Glossary: RevOps, ABM, BANT, MCP, AIOps and more

Sales

BANT: Also: BANT framework, BANT qualification, budget, authority, need, timeline; BANT is a lead qualification framework that checks four things: budget, authority, need and timeline. A lead that has a budget, a decision-maker in the conversation, a real need and a date to act is worth pursuing. BANT is a useful checklist for a first call, but a firm that treats it as a pass-or-fail gate can drop good leads that simply haven't set a budget yet.; Read the guide → OpsUPLOOP Sales →
Conversation intelligence: Also: call analysis, call intelligence; Conversation intelligence is software that records, transcribes and analyses sales calls and meetings. It turns what was said into notes, themes and follow-up actions that the team can search and review. For a small sales team, the value is usually in consistent call notes and follow-ups, not dashboards. Tell the people on the call that it's being recorded.; OpsUPLOOP Sales →
Ideal customer profile (ICP): Also: ICP, ideal client profile; An ideal customer profile is a description of the type of organisation that gets the most value from your service and is most valuable to you. It covers traits such as sector, size, location, budget and the problems they tend to have. An ICP describes a company, while a buyer persona describes a person within it. A written ICP is what makes lead scoring and account selection consistent from one person to the next.; Read the guide → OpsUPLOOP Outreach →
Lead qualification: Also: qualifying leads, sales qualification; Lead qualification is the process of deciding whether a new enquiry is worth your sales team's time, and how much. It weighs fit, need, budget, authority and timing against what your firm sells. In a 10–75 person firm the person qualifying is often a founder, so a clear, written set of criteria saves hours a week and makes the decision easy to hand over.; Read the guide → OpsUPLOOP Sales →
Lead scoring: Also: lead scoring model, lead rating; Lead scoring is a method of ranking leads by giving each one a number that reflects how well it fits and how ready it is to buy. The score is built from criteria such as budget, authority, intent, service fit and contact quality. A score is only useful if the team can see why a lead got it. OpsUPLOOP scores leads against a configurable rubric and shows the reasons behind each score.; Read the guide → OpsUPLOOP Sales →
Predictive lead scoring: Also: AI lead scoring, machine-learning lead scoring; Predictive lead scoring uses a statistical or machine-learning model trained on past won and lost deals to estimate how likely a new lead is to convert. The model finds the patterns itself instead of following rules a person wrote. It needs a large, clean history of outcomes to learn from, which many small service firms don't have. OpsUPLOOP does not use a predictive model: it scores leads against a rubric the business sets, and shows the reasons.; Read the guide → OpsUPLOOP Sales →
Sales pipeline: Also: deal pipeline, sales pipeline stages; A sales pipeline is the set of open deals a business is working on, organised by the stage each one has reached, from first conversation to won or lost. It shows what might close, when, and what needs doing next. Stages only help if everyone agrees what moves a deal from one to the next. Write down the exit criteria for each stage.; Read the guide → OpsUPLOOP Billing →
Weighted pipeline: Also: weighted pipeline value, probability-weighted pipeline; A weighted pipeline is the total value of open deals after each deal is multiplied by its probability of closing. A £40,000 deal at 25% counts as £10,000. It is a better guide to likely revenue than the raw pipeline total, but it is only as good as the probabilities behind it. It isn't a cash-flow forecast.; Read the guide → OpsUPLOOP Billing →

