Every term in the playbook, defined.

Account-Based Marketing: sales and marketing aligned around a defined list of target accounts, with personalized programs run against each. Tier-1 (1:1), Tier-2 (1:few), Tier-3 (1:many).

Annual Contract Value: the annualized value of a single customer contract. The denominator for most B2B SaaS unit-economics calculations.

Answer Engine Optimization: optimizing content for AI Overviews / ChatGPT / Perplexity citations rather than blue-link Google rankings. The 2025 evolution of SEO.

The documented specification for an AI agent: role, responsibilities, inputs, outputs, voice rules, guardrails. The artifact that turns a prompt into an agent.

The internal function (1–3 people) that owns agent specs, eval libraries, governance, and the marketing-AI roadmap. Cross-functional; reports to the CMO.

Google\'s Search Generative Experience (rebranded as AI Overviews): synthesized AI answers above search results. Reduces vendor-site click-throughs; rewards content that gets cited as a source.

The discipline of briefing industry analysts (Gartner, Forrester, IDC) before major announcements and maintaining the relationship for category-defining coverage.

Agent Operator Score: CoreCMO\'s four-stage maturity assessment for AI-native marketing functions. AOS 1 (Curious), AOS 2 (Experimenter), AOS 3 (Operator), AOS 4 (Compounder). Take the assessment at /scorecard.html.

Annual Recurring Revenue: total subscription revenue normalized to an annual figure. The most-watched metric in B2B SaaS finance.

A small, specific segment inside your SAM where you concentrate every resource until you dominate it. Then you expand to adjacent segments. The alternative to spray-and-pray. Originated as a military tactic (Normandy 1944); applied to B2B by Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm.

The 3–5 public stances your brand takes about its category, its buyer, or its world. Different from company values (private, internal). Different from features (commodified). Pillars survive a competitor copying your features.

The cross-pillar orchestration agent that reads every draft output BEFORE it ships. Blocks publication if voice/forbidden-language thresholds fail. The most-important agent in the architecture.

The two-bucket marketing-budget split. Brand spend = long-cycle awareness and authority (PR, content, sponsorships). Demand spend = short-cycle lead generation (paid search, social, ABM). Healthy mix shifts toward brand as the company matures.

A one-page profile of a specific role on the buying committee, capturing seven dimensions: goals, priorities, challenges, objections, metrics, watering holes, and trigger events.

The set of humans involved in a B2B purchase decision. Typically four roles: Economic Buyer (signs the check), Champion (internal advocate), Technical Evaluator (clears security/integration), and End User (uses the product daily).

Customer Acquisition Cost: total sales + marketing spend divided by new customers acquired in the same period. Compared to LTV to assess unit economics.

Months of revenue required to recover CAC. Healthy B2B SaaS targets 12–18 months for mid-market, 24–36 months for enterprise.

One of six operating-discipline gaps that end CMO tenures: year-one goals too high, getting dragged into execution, losing ELT cadence, talking leads not revenue, no documented stated risks, not in the room.

The structured markdown files (goals.md, definitions.md, brand.md, etc.) that any LLM can read to understand your company. The foundation of the 3-layer LLM Ops framework: Context → Data → Action.

Cost Per Lead: paid spend divided by leads generated. Channel-specific; roughly capped at 1% of ACV for healthy CAC math.

Customer Satisfaction Score: point-in-time satisfaction measure, usually 1–5 scale. Different from NPS in that it measures specific interactions vs. overall relationship.

A sequence of automated emails sent on a schedule to nurture a lead or customer toward a specific action.

The three media types: paid (you bought it), owned (you control it), earned (someone else gave it to you). Earned media outperforms paid for trust and (increasingly) AI citations.

The set of test cases an agent\'s output is scored against before shipping a new prompt version. The regression suite for AI work.

The canonical AI Field Marketing Specialist agent. Event coordination, attendee outreach drafts, on-site social monitoring, post-event retrospective compilation. Reports to the Head of Field Marketing.

Words, phrases, or concepts your brand will never use: even when commercially convenient. Filter applied before any agent ships output.

Gross Revenue Retention: % of starting ARR retained over a period, excluding expansion. Pure churn measure.

When an LLM generates plausible-sounding but factually wrong output. Mitigation: verify-before-publish gates, source-traced outputs, eval libraries.

Ideal Customer Profile: the segment within SAM you have committed to win. Defined by 3–5 must-have criteria, weighted to a 100-point scorecard, with accounts graded A through F based on fit.

A marketing plan documented well enough that a successor walking in mid-year can read it and know what to keep, kill, and change. The opposite of a CMO\'s plan-in-their-head.

Where a contact sits in the customer journey: Unaware, Aware, Considering, Decision, Customer, Advocate. Each stage maps to different marketing programs.

