In 2011 my job title was Internal Account Manager. It meant I was in the office five days a week making cold calls. Today that exact job is called an SDR, and it sounds like it was invented in San Francisco.
The job didn't change. The title did. And there's a reason for that, that nobody says out loud, so I'll say it at the end of this page.
If you're a technical founder, you sit in meetings where people say things like "we need more top of funnel" and "is this commit or best case?" and everyone nods, and nobody wants to be the one who asks what any of it means. This page is me being the one who answers. What each term means, where it actually came from, and what I really think of it after fifteen years of using them.
the job titles
SDR (Sales Development Representative). The person who finds and books the meetings. The role title has become more and more common over my career as companies tried to look like software companies, and SDR was the chosen title. When I started out, the same job was called Internal Account Manager: in the office five days a week, making cold calls. The modern split between the SDR who books and the AE who closes was popularised by Aaron Ross at Salesforce and written up in Predictable Revenue in 2011. It is assembly line logic applied to selling. What it means for you: the person who emailed you has no power, and the person who demos has no idea what the first one promised.
AE (Account Executive). The salesperson who works deals and closes them. Same story as the SDR: the title spread as everyone dressed like a software company. When I started it was called many things, Business Development Manager, Sales Executive, Business Development Executive, and they all meant the same thing: you generate pipeline AND you work it until it's closed won, and you attend face to face meetings. In my day it also meant a lot of travel up and down the country. Less so now. The title itself is borrowed from 1950s advertising agencies, who invented "account executive" to make client handlers sound important. Nobody executes any accounts.
how salespeople carve up the world
SMB (Small and Medium Sized Businesses). I'd personally class this as below 500 people.
Mid Market. For me, a minimum of 500 people and a maximum of 10,000. Different strokes for different folks; every company draws these lines wherever flatters their pipeline.
Enterprise. Haha. Plenty of jokes about this one down the years. My own interpretation: an enterprise deal is with a customer of 10,000 people or more. But it varies, and you'll genuinely hear people say "naaahhh, 10,000 isn't ACTUAL enterprise, 50,000+ is enterprise, but you wouldn't know that, because you're not actually enterprise." It is the only market segment defined mostly by who is sneering at whom. You also get Enterprise Account Executive as a title, sometimes working very small accounts. Salespeople like grand sounding titles. One origin worth knowing: "enterprise" comes from the French entreprendre, to undertake. It is literally the same word as entrepreneur.
The paycheck truth. Despite all the grandiose stuff, mid market and SMB salespeople often make more money than the enterprise ones, and that has often been the case at companies I've worked at. Enterprise reps live binary years: one monster deal that either lands or slips. The mid market rep closing something every fortnight compounds attainment and hits accelerators. There's a grand sounding title, and there's a bigger paycheck.
the deal words
MEDDICC. Ahh. Good old MEDDICC. Sometimes MEDDPICC. A sales qualification framework: Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Making Criteria, Decision Making Process, Implicate Pain, Champion, Competition, and the P is Paper Process. It came out of a 90s software company called PTC, where some of the commercial team created it, did really well with it, and a fair few of them now have whole careers writing books about it. My opinion: it's genuinely really helpful. Just don't make the mistake of trying to get all of the information in the first 20 minutes of call number one. It's a checklist of what you need to eventually know, not a script for an interrogation.
Economic Buyer. People get really serious about this one. The definition is the person with discretionary power to sign this off. The final say. The biggest dog in the chain. The mistake we often make as salespeople is believing the person we're speaking to is the economic buyer, because they said they were. In my experience, whoever you think is the economic buyer is one rung in the food chain below the actual economic buyer. The term comes from Miller Heiman's Strategic Selling in the 80s. The way to find the real one is to ask how the last purchase like this actually got signed off. People inflate their own authority; they describe history honestly.
ICP / IBP (Ideal Customer Profile / Ideal Buyer Profile). They sound similar but mean very different things. ICP is the company. IBP is the person. In my experience too much emphasis goes on ICP and not enough on IBP. Companies don't read your email. A person does, with their own fears, their own boss, and their own beliefs.
PoC / PoV (Proof of Concept / Proof of Value). If you were selling a car, it's a test drive, but with a more glamorous name for IT and software sales, as per usual. The key thing: set it up for success from the start. Define what good looks like, write the success criteria down, and then hammer home on every call that you are hitting the criteria, week in, week out. By decision day the case has been made eleven times and the final meeting is a formality. A PoC without written success criteria isn't a trial; it's free consulting with no end date.
RFP (Request for Proposal). Usually a gigantic Excel document which has been rehashed many times, probably started life as something completely different, and has just morphed over the years. Many sheets, lots of questions that seem kind of pointless. Used when purchase values go above a certain level, and in the public sector that level is lower, because there it's actually the law: above around £135k (central government) or £208k (councils, NHS), a public body legally has to run an open competition. Private companies aren't forced by law; they force themselves, through purchasing policies, audit requirements and anti bribery rules that demand evidence of a fair process. One of the things you learn in your career is that RFPs are a huge drain on time and resources, and they are often decided before they are even written. The decision gets made in the spec, not the scoring. If you didn't help shape the requirements, you're probably there to make up the numbers.