Outreach and data

Account-based marketing (ABM): Also: ABM, account-based selling, key account marketing; Account-based marketing is a B2B approach that picks a short list of named organisations and writes to each one directly, instead of casting a wide net and waiting for leads. Research on each account shapes what you send and who you send it to. ABM suits a small firm because it trades volume for relevance. A few dozen well-researched accounts can be enough to fill a pipeline.; Read the guide → OpsUPLOOP Outreach →
Contact enrichment: Also: data enrichment, contact data enrichment; Contact enrichment is filling in missing details on a contact record, such as an email address, phone number or job title, using third-party data providers. It is usually charged per lookup. Enriched data can be wrong or out of date, and it is personal data. Record where each detail came from, and only buy what you have a reason to use.; OpsUPLOOP Outreach →
Data provenance: Also: data lineage, source tracking; Data provenance is the record of where a piece of data came from, when it was obtained and how it has changed since. For contact data, it answers "how did you get my details?" Provenance is what lets you answer a subject access request accurately. OpsUPLOOP keeps an append-only record of where each contact detail came from.; OpsUPLOOP Outreach →
Legitimate interest: Also: legitimate interests, legitimate interests assessment, LIA; Legitimate interest is one of the six lawful bases for processing personal data under UK GDPR. It applies when processing is necessary for a genuine business purpose and that purpose is not outweighed by the rights and interests of the person concerned. Relying on it means doing and recording a legitimate interests assessment. Email and phone marketing also fall under separate rules in PECR. This is not legal advice.; OpsUPLOOP Outreach →
Prospect research: Also: account research, prospecting research; Prospect research is gathering what you need to know about a target organisation and the people in it before you contact them. That includes what they do, recent news, likely needs and who makes the decision. Good research is what makes outreach feel written for one reader. It is also the step that takes longest by hand, which is why firms tend to skip it.; Read the guide → OpsUPLOOP Outreach →
Subject access request (SAR): Also: SAR, DSAR, data subject access request, right of access; A subject access request is a request from a person to see the personal data an organisation holds about them, under the right of access in Article 15 of UK GDPR. The organisation must normally respond within one month. Anyone you prospect can make one. You'll need to show what you hold about them and where it came from, so keep that record as you go. This is not legal advice.
Suppression list: Also: do-not-contact list, opt-out list; A suppression list is a list of people, email addresses or postal addresses that must not be contacted, checked before every send. It holds people who have opted out, objected or asked to be removed. It has to be kept even after the rest of their data is deleted, otherwise the same person can be re-imported and contacted again.; OpsUPLOOP Outreach →

Revenue and billing

Accounts receivable: Also: AR, debtors, trade receivables; Accounts receivable is the money customers owe a business for invoices it has issued but not yet been paid. It sits on the balance sheet as an asset until the cash arrives. Receivables are invoiced, not collected. Treating them as cash in the bank is one of the commonest ways a profitable firm runs short.; Read the guide → OpsUPLOOP Billing →
Aged debt: Also: aged debtors, aged receivables, aged debtors report; Aged debt is unpaid customer invoices grouped by how long they have been outstanding, typically in bands such as 0–30, 31–60, 61–90 and over 90 days. An aged debt report shows which customers owe what, and for how long. The older a debt gets, the harder it is to collect, so the report is where credit control starts each week.; Read the guide → OpsUPLOOP Billing →
Credit control: Also: credit control process, debt chasing, invoice chasing; Credit control is the process a business uses to make sure customers pay on time. It covers setting payment terms, invoicing promptly, sending reminders and escalating overdue debts. In a small firm it often falls to whoever has a spare hour, so reminders go out late or not at all. A written, scheduled process fixes most of that. Never chase an invoice that has already been paid.; Read the guide → OpsUPLOOP Billing →
Late payment interest: Also: statutory interest, late payment of commercial debts, statutory late payment interest; Late payment interest is interest a business can claim on an overdue invoice from another business. In the UK, the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998 sets statutory interest at 8% a year above the Bank of England base rate, plus fixed compensation per invoice. Fixed compensation is £40 for debts under £1,000, £70 for £1,000 to £9,999.99 and £100 for £10,000 or more, plus reasonable recovery costs. Check the current base rate before you calculate a claim. This is not legal advice.; Read the guide → OpsUPLOOP Billing →
Project billable: Also: billable milestone, planned invoice, billing milestone; A project billable is a planned invoice on a project: an amount you expect to bill, and the date or milestone that triggers it. It is a plan, not an invoice and not cash. Keeping planned, invoiced and collected as three separate numbers shows where revenue is stuck. A missed billable is money you've earned but haven't asked for.; Read the guide → OpsUPLOOP Billing →
Revenue operations (RevOps): Also: RevOps, revenue ops; Revenue operations, or RevOps, is the practice of running sales, delivery and billing as one connected process, so revenue doesn't leak in the handovers between teams. It joins up the data, tools and responsibilities that each team usually keeps separately. In a 10–75 person service firm there is rarely a RevOps team. It is usually a founder or operations lead making sure a won deal becomes a project, the project gets billed, and the invoice gets paid.; Read the guide → OpsUPLOOP Billing →

