The outbound sales glossary

Appointment setting

The service of booking sales meetings with target buyers on your team's behalf, usually priced per meeting or on retainer. The output is calendar slots; the quality question is who is actually in them.

Build, Run, Own

Build, Run, Own is Enquirer Consulting Group's fixed four-month engagement: we design, staff and run a complete outbound sales business unit for a US medical or pharma company, prove it on live numbers, then hand the working unit and a trained operator to your team to own. Full page: Build, Run, Own, explained.

Cold email infrastructure

The technical layer that lets cold email land: separate sending domains, warmed mailboxes, authentication, and volume discipline. Built properly, your corporate domain is never touched.

Contract sales organization (CSO)

A firm that supplies outsourced sales representatives, typically field reps calling on healthcare professionals at scale. Built for rep coverage, not for digital top-of-funnel reach.

Deliverability

Whether your email actually reaches the inbox rather than spam. Driven by domain reputation, warmup, authentication, list quality and volume discipline. We hold bounce rates under 0.5% on live sending.

Domain warmup

The two-week-plus process of building a new sending domain's reputation with gradually increasing, high-engagement volume before any cold sending. Skipping it is how domains get burned.

GTM operator

The dedicated person who runs the outbound unit day to day: list building, sequence management, reply triage, reporting. In a Build, Run, Own engagement the operator is sourced, trained during the run phase, and transitions to your team at handover.

Handover

The end state of a Build, Run, Own engagement: domains, data, dashboards, playbook, documentation and the trained operator, transferred to your team and set up in your name. The client owns a working machine their team runs from day one.

ICP (ideal customer profile)

The precise definition of the companies most likely to buy: sector, size, situation, and the roles inside them who decide. Every serious outbound program starts here, because the list sets the ceiling on everything after it.

Lead generation agency

A firm that runs outbound campaigns and books meetings for you on a monthly retainer. Fast to start; the infrastructure and know-how usually remain the agency's, so the pipeline stops when the retainer does.

Managed service (MSP)

The optional layer after handover where ECG keeps operating the unit the client now owns. Optional is the load-bearing word: the client can run the unit without us, so staying is a choice, not a dependency.

Outbound business unit

Everything required to run outbound as an operation rather than a campaign: the engine, the data system, the messaging, the operator, the reporting, and the surrounding disciplines a given company is missing. What ECG builds, runs and hands over.

Outbound sales engine

The system that produces qualified sales conversations on schedule: targeting and data, one-buyer messaging, protected sending infrastructure, LinkedIn plus email, reply routing, and reporting tied to pipeline.

Qualified conversation

A positive or interested reply. Not a booked meeting, not a deal. This is the metric behind the numbers on this site, defined on the resources page.

Reply routing

The mechanics that get an interested reply in front of a human seller within minutes, with the conversation logged in your CRM. Slow routing is where good engines quietly leak revenue.

SDR (sales development representative)

The role that runs prospecting and books meetings for closers. In-house SDRs give control at the cost of hiring, ramp and management; the 2026 comparison page covers the five ways of buying this function.