On-the-ground definitions, verdict-first. What an AI SDR is, how to measure meeting conversion — we've compiled the key terms.
Speed to Lead is the time it takes from the moment a prospect shows interest—via a form submission, inquiry, etc.—to when a sales rep makes first contact. This speed is a critical sales metric directly tied to the lead meeting-conversion rate.
Inside sales is a sales method (and a specialized function) that uses non-face-to-face channels such as phone, email, and online meetings to handle everything from nurturing prospects to creating meetings. Divided in labor from field sales, it nurtures the leads marketing acquires into high-certainty opportunities and hands them off to closers in a state where the win probability has been raised.
Lead nurturing is a marketing activity that continuously provides information and communicates with acquired prospects (leads) until their buying intent rises, nurturing them toward meeting conversion and closing. Derived from "nurture," its purpose is to not abandon latent prospects who do not buy immediately, but to maintain the relationship and hand them off to sales at the right time.
Sales engagement is an umbrella term for the sales strategy and process that systematically manages and optimizes all the communication sales reps conduct with prospects and existing customers across multiple channels—email, phone, social, chat, etc.—simultaneously achieving trust building and improved win certainty. In recent years it often also refers to the software that automates and analyzes this (a sales engagement platform).
AI SDR (AI Sales Development Representative) is an umbrella term for software in which an AI agent autonomously performs, 24/7, the work that human inside-sales reps (SDRs) used to do—"initial inquiry handling, lead qualification, content recommendation, meeting setting, and follow-up." Unlike a mere scripted chatbot, its biggest characteristic is that it interprets conversational context and buying intent and chooses the right action at the right time.
Meeting-conversion rate is a sales KPI indicating the proportion of leads (prospects) acquired in a given period that actually advanced to a meeting. It is calculated as "meeting-conversion rate (%) = number of converted meetings ÷ total leads × 100" and is widely used as a basic metric for measuring pipeline efficiency from marketing to sales.
An MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) is a prospect the marketing team has judged "worth handing off to sales," and an SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) is a lead the sales team has further judged "can be converted into a meeting." The two are "stages" where the same lead's label changes as it advances through the buying process, and they function as a shared definition for articulating the collaboration criteria between marketing and sales.
Inbound sales is a sales method that designs a flow in which prospects contact and inquire with a company on their own through content or ads, and then connects that interest to meetings and deals. It is a concept paired with outbound sales—where the company unilaterally approaches via telemarketing or cold visits—and, against the backdrop of growing self-learning behavior by customers due to digitalization, its adoption is advancing in Japan's B2B market as well.
BANT is a discovery framework for judging whether a lead can be converted into a meeting in B2B sales, combining the initials of four elements: Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline. Said to have been systematized by IBM in the 1950s, it has taken hold as a basic qualification requirement used widely from inside sales to field sales.
PLG (Product-Led Growth) is a go-to-market strategy that makes the product itself the main engine of user acquisition, conversion, and expansion—letting users experience value first via a free plan or free trial, with convinced users voluntarily moving to paid. Contrasted with the traditional sales-led (SLG) approach, it is rapidly spreading in the SaaS / B2B software domain.