GTM Engineering Glossary: 40 Terms
This glossary defines the 40 terms that come up most in GTM engineering job posts, interviews and tool docs, in plain English with one example each. New to the field? Start with the complete guide to GTM engineering.
Strategy and targeting
GTM (go-to-market): Everything a company does to find, win and keep customers: marketing, sales and customer success.
GTM engineering: Building the systems (data, signals, outbound, automation, AI) that create and convert pipeline. Full guide.
ICP (ideal customer profile): A description of the companies most likely to buy and succeed with your product. Example: "US B2B SaaS, 20–200 employees, just raised a Series A, uses HubSpot."
Persona: The specific person you sell to inside an ICP company, such as the Head of RevOps.
TAM (total addressable market): Every company that fits your ICP. GTM engineers often build the TAM list from scratch.
Firmographics: Company facts used for targeting: industry, headcount, revenue, location, funding stage.
Technographics: What tools a company uses. Example: targeting companies that run Salesforce and Outreach.
Lookalike: A company that resembles your best customers on firmographics and technographics.
ABM (account-based marketing): Picking a small set of high-value accounts and running coordinated, personalized outreach at each.
Data and enrichment
Enrichment: Adding missing data to a record, such as email, title, headcount or tech stack.
Waterfall enrichment: Querying several data providers in sequence until one returns a result. It raises coverage because no single provider has everything.
Data provider: A company that sells contact or company data, accessed by API or inside tools like Clay.
Deduplication (dedupe): Merging records that describe the same person or company so they aren't contacted twice.
Data hygiene: Keeping CRM data accurate: correct fields, no duplicates, current titles.
Scraping: Collecting data from websites programmatically, such as a conference attendee list or a job board.
Reverse ETL: Syncing data from a warehouse (like Snowflake or Databricks) back into business tools (like Salesforce), so teams act on it.
CDP (customer data platform): A system that unifies customer data from many sources into one profile per customer.
Data warehouse: The central database where a company's analytics data lives (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks).
Signals
Signal (buying signal): A public event that suggests a company might buy now: hiring for a related role, raising money, a new leader, a tech stack change.
Trigger event: Another name for a signal that kicks off outreach.
Intent data: Data suggesting a company is researching a topic, often based on web browsing. Less specific than a public signal.
Visitor identification: Tools that identify which companies visited your website.
Champion tracking: Watching when past users or buyers change jobs, then reaching out at their new company.
Closed-lost reactivation: Re-engaging deals you lost, usually when something changes at the account.
Outbound
Sequence: A planned series of outreach steps (emails, LinkedIn touches, calls) sent over days or weeks.
Personalization at scale: Using data and AI to write a specific, relevant line for each prospect across thousands of contacts.
Deliverability: Whether your emails reach the inbox instead of spam.
Domain warm-up: Gradually increasing sending volume from a new domain so inbox providers trust it.
SPF, DKIM, DMARC: Email authentication records that prove your emails really come from your domain. Required for good deliverability.
Secondary domain: A separate domain used for cold email so problems don't hurt your main domain.
Reply rate / positive reply rate: The share of contacts who reply, and who reply with interest.
Routing and operations
Lead routing: Automatically assigning a new lead to the right rep.
Speed to lead: How fast a new inbound lead gets a response.
Lead scoring: Ranking leads by how likely they are to buy.
MQL / SQL / PQL: Marketing-, sales- and product-qualified leads: stages that show how ready a lead is, judged by marketing activity, a sales conversation or product usage.
Pipeline coverage: Total open pipeline divided by the revenue target. Many teams aim for about 3x.
CAC (customer acquisition cost): What it costs, on average, to win one customer.
AI and automation
Workflow automation: Connecting tools so actions happen automatically (n8n, Make, Zapier).
AI agent: Software that uses an AI model to complete multi-step tasks, such as researching an account and drafting outreach.
MCP (Model Context Protocol): An open standard that lets AI models connect to tools and data sources, like a CRM, in a consistent way.
Human-in-the-loop: A workflow where AI does the work but a person approves key steps before anything is sent or changed.
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