CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote)

A classic sales qualification framework that evaluates prospects on four criteria: do they have the budget, is the contact a decision-maker, do they have a genuine need, and is there a real timeline to buy? BANT helps reps avoid wasting months on deals that were never going to close. It's been around since IBM invented it in the 1960s, and while newer frameworks exist, most of them are just BANT with different letters.

An outbound sales role focused on prospecting and booking meetings for account executives, rather than closing deals. BDRs are the engine of pipeline generation — they research accounts, send cold outreach, and qualify inbound leads. The performance of your BDR team is directly visible in your pipeline coverage ratio, and underinvesting here creates revenue gaps that show up two to three quarters later.

Any action or behavior from a prospect that indicates they're moving toward a purchase decision — visiting your pricing page, downloading a case study, responding to an email, or asking about implementation timelines. Buying signals are gold for sales teams because they let you prioritize the hottest opportunities. The problem is that most companies only track a fraction of these signals, and the ones they miss often represent their best opportunities.

The percentage of qualified opportunities that result in a closed-won deal. Close rate is one of the clearest indicators of sales team effectiveness and product-market fit. A declining close rate usually means one of three things: you're letting unqualified deals into the pipeline, your competition is getting stronger, or your sales process has a structural gap. Tracking close rate by segment, rep, and lead source reveals where the real problems are.

Selling additional products or services to existing customers beyond what they originally purchased. Cross-selling is one of the highest-ROI revenue activities because the customer already trusts you and the acquisition cost is near zero. The challenge is that most CRMs don't surface cross-sell opportunities automatically, so they depend on individual reps noticing patterns — which means most opportunities get missed entirely.

The first substantive sales conversation with a prospect, focused on understanding their situation, pain points, goals, and decision-making process rather than pitching your product. Discovery calls determine whether an opportunity is real and how to position your solution. Reps who rush through discovery to get to the demo consistently underperform — the data shows that deals with thorough discovery close at significantly higher rates and with larger deal sizes.