Customers and people

90-day plan: Also: 90 day plan, quarterly plan, 30-60-90 day plan; A 90-day plan sets out what a person or team will achieve in the next quarter, with a few priorities, the actions behind them and how progress will be measured. It is reviewed during the quarter and replaced at the end of it. Ninety days is long enough to finish something meaningful and short enough to stay concrete. Plans fail when nobody looks at them again after week two, so book the reviews when you write the plan.; Read the guide → OpsUPLOOP Delivery →
Account owner: Also: account manager, client owner, relationship owner; An account owner is the one named person responsible for a customer relationship. They keep the context, follow through on commitments and are the first person anyone asks about that customer. When a customer has several contacts across your firm and no owner, promises get lost between them. Naming one owner does not mean they do all the work.; Read the guide → OpsUPLOOP Delivery →
Customer health score: Also: account health score, client health score; A customer health score is a single rating that summarises how a customer relationship is going, built from signals such as feedback scores, contact frequency, overdue invoices and open issues. It flags accounts at risk before they leave. For an agency with dozens rather than thousands of clients, a simple score everyone understands is more useful than a precise one nobody trusts.; Read the guide → OpsUPLOOP Delivery →
Net Promoter Score (NPS): Also: NPS, Net Promoter; Net Promoter Score is a customer loyalty measure based on one question: how likely are you to recommend us, on a scale of 0 to 10? The score is the percentage of promoters (9–10) minus the percentage of detractors (0–6), giving a number between −100 and 100. With a small client base, each response moves the score a lot, so read the comments and follow up with each detractor rather than watching the number.; Read the guide → OpsUPLOOP Delivery →
Objectives and key results (OKRs): Also: OKR, OKRs, objectives and key results; OKRs are a goal-setting method that pairs a qualitative objective with a few measurable key results that show whether it has been achieved. They are usually set quarterly for a company, team or person. Small firms often get more from a handful of OKRs tied to named owners than from a full cascade. A 90-day plan is a lighter-weight cousin.; Read the guide → OpsUPLOOP Delivery →

AI and systems

AIOps: Also: AI for IT operations, artificial intelligence for IT operations; AIOps, short for artificial intelligence for IT operations, is a category of IT software that uses machine learning for incident detection, event correlation and observability across infrastructure and applications. It is used by IT and site reliability teams. AIOps is not the same as using AI to run business operations such as sales, billing and customer work. OpsUPLOOP is not an AIOps tool.; Read the guide → The OpsUPLOOP platform →
Human-in-the-loop: Also: HITL, human in the loop, human review; Human-in-the-loop describes an automated or AI system in which a person reviews and approves the output before it takes effect. The software does the research and drafting, and a person makes the decision. It matters most where a mistake reaches a customer or costs money. In OpsUPLOOP, AI researches, scores and drafts, a person decides, and letters are reviewed before they are posted.; The OpsUPLOOP platform →
Model Context Protocol (MCP): Also: MCP, MCP server, model context protocol; The Model Context Protocol is an open standard for connecting AI assistants to tools and data, introduced by Anthropic in November 2024. An MCP server exposes a system's records and actions so an assistant such as Claude or ChatGPT can use them. It has since been adopted by other AI providers, including OpenAI. OpsUPLOOP works with Claude and ChatGPT through MCP, and each user can only reach what their own permissions allow.; Read the guide → The OpsUPLOOP platform →
Professional services automation (PSA): Also: PSA, PSA software, professional services automation software; Professional services automation is software for running project-based service firms, typically covering timesheets, resource scheduling, project delivery and billing from time. PSA tools are built around tracking where people's hours go. OpsUPLOOP is not a PSA: it has no timesheets or resourcing. It can be your CRM or sit on top of the one you have, joined to your accounts, covering sales, outreach, billing follow-through and ownership.; Read the guide → For agencies →

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