A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a contact who has met a threshold of fit and engagement criteria defined by the marketing team, indicating sufficient likelihood to purchase that the lead should be passed to sales for follow-up.
Lead scoring is a methodology that assigns numerical scores to leads or accounts based on fit attributes and behavioral signals, enabling sales and marketing teams to prioritize outreach toward the contacts most likely to convert.
A go-to-market strategy is a plan that defines how a company will reach its target customers, communicate value, and generate revenue from a specific product or market entry, typically covering positioning, channel selection, pricing structure, and sales motion.
Demand generation is a marketing discipline focused on creating awareness and interest in a product or category among potential buyers who are not yet actively searching, with the goal of building pipeline over time rather than capturing it in the moment.
Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is the total cost required to acquire one new customer, calculated by dividing the combined sales and marketing spend over a period by the number of new customers acquired in that same period.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the practice of systematically improving a website or landing page to increase the percentage of visitors who complete a desired action, such as booking a demo, starting a trial, or submitting a contact form.
Contact enrichment is the process of appending additional data attributes to an existing contact or account record, such as job title, phone number, LinkedIn profile, company size, or technographic data, using third-party data providers to fill gaps that inbound forms and first-party interactions leave incomplete.
The B2B sales cycle is the sequence of stages a deal moves through from initial contact or account identification to a signed contract, encompassing prospecting, qualification, discovery, proposal, negotiation, and close.
Account-based advertising is a paid media strategy that serves ads exclusively to named companies on a target account list, using IP matching, CRM uploads, or identity resolution to limit impressions to specific buyers rather than broad audience segments.
Professional services firms operate under a relationship economy that most ABM platforms were not designed for. Whether your firm does management consulting, legal services, accounting and advisory, recruitment, or specialized technical services, the reality is that your business development depends more on personal relationships, referral networks, and reputation than on the kind of inbound intent data and account-based advertising that drives pipeline for product companies.
Healthcare technology is one of the most structurally unusual B2B verticals for account-based marketing. Your buyers span health systems, payer organizations, digital health startups, and government-adjacent entities, each with procurement rules that can differ more from each other than an average B2B software purchase differs from a healthcare purchase. The ABM platform you choose needs to handle long buying cycles, committee-driven decision making, and an audience that is resistant to interruptive outreach in ways that most platform marketing does not account for.
Running demand generation as the only marketing hire at a B2B company is one of the most operationally demanding roles in growth. You are expected to generate pipeline, build brand awareness, manage events, produce content, run paid campaigns, maintain the marketing automation system, report to the CEO or VP of Sales, and somehow also do ABM because someone read an article about it at a competitor and thinks it is the answer.