Procurement. Known in sales locker rooms as the sales prevention team. The real definition: the department that buys everything the company needs: sourcing suppliers, running tenders, negotiating price and terms, managing contracts, vetting risk. What they're measured on explains how they behave: cost savings first and loudest (the gap between your opening price and the signed price is literally their performance review, which is why they will always ask for a discount), then supplier risk, spend under proper process, and payment terms. Notice what's missing: speed, and whether your champion's problem gets solved. Nobody in procurement gets a bonus for your deal closing this quarter. You will need to learn to get along with them. They have dealt with your type many, many times, and rushing them is a tactic they've seen before and won't respond well to. Build your discount into the plan from day one and let them win it. Tread carefully.
the numbers game
Pipeline to Close Ratio. The sceptic in me has plenty to say here. On a basic level it's simple maths: closed sales divided by total qualified opportunities, times 100. HOWEVER. Any experienced person will notice it's suspiciously often the same answer: 3:1. Three to one has become the golden standard, so the statistics get managed to show 3:1. Qualification gets tightened or loosened until the ratio looks right. There's a name for this: Goodhart's law. When a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. When a metric is suspiciously tidy, it's being managed, not measured. (Pedants' corner: strictly, the famous 3:1 belongs to pipeline coverage, pipeline value versus target, and the formula above is your win rate. Both get bent the same way, which might be the real lesson.)
Forecast. Your salesperson telling the business what they are going to close in a given period: month, quarter or year. Usually three buckets: Commit, Likely, Outsider (some people call the third one Upside or Best Case), plus the Best Guess figure you'll be asked to land on. For me, forecast accuracy is one of the key differentiators between a good salesperson and a bad one. Not the size of the number. Whether it was true. A rep who says 80 and lands 78 is worth more to the business than one who says 150 and lands 90. As a leader, your job is to pin down exactly what earns a deal the word commit, what makes it likely and what makes it an outsider, and then challenge every deal with one question: why shouldn't I move this?
Sandbagging. You've done your target, it's halfway through the month, next month is looking light. You have deals you could close now, but you actively steer the customer into signing next month instead. Why? Because in sales you are only as good as your last month. One great month and one terrible month: you are terrible. One quite good month and one quite good month: you are quite good. We don't set the rules of the game as salespeople, so make sure you play the game you're being asked to play. (The word is old poker slang: playing a strong hand weak. It's the rep-side mirror of the 3:1 fiddle above. Everyone manages the measure.)
Deal Review. Sometimes your manager asks for an hour to go through one of your deals, often with a document to fill in beforehand. Feared by salespeople initially, and yes, some managers use them as a dressing down when you don't have the answers. Over time you realise they actually help you make more money, and that being upfront about what you don't know is the best way to go. "I don't know, I'll find out" beats bluffing in front of six people every single time. A good deal review isn't an interrogation of you; it's an interrogation of the deal, and you're both on the same side of the table. The question that became a whole chapter of this method ("have you asked the hard questions here?") was asked of me in a deal review.
Churn. A customer who hasn't renewed their contract. It comes off the ARR number, and as a side note, ARR (Annually Recurring Revenue) = MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) x 12. The word comes from butter-making: constant agitation until things separate, which is uncomfortably accurate. Churn is also the lagging indicator of a bad sale. A customer who leaves at month twelve was often oversold at month zero. Selling honestly isn't just ethics; it's churn prevention on a twelve month delay.
the term that explains all the other terms
Software Business / Services Business. Interestingly, investors look at everything through a numbers based prism, not a words based prism. Above a certain gross margin, you're a software business. Below it, you're a services business. The higher band gets the bigger multiple. For example: a software business with £25 million of revenue might be valued at 10x revenue, £250 million. The same revenue judged as a services business might get 5x, £125 million. Same work, same customers, £125 million apart.
And that's the answer to the question this page started with. Why did Internal Account Managers become SDRs? Why does every company talk like a software company? Because looking like one is worth nine figures. The vocabulary is the cheapest part of the costume.
The terms aren't going anywhere, so learn them, use them, and keep one eyebrow raised at all times. The ones that matter most are whichever ones you were nodding along to last week.
This page will grow. If there's a term you keep hearing and quietly googling, tell me and I'll add it.
(If your team nods along to these in meetings and you'd rather they actually knew them, that's roughly why the cybersecurity sales training exists.)
James Irving is the founder of Emotive JLI, a sales consultancy for technical founders. He learnt to sell the old school way: 50 cold calls per day in a Manchester boiler room, then enterprise cybersecurity, then ThreatSpike, where he joined as the first commercial person and left with a £10M sales engine. Tell him what you've built or watch the stories.