AI sales glossary

The terms that come up when you're buying AI sales tools, in plain English — stripped of the vendor spin so you can read a feature list and know what's actually being promised.

By Marcus TaylorUPDATED JUN 12, 2026

SDR (Sales Development Rep)

The rep at the front of a sales team whose job is to fill the calendar — building lists, sending first-touch outreach and booking meetings, then handing warm prospects to an account executive to close. Outbound-focused.

BDR (Business Development Rep)

Effectively the same role as an SDR, with the label often used for reps focused on generating new business through outbound. Many vendors use SDR and BDR interchangeably.

AI SDR

Software that runs the SDR job autonomously — sourcing prospects, researching them, writing personalized outreach, sending it and booking the meeting, with minimal human input. The category of tools we call autonomous AI reps.

Deliverability

Whether your emails actually land in the inbox rather than spam or a promotions tab. The single biggest factor in whether cold email works, and the main thing dedicated cold-email platforms exist to protect.

Warmup

The process of gradually building a new sending mailbox's reputation by sending and replying to low-volume, human-looking email before you scale up. Skip it and your domain gets flagged. Good cold-email tools automate it.

Inbox rotation

Spreading outbound across many sending mailboxes so no single inbox sends enough volume to trip spam filters or burn its reputation. A core deliverability tactic for high-volume cold email.

Domain reputation

The trust score mailbox providers assign to the domain you send from, based on engagement, spam complaints and authentication. Low reputation means even good email lands in spam. Send carelessly and you torch it.

Enrichment

Adding data to a contact or company record — job title, company size, tech stack, funding, social profiles — so you can target and personalize. Enrichment is what turns a name and email into a reason to reach out.

Intent / buying signals

Observable events that suggest a company is in-market — hiring for a relevant role, raising funding, using a competitor, visiting your pricing page. Reaching out on a signal is far more effective than cold timing.

Sequence / cadence

A pre-planned series of outreach touches over time — for example, an email, a follow-up three days later, a LinkedIn connection, another email. The backbone of any outbound motion; sequencers and AI reps both run them.

Autonomous agent

Software that decides and acts toward a goal with little step-by-step instruction, rather than just executing a fixed script. An autonomous AI rep decides who to contact and what to say; a sequencer only runs what you set up.

Multichannel

Running outreach across more than one channel — email, LinkedIn, phone, SMS — usually in a coordinated sequence. Channel coverage is one of the four factors we score, because breadth widens who you can reach.

Reply rate

The share of contacted prospects who respond. A more honest measure of outbound quality than open rate, because it reflects whether the targeting and message actually landed — and the metric personalization most affects.

CRM enrichment

Keeping the contact and company records in your CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce) complete and current by pulling in fresh data automatically. Stops reps working from stale records and feeds better targeting back into outbound.