Powerful Three-Letter Sales Acronyms

One of the advantages of engaging with sales experts and interviewing them for this blog is that you learn a lot from them. Claude Whitacre, author of ‘One Call Closing’ and an expert on selling techniques, shared with us that one of the ways he got to be so good at making sales calls is by hanging out with the most successful sales reps in different fields.

Thing is that you don’t necessarily have to know everything to be good at sales. For instance, we have here a huge collection of three-letter sales acronyms. How many of these words are you already familiar with, and are you making use of them?

1. ABC – Always be Closing

This unusual phrase is your aim in sales – everything you do or say should take you one step closer to closing the deal.

2. SAT – Sales Acceleration Technology

Technology that will automate your sales process and helps increase its velocity – help you generate and convert more leads in less time, and make your sales cycles shorter.

3. USP – Unique Selling Point

A USP is the differentiator that distinguishes you from your competitors. Unless you can pinpoint what makes your business unique in a world full of identical competitors, you cannot target your sales efforts successfully.

4. CRM – Customer Relationship Management

The CRM is the core of your sales stack. It’s extremely important if you want to generate a sustainable pipeline of sales leads and take them forward through your funnel.

5. BEA – Break Even Analysis

An analysis done to determine the point at which your business will be able to cover all its expenses and start making a profit.

6. CAC – Customer Acquisition Cost

It is the average cost you incur for acquiring a new customer. Calculate it by adding the total cost of lead acquisition and the total sales touch costs for a selected period, and dividing it by the number of customers converted from leads during the same period.

7. LTV – Lifetime Value

LTV is the projected revenue that a customer will generate for your business over their lifetime. By understanding what value a prospect is going to generate once they become your customer, you can decide to invest more time and energy on those customers.

8. SGL – Sales Generated Lead

Leads pursued by sales representatives on their own through multiple channels like social media, cold calling, etc.

9. SAL – Sales Accepted Lead

It is formal process for acceptance of leads by the sales team. Identifying SAL helps to align marketing and sales to make sure that both sides are on the same page.

10. SQL – Sales Qualified Leads

Leads that have been carefully vetted by Marketing, and then handed over to Sales to be taken to the next stage of your sales process.

11. MGL – Marketing Generated Leads

Similar to SGL, these are leads that have been generated via various marketing channels such as online and offline marketing practices.

12. MQL – Marketing Qualified Leads

These are leads that have taken an action or shown interest in your product. Keep in mind, these leads are not yet ready to buy, but need followups by SDRs to push them forward through your marketing funnel and convert them into SQLs.

13. AQL – Automation Qualified Lead

It is a process where automation is used for engaging prospects from both inbound and outbound channels, and loading them into a marketing automation platform (MAP).

14. ULD – Universal Lead Definition

ULD is why 61% of marketers are wasting their hard earned resources today. It is a common definition of a lead for your entire organization.

15. LMS – Lead Management System

This is a system where you enter and manage all your leads together in a single place. CRMs do this job very well, but there are dedicated LMSs as well.

16. WBR – Website Bounce Rate

Percentage of people who come to a particular page on your website and then leave without clicking on anything or navigating to any other pages on your site.

17. CCR – Customer Churn Rate

Also called the rate of attrition. This is the percentage of customers who discontinue their services with a company in a given time period. For a growing company, its growth rate must exceed its churn rate.

18. CRO – Conversion Rate Optimization

Anything that helps increase the number of conversions you get from the leads generated is conversion rate optimization.

19. CTR – Click Through Rate

It is ratio of the number of users who click on a link to the total number of times an ad is displayed. It’s one of the metrics used to measure the success of an online advertising campaign.

20. PPC – Pay Per Click

Paid traffic to draw more traffic to your website and get more sales. You are only charged by a publisher or ad network when someone on their website clicks on your ad.

21. CPC – Cost Per Click

This is the amount you pay the publisher or network per click for an ad campaign on the publisher’s website.

