Growth Recon Glossary
Every term explained in plain English. No jargon gatekeeping - if you don't know it, now you do.
R Research
ICP - Ideal Customer Profile
A detailed description of the company or person most likely to buy from you - based on who actually converts, not who your pitch deck targets.
Language Audit - Customer Language Audit
Comparing how customers describe their problems versus how your company talks about its solution. The gap between these is where your messaging fails.
Source Doc - Source Document
The single reference document produced by the Research stage. Contains ICP data, language patterns, tracking status, and competitive landscape. Everything else builds on this.
Attribution - Attribution Model
How you assign credit for a conversion to the marketing touchpoints that preceded it. Last-touch, first-touch, and multi-touch are common models - all are flawed in different ways. The goal is directional accuracy, not precision.
Win Rate - Win-Loss Analysis
Percentage of qualified deals your sales team closes. Track by segment - your best ICP might close at 25%, your worst at 5%. The difference tells you where to focus.
PMF - Product-Market Fit
When customer demand, product capabilities, and distribution align such that growth accelerates naturally. Most teams never measure it explicitly - a mistake.
Segmentation - Customer Segmentation
Dividing your customer base by shared characteristics to identify patterns. Revenue per segment is often more useful than blended averages.
UTM - UTM Parameters
URL parameters (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign) that track where traffic comes from. Sloppy UTM hygiene means your attribution reports are fiction.
CRM - Customer Relationship Management
The system that tracks every interaction with prospects and customers - deals, emails, calls, notes. If your CRM data is garbage, every decision built on it is fiction.
GA4 - Google Analytics 4
Google's event-based analytics platform. Replaced Universal Analytics. Powerful when configured correctly, misleading when misconfigured - which is most implementations.
B2B - Business-to-Business
Selling to other businesses, not consumers. Longer sales cycles, multiple decision-makers, higher deal values, and completely different marketing playbook than B2C.
E Expose
Vanity Metrics
Numbers that look good in reports but don't connect to revenue. Likes, impressions, open rates - unless they directly correlate to pipeline movement, they're vanity.
Sacred Cow
A campaign, channel, or initiative that everyone protects despite poor performance. Usually backed by ego or politics, not data.
Spend vs. Output - Spend vs. Output Analysis
Mapping every marketing dollar to its measurable outcome. Channel A costs X and delivers Y pipeline. Channel B costs 10X and delivers Y/5. Why does B still exist?
ROAS - Return on Ad Spend
Revenue generated per dollar of ad spend. A ROAS of 5x means every $1 in ads returns $5 in revenue. Below 3x in most B2B means the channel isn't working.
CPC - Cost Per Click
What you pay each time someone clicks your ad. Meaningless in isolation - a $50 CPC that converts at 10% beats a $2 CPC that converts at 0.1%.
Demand Gen - Demand Generation
Marketing activities designed to create awareness and interest in your category, not just your product. Harder to measure but important for long-term pipeline health.
Organic - Organic Traffic
Visitors who come from search engines or direct navigation, not paid ads. Lower cost per visitor but requires investment in content or SEO to build.
Paid - Paid Acquisition
Traffic purchased through ads - search, social, display. Higher cost per visitor but immediately controllable, testable, and scalable.
ARR - Annual Recurring Revenue
Total annual revenue from customers on recurring subscriptions. The number SaaS companies obsess over - but meaningless without retention context.
MRR - Monthly Recurring Revenue
ARR divided by 12. More useful for spotting month-over-month trends and seasonal patterns than annual figures.
CPL - Cost Per Lead
What you pay to acquire a single lead. Like CPC, meaningless without quality context - a $200 lead that converts at 15% beats a $20 lead that converts at 0.5%.
CTR - Click-Through Rate
Percentage of people who click after seeing your ad or link. High CTR with low conversion means your ad promises something your landing page doesn't deliver.
ROI - Return on Investment
Net profit divided by cost of investment. The ultimate question every marketing dollar must answer: did this make more money than it cost?
SEO - Search Engine Optimization
Making your content findable when people search for their problems. Not keyword stuffing - understanding what your market searches for and creating the best answer.
C Convert
LTV - Lifetime Value
Total revenue a customer generates over their entire relationship with your business. Not just the first purchase - every renewal, upsell, and expansion.
CAC - Customer Acquisition Cost
Total cost to acquire one customer - ad spend, sales salaries, tools, content production, everything. Most companies undercount this by 30-50%.
LTV:CAC - Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost Ratio
How much a customer is worth over their lifetime divided by what it cost to acquire them. Below 3:1 means you're bleeding. Above 5:1 means you're underinvesting in growth.
Funnel - Conversion Funnel
The sequence of steps from first touch to paying customer. Every step has a conversion rate. Fix the worst step first - that's where the money is leaking.
