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Glossary

The words, defined properly.

36 terms that decide whether an outreach campaign works, each answered in full rather than in a sentence that sends you somewhere else. Written by the people who had to understand them to build the tool.

Sales

B2B lead generation
B2B lead generation is finding businesses that fit your customer profile and collecting a verified way to contact them. It splits into inbound, where buyers find you, and outbound, where you find them.
Ideal customer profile
An ideal customer profile is a written description of the kind of company you sell to best — industry, size, location, situation — specific enough to look at a business and say yes or no in a second.
Lead
A lead is a business that might buy from you, together with a way to reach it. Without a working contact method it is not a lead, it is a name.
Lead scoring
Lead scoring is ranking a list so the best-fit businesses are contacted first. On a cold list it is done on attributes you can observe from outside, not on behaviour you have not seen yet.
Outbound sales
Outbound sales is contacting businesses that have not asked to hear from you. It is the only acquisition channel whose volume you control directly, which is also why it is the easiest to do badly.
Prospecting
Prospecting is finding businesses that match your customer profile and gathering enough about each one to send a message worth reading. It is the step before outreach, not part of it.
Total addressable market
Total addressable market is the number of businesses that could plausibly buy what you sell. For outbound, the only version that matters is the one you can build a contact list for.

Data

Data enrichment
Data enrichment is adding missing fields to a list you already have — typically taking a business name and website and finding the email address, phone number, size or social profiles attached to it.
Google Maps scraping
Google Maps scraping is extracting business listings — name, category, address, phone, website — from Maps results. Maps publishes no email addresses, so the website link is what makes a listing useful.
SERP
A SERP is a search engine results page. In lead generation it matters as a data source: the organic results for a query like "orthodontist Lyon" are a list of businesses in that category and place.
Web scraping
Web scraping is reading a web page with a program and pulling structured data out of it. It is how nearly all business contact data is collected, including by vendors who avoid the word.

Deliverability

Bounce rate
Bounce rate is the share of sent messages the receiving server refused. Under 2% is healthy for cold outreach; above 5% and mailbox providers start treating you as a sender who did not collect their own list.
Catch-all email
A catch-all domain accepts mail for every possible address, including ones that do not exist. Because the server says yes to anything, no verifier can confirm whether a specific mailbox there is real.
Deliverability
Deliverability is whether your email reaches the inbox rather than the spam folder or nowhere at all. It is decided by sending reputation, authentication and list quality — not by your copy.
Disposable email address
A disposable address is a temporary mailbox from a service like Mailinator or 10minutemail, used to get past a sign-up form. It usually stops existing within hours.
DKIM
DKIM adds a cryptographic signature to every message you send, which the receiving server checks against a public key in your DNS. It proves the message came from your domain and was not altered on the way.
DMARC
DMARC ties SPF and DKIM together: it tells receiving servers what to do when a message claiming to be from your domain fails those checks, and asks them to report back on what they saw.
Domain warm-up
Warm-up is increasing sending volume gradually on a new domain, so mailbox providers build a reputation for it before it ever sends at full rate.
Email blacklist
A blacklist is a published list of domains or IP addresses known for sending spam. Receiving servers check incoming mail against them, and being listed can stop delivery entirely rather than just filtering it.
Email verification
Email verification is checking whether an address can actually receive mail before you send to it. A full check tests the syntax, then the domain's mail records, then asks the receiving server about the specific mailbox.
Greylisting
Greylisting is a spam defence where a server temporarily rejects mail from an unfamiliar sender and accepts it on the retry. Real mail servers retry; most spam software does not.
Hard bounce
A hard bounce is a permanent rejection — the mailbox does not exist, or the domain cannot receive mail. The address should be removed immediately and never retried.
List hygiene
List hygiene is the habit of removing addresses that bounce, never engage, or should never have been added, so your sending reputation is not spent on people who are not there.
MX record
An MX record is the DNS entry naming the server that handles mail for a domain. If a domain has no MX record, nothing sent to any address at that domain can be delivered.
Role-based email address
A role-based address belongs to a function rather than a person — info@, sales@, contact@, hello@. It is usually a shared inbox, and for local business outreach it is often the only address published.
Sender reputation
Sender reputation is the score mailbox providers keep on your domain and sending IP, based on how recipients react to your mail. It decides whether your next message reaches the inbox.
SMTP
SMTP is the protocol mail servers use to hand messages to each other. In verification, an SMTP probe opens a conversation with the receiving server and asks whether a specific mailbox exists, without sending anything.
Soft bounce
A soft bounce is a temporary rejection — a full mailbox, a server that is down, or a rate limit. The address may work later, so it is retried rather than removed.
Spam trap
A spam trap is an address that exists only to catch senders who did not collect their list properly. Mail to one is strong evidence of harvesting or list buying, and hitting them damages reputation quickly.
SPF
SPF is a DNS record listing which servers may send email for your domain. Receiving servers check it to see whether a message claiming to come from you actually came from a server you authorised.

Outreach

Cold email
A cold email is a message to a business that has had no prior contact with you. It is lawful in most B2B contexts under specific conditions, and it works only when the list is right and the message is specific.
Email sequence
A sequence is a planned series of messages to the same contact over days or weeks, stopping as soon as they reply. Most replies to cold outreach arrive after the first message, not on it.
Reply rate
Reply rate is the share of contacted businesses that answer, positively or not. For cold B2B outreach to a well-targeted list, somewhere between 2% and 8% is a realistic range.