22. CPA – Cost Per Action

Also known as cost per acquisition, this is another online advertising model where you have to pay an agreed-upon amount for a specified action. For example, you pay a publisher or affiliate $10 per sale, $1 per click, $2 per form submission, etc.

23. CTA – Call To Action

This is what you want your prospects and leads to do. For example, a website call to action may be to buy your product, or to enter their details into a web form, or to ask for a product demo.

24. ERP – Enterprise Resource Planning

It is a process by which businesses manage and integrate business processes or departments such as purchasing, inventory, sales, planning, marketing, finance and human resources.

25. MRP – Material Requirement Planning

These are typically used by manufacturers to help them grow. This software is used for production planning, scheduling and inventory control systems, and also helps in planning requirement quantities and schedules for materials.

26. BDR – Business Development Representative

A BDR is a specialized role in the sales department of a company where a representative seeks out and brings in new business.

27. SDR – Sales Development Representative

A representative that works mostly on outbound prospecting. SDRs are responsible for making outbound calls, taking inbound leads and generating new sales leads for the business.

28. KPI – Key Performance Indicator

These are results expected from the tasks assigned to your teams. KPIs put together can be used to measure the success and performance of your employees.

29. SEO – Search Engine Optimization

It is the set of steps you take to get more organic visitors, leads and online sales from search engines.

SEM is a much broader concept that includes everything you do to get sales from search engines, including SEO, PPC and display ads.

31. SMM – Social Media Marketing

Any form of engagement on social networks to promote your brand, generate leads and stay in touch with your customers is social media marketing.

32. SLA – Service Level Agreement

An SLA, as far as sales is concerned, is an agreement between your sales and marketing teams to define what is a sales-qualified lead, and how much time sales can take to respond to it.

33. IDP – Ideal Customer Profile

Also known simply as the persona, knowing your ideal customer profile lets you structure your content and marketing strategies and goals in such a way that it appeals to this set or group, and helps you reach them, engage them and convert them into customers.

34. MAP – Marketing Automation Platform

These are platforms that enable you to automate all your marketing actions. Eliminate manual actions on repetitive tasks such as emails, social media, and other website actions.

35. SFA – Sales Force Automation

This software helps you increase your sales by creating targeted workflows. You can now automate and customize business tasks such as inventory control, tracking customer interactions, analyzing sales forecasts and performance, etc.

36. NLP – Neuro-Linguistic Programming

How is this connected to sales? As cold calling expert Art Sobczak told us – sales is about people – people selling to people. Understanding human behavior through NLP enables salespeople to understand their clients, themselves and very importantly – how not to hate selling.

37. CMS – Content Management System

It is a s that system or solution that helps you with the creation and management of all your digital content. A CMS makes it easier for you to manage, edit and distribute all your digital content from a single place.

38. COS – Content Optimization System

This is a CMS that is optimized for all devices and helps you simplify your traditional CMS process while letting you focus all the other components of digital marketing.

39. FAB – Features, Advantages, Benefits

The FAB technique has helped many professionals clarify their marketing messaging and close more sales. This simple three-letter technique can also be reversed and used as the BAF technique.

40. ROI – Return of Investment

Before making any kind of investment in your marketing and sales process, the single most important thing you need to look at is this – what will be the ROI from this investment?

41. WOM – Word of Mouth

WOM, also known as referral marketing, has a large impact on sales and is generally spread by credible sources reaching unaware peers with high interest in the topic.

42. LVR – Lead Velocity Rate

This is an acronym that lets you quantify your business growth in terms of qualified leads. More the lead velocity, lesser the time the lead spends at the MQL stage, signifying that marketing has the ability to influence buyer groups.

43. NPS – Net Promoter Score

A score in between 1 – 100 range that is used to measure the willingness of customers to recommend your company’s products and services to others. It can also be used for measuring individual customer’s overall satisfaction level and loyalty to the brand.