Churn - Customer Churn Rate
Percentage of customers who stop paying in a given period. High churn means you're filling a leaky bucket. Fix the bucket before pouring more water.
MQL - Marketing Qualified Lead
A lead that marketing considers ready for sales based on engagement signals. The definition varies wildly - if marketing and sales disagree on what an MQL is, you have a pipeline problem.
SQL - Sales Qualified Lead
A lead that sales has accepted as worth pursuing. The handoff from MQL to SQL is where most pipeline leaks happen.
Cohort - Cohort Analysis
Grouping customers by signup date and tracking their behavior over time. Reveals whether your newest customers are retaining better or worse than old ones - a signal that your product or market is shifting.
Activation - Time-to-First-Value
The moment a customer first experiences the core value of your product. Reduction in time-to-activation directly correlates with lower churn and higher LTV.
Onboarding - Customer Onboarding
The structured experience that takes a new customer from signup to their first meaningful outcome. A broken onboarding is a silent revenue killer - most churn happens here.
NRR - Net Revenue Retention
Revenue from existing customers divided by revenue from the same customers the prior year. Above 100% means customers spend more over time. A 120% NRR lets you grow 20% YoY without a single new customer.
Payback Period - CAC Payback Period
Months until revenue from an acquired customer covers their acquisition cost. A 4-month payback is healthy. A 14-month payback is a cash flow problem, even if unit economics are sound.
Conversion Rate
The percentage of visitors who complete a target action. A 1% conversion rate moving to 2% doubles your revenue from existing traffic - no extra ad spend required.
Expansion Revenue
Revenue generated from existing customers beyond their initial purchase - upsells, cross-sells, seat additions. The highest-leverage growth lever available.
Bounce Rate
Percentage of visitors who leave without taking any action. A high bounce rate on a landing page signals messaging mismatch or poor targeting.
Lead Scoring
Ranking leads by likelihood to convert based on behavior and fit signals. Quality matters more than volume - 50 qualified leads beat 500 tire-kickers.
Pipeline - Sales Pipeline
The total value of deals in progress at each stage of your sales process. Pipeline coverage - how much pipeline you need per dollar of target - is a better predictor than revenue forecasts.
Unit Economics
Revenue and cost per individual customer or transaction. If unit economics don't work at small scale, scaling just accelerates losses.
SaaS - Software as a Service
Software delivered via subscription over the internet. The business model where retention is everything - if customers churn faster than you acquire, the math never works.
SDR - Sales Development Representative
The person responsible for qualifying inbound leads and generating outbound pipeline. The bridge between marketing's leads and sales' closed deals.
CTA - Call to Action
The specific action you want a visitor to take - sign up, book a demo, download. Unclear CTAs create hesitation. Hesitation kills conversions.
O Optimize
Operating Rhythm
The cadence of reporting, reviews, and decisions that keeps execution on track. Who reports what, how often, to whom. The heartbeat that prevents drift.
A/B Test
Running two variants simultaneously to measure which performs better. Requires statistical significance, not gut feeling. Most companies declare winners too early.
RECON Loop - RECON Framework Reapplication
Coming back and running the five RECON stages again after implementation. Things change. Markets shift. The framework isn't apply-and-forget - it's a living system.
KPI - Key Performance Indicator
The handful of metrics that actually matter for your business goals. If you have more than 5 KPIs, you have zero - nobody can focus on everything.
North Star - North Star Metric
The single metric that best captures the core value your product delivers. Everything else should ladder up to moving this number.
SOP - Standard Operating Procedure
A documented process that defines how a recurring task gets done. Good SOPs are short, accessible, and followed. Bad SOPs live in shared drives nobody opens.
N Navigate
Change Management
Navigating the human side of implementing new systems. People resist change, especially when it exposes that what they were doing wasn't working.
Ally - Internal Ally
Someone inside the organization who already knew the problems were real but lacked the data or platform to push for change. Your best asset during Navigate.
Quick Win
A visible, measurable improvement achievable in 1-2 weeks. Quick wins build trust and credibility before the harder changes. Lead with these - not the restructuring plan.
Stakeholder Mapping - Stakeholder Influence/Attitude Map
Plotting every person involved in a change by their power to block or enable it (influence) and their disposition toward it (attitude). Tells you who to invest time in and who to manage around.
Handover - System Handover
The structured transfer of processes, decision frameworks, and ownership from the person who built the system to the team who will run it. If the system needs you to maintain it, you built a dependency - not a system.
Reversion - Reversion Trap
The tendency for organizations to slip back to old processes 4-8 weeks after a change. Prevented by ally networks, documented decision trails, and visible metrics that make backsliding obvious.