discards the majority of its own results.
CAN-SPAM Act
CAN-SPAM is the United States law governing commercial email. It requires accurate sender identification, a non-deceptive subject line, a valid physical postal address and a working opt-out mechanism honoured promptly. It permits B2B cold email, unlike opt-in regimes such as GDPR in the European Union.
Cold email
Cold email is an unsolicited but permitted business email sent to a prospect who matches your ideal customer profile. It works at volume when deliverability, targeting and message relevance are all handled — see the Cold Email Campaign Setup.
Connection request
A connection request is the invitation that opens a LinkedIn relationship, optionally carrying a short note. Pitching inside the request is the fastest way to be ignored; the note earns the accept, and the conversation starts afterwards. LinkedIn tolerates roughly 100 requests per week.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
A CRM is the system of record holding every contact, conversation and deal — HubSpot, Pipedrive and Close being common choices. Without one configured for outbound, replies scatter across personal inboxes and pipeline value becomes guesswork. See CRM Pipeline Setup.
Outbound terms: D to I
D
Deliverability
Deliverability is whether your email reaches the inbox rather than the spam folder. It depends on domain authentication, sender reputation, list quality and message content — not on how good the copy is. A campaign with poor deliverability produces nothing regardless of its offer.
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail)
DKIM adds a cryptographic signature to outgoing email so the receiving server can verify the message genuinely came from your domain and was not altered in transit. It is one of the three DNS records every cold email domain needs, alongside SPF and DMARC.
DMARC
DMARC tells receiving mail servers what to do when a message fails SPF or DKIM checks — monitor it, quarantine it or reject it — and where to send reports. Major providers now expect a DMARC policy on any domain sending at volume.
Domain warmup
Domain warmup is the gradual ramp of sending volume from a new domain so mailbox providers observe normal behaviour rather than a sudden spike. Ten days is the shortest reliable ramp. Skipping warmup is the single most common cause of cold email landing in spam.
E
Email verification
Email verification checks that an address exists and can receive mail before you send to it. It is what keeps bounce rates low enough to protect sender reputation. Catch-all domains accept everything, so they can only be scored probabilistically rather than confirmed.
Enrichment
Enrichment adds missing fields to a contact record — job title, headcount, technology stack, funding stage — from external data sources. Enriched records enable relevant personalisation; thin records force generic messaging, which is what recipients ignore.
F
Firmographics
Firmographics are the company-level attributes used to target B2B outbound: industry, headcount, revenue band, geography, ownership and growth stage. They are the B2B equivalent of demographics and form the backbone of any ideal customer profile.
I
ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
An ideal customer profile defines the companies most likely to buy, stay and refer — by industry, headcount, geography, job titles and buying triggers, plus explicit disqualifiers. Everything downstream depends on it, which is why vozume sells it as a standalone ICP and Offer Research Report.
Intent data
Intent data are signals suggesting a company is actively evaluating a purchase — job postings, funding rounds, technology changes, content consumption. Used as timing rather than proof, intent signals tell you which accounts to contact this month instead of next quarter.
Jargon is not the hard part.
Knowing which five parts you are missing is.
Outbound terms: L to P
L
Lead list
A lead list is the set of prospect contacts a campaign sends to, filtered to an ideal customer profile and verified before use. A list built to a brief differs sharply from a bulk database export, where nobody checked whether the contacts can buy. See Lead List Building.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator
Sales Navigator is LinkedIn’s paid prospecting tool, allowing searches filtered by headcount, seniority, geography, function and buying signals, saved as reusable lists. It is the practical basis for precise LinkedIn targeting and is billed by LinkedIn directly, not resold by agencies.
M
Mailbox rotation
Mailbox rotation spreads a campaign’s daily volume across several sending mailboxes so no single one exceeds a safe threshold, typically 30 to 50 emails a day. Scaling outbound means adding mailboxes, not pushing one mailbox harder.
MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead)
A marketing qualified lead has shown interest — downloaded something, attended a webinar — but has not been verified as able to buy. Outbound generally skips the MQL stage: a qualified meeting is the unit of value, not a captured email address.
O
Open rate
Open rate is the share of recipients recorded as opening an email. Privacy features that pre-load images have made it substantially unreliable, and tracking pixels can themselves hurt deliverability. Treat replies and meetings as the real measures.
Opt-out
An opt-out is a recipient’s request to stop receiving your email, which CAN-SPAM requires you to honour promptly and without conditions. Suppression lists must persist across campaigns and domains — contacting someone after they opted out is both a legal and a reputational failure.
Outbound
Outbound is any sales motion where you initiate contact with a prospect who has not approached you — cold email, LinkedIn outreach, cold calling, account-based marketing. Its advantage over inbound is control: you choose which companies enter your pipeline and when.
P
Pipeline
Pipeline is the set of live opportunities moving through defined sales stages, with a value attached to each. Outbound exists to fill it. A pipeline that lives in someone’s inbox rather than a CRM cannot be forecast, reviewed or handed over.
Positive reply rate
Positive reply rate counts only replies expressing interest, excluding rejections, out-of-office messages and unsubscribes. It is a far more honest measure of campaign health than a raw reply rate, which counts every “no” as engagement.
Outbound terms: R to T
R
Reply rate
Reply rate is the share of contacted prospects who respond at all, positive or negative. It is the primary health signal for a cold email sequence because, unlike open rate, it cannot be distorted by image pre-loading or blocked tracking pixels.
S
SDR (Sales Development Representative)
An SDR is the person who prospects, works replies and books meetings for closers. In the New York market an in-house SDR costs roughly $80,000 to $120,000 a year before tooling, management and ramp — the honest benchmark against which outsourced outbound should be judged.
Sender reputation
Sender reputation is the score mailbox providers assign your domain and IP based on bounce rates, spam complaints, engagement and sending patterns. It is slow to build and fast to lose, which is why cold email is sent from separate domains rather than your primary one.
Sequence
A sequence is the ordered set of messages sent to a prospect over time, each with its own angle rather than a repeated nudge. Most replies arrive after the first message, so sequences of three or four touches consistently outperform one-shot sends.
Show rate
Show rate is the share of booked meetings the prospect actually attends. It separates real interest from polite agreement, and it is the reason vozume counts meetings held rather than meetings booked when measuring a sprint against its guarantee.
SPF (Sender Policy Framework)
SPF is a DNS record listing which mail servers are permitted to send email for your domain. Receiving servers check it to detect spoofing. Along with DKIM and DMARC it forms the authentication baseline every cold email domain requires before its first send.
SQL (Sales Qualified Lead)
A sales qualified lead has been verified as worth a salesperson’s time against explicit criteria — company fit, seniority, a stated problem and no immediate disqualifier. Agreeing those criteria before a campaign starts is what stops “meetings booked” becoming a vanity number.
T
Trigger event
A trigger event is a change at a target company that creates a reason to reach out now — a funding round, a relevant hire, an office move, a new tool adopted. Trigger-led outreach outperforms cold targeting because the timing argument writes itself.
In practice
Where do these terms turn into work?
ICP, firmographics, intent
Defined in the ICP and Offer Research Report.
SPF, DKIM, DMARC, warmup
Handled in the Cold Email Campaign Setup.
Verification, enrichment
Applied in Lead List Building.
Pipeline, SQL, show rate
Configured in CRM Pipeline Setup.
Know the words. Now build the system.
Nine services, fixed prices, every deliverable listed.