The GTM Dictionary

Account scoring is the practice of ranking every company in your addressable market by how valuable it is to pursue, before you spend a dollar or an SDR hour on it. A good score answers three questions: how likely is the account to buy, what is it worth if they do, and how long will they stay.

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a go-to-market motion that treats individual high-value accounts as markets of one, coordinating marketing and sales to pursue a named list rather than casting a wide net.

The Cox proportional-hazards model is a survival-analysis technique that estimates how a set of inputs, here firmographics, affects the time until an event. In GTM, the event is churn.

Expected value in scoring is propensity multiplied by lifetime value: the dollars you would expect from pursuing an account, blending how likely it is to buy with what it is worth if it does.

Firmographics are company-level attributes used to describe and segment accounts: industry, employee count, revenue, location, and growth stage.

In scoring, the GINI coefficient measures how much better your score ranks converters above non-converters than random chance: 0 is a coin flip, 1 is perfect.

A GTM engineer is a technical go-to-market builder who assembles data, enrichment, AI agents, and automations into working revenue systems, the person who owns the logic in tools like Clay.

An ideal customer profile (ICP) is a precise description of the companies most likely to become high-value, durable customers, defined by firmographics, technographics, and behavior.

Intent data is a set of signals that a company is actively researching your category right now: content consumption from networks like Bombora and 6sense, review-site activity on G2, competitor renewal windows, or first-party visits to your own site.

Lead scoring ranks individual people, usually after they have engaged through a form fill, an event, or a trial, by how likely they are to convert. It operates on person-level behavior and demographics.

Lifetime value (LTV) is the total revenue an account is expected to generate over the life of the relationship: a survival curve, how long they will stay, multiplied by expected contract value, discounted to today.

A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is an individual person who has interacted with your marketing enough — downloading something, visiting key pages, opening emails — that they're judged ready to be passed to a salesperson.

Product-Led Growth (PLG) is a way of growing a software company where the product does the selling. Instead of a salesperson reaching out first, people sign up themselves — usually through a free trial or a free tier — start using the product, and upgrade to a paid plan once they see the value.

A propensity model is a machine-learned estimate of the probability that an account becomes a customer, trained on your closed-won and closed-lost history using only pre-contact attributes.

RIFT is a simple way to score a buying signal instead of treating it as a yes-or-no. Not every signal counts the same, and RIFT captures four things that make one signal stronger than another:

Speed-to-lead is how fast you engage an inbound lead after they raise a hand, the single biggest lever on inbound conversion.

Survival analysis is a family of statistical methods that model the time until an event happens. Borrowed from medicine, where the event is patient survival, it is applied in GTM to churn.

Technographics are data about the technologies a company uses: its CRM, marketing stack, and tooling, detected via install signals from providers like HG Insights and BuiltWith, or by scraping.

Website de-anonymization resolves an anonymous website visit to the company behind it, typically via reverse-IP and identity providers like 6sense, Bombora, and Leadfeeder.