Lifetime Value: the total expected revenue from a customer over their relationship. Calculated as ACV × average customer lifetime years × gross margin.

The ratio of Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost. Healthy SaaS targets 3:1 or better. Under 1:1 means you lose money on every customer.

Model Context Protocol: Anthropic\'s standard for letting an LLM call out to external systems (CRM, marketing automation, etc.). The 2026 default integration pattern for marketing agents.

Marketing Mix Modeling: statistical attribution model that estimates channel-level revenue contribution from spend, controlling for seasonality, base demand, and saturation. The CFO-defensible alternative to MTA.

The cross-functional aggregation of marketing source rates, sales conversion rates, CS expansion signals, and product feature-gap reports.

Marketing Qualified Lead: a lead that meets the agreed-upon marketing criteria (firmographic + behavioral) to be handed to sales. Definition must be sales-marketing aligned in Brief Section 7.

Multi-Touch Attribution: pixel-based tracking that credits revenue to specific touches in the buyer journey. Increasingly broken by privacy changes (ITP, third-party cookie deprecation, iOS).

Attaching your perspective to a news cycle already in motion. Faster path to coverage than seeded press releases.

Net Promoter Score: "how likely are you to recommend us, 0–10?" Promoters (9–10) minus detractors (0–6) = NPS. Above 50 is strong B2B SaaS.

Net Revenue Retention / Net Dollar Retention: % of starting ARR retained including expansion. NRR above 120% is the metric every late-stage SaaS company is graded on.

The central context file every prompt and agent in the playbook inherits from. Eight sections covering market, ICP, personas, right-to-win, pricing, brand, KPIs, and AI voice rules. Fill once; every output uses your real values.

The canonical AI Performance Marketing Specialist agent. Runs paid channels (LinkedIn, Google, Meta, review sites) with budget-officer discipline. Hourly platform pulls, daily digest, weekly reallocation + creative variants. Reports to the Director of Demand Gen.

The ratio of open pipeline to the target number. Minimum 3× for healthy quarterly forecasting; many teams target 4–5× during weak macro periods.

How your product or category occupies a specific mental territory in the buyer\'s mind. Distinct from messaging (the words you use) and brand (the meta-narrative wrapping both).

Product Qualified Lead: for PLG motions, a free-trial or self-serve user showing product engagement that predicts paid conversion.

Per-persona buying-readiness signals scored to a 100-point model. Banded into Hot (80+), Warm (60–79), Watching (40–59), and Cold (under 40). Drives Tier-1 ABM selection and SDR cadence.

The document the next CMO inherits. Captures what changed in win rate, sales cycle, channel mix, and team structure each quarter. The institutional memory of the function.

The empirical, observable segment where you already win consistently today. Not aspirational: observable. Where your win rate is highest, sales cycle shortest, churn lowest, customer language sharpest.

Sales Accepted Lead: an MQL that sales has formally accepted into their pipeline. Often equivalent to SQL.

Average days from opportunity creation to closed-won. Healthy SaaS varies by ACV: SMB 30–60 days, mid-market 60–120 days, enterprise 6–18 months.

Serviceable Addressable Market: the slice of TAM you can actually serve today given your motion, geography, language, regulatory clearance, and integration footprint. The honest number. The one the marketing function is actually competing inside.

The diminishing-returns curve for a channel: at what spend level does additional spend stop producing proportional revenue. MMM output that informs budget reallocation.

Search Engine Optimization: making content rank in search results. Increasingly shifting to AEO as buyers ask AI tools instead of typing queries into Google.

The cross-pillar orchestration agent that ingests signals from every module and routes each to the right downstream agent or human owner. The central nervous system.

Serviceable Obtainable Market: the slice of SAM you can realistically capture in the next 3–5 years given your share-of-voice, win rate, and capacity. Healthy B2B SaaS SOM is 5–15% of SAM.

Sales Qualified Lead: an MQL that sales has accepted as worth working. Higher bar than MQL.

A quarterly written commitment from the CMO to the board naming the single biggest risk to the plan and the mitigation. The artifact that protects the function when the risk materializes.

Total Addressable Market: the full universe of accounts that could ever buy your category, ignoring whether you can reach them, sell them, or serve them today. The biggest number in the deck. Useful for narrative; almost never useful for operating decisions.

The framework anchoring Right-to-Win: (1) buyer pain you uniquely solve, (2) segment where you have credibility, (3) competitive gap that favors you. The Venn intersection of all three is your defensible right-to-win segment.

Named customers who advocate publicly: reference calls, case studies, conference talks, public quotes. Built and maintained as a deliberate pipeline.

A pillar article plus 5–15 supporting articles that link to each other around a single semantic topic. The canonical SEO architecture for B2B SaaS in 2026.

An organizational moment that moves a persona from passive to active: a new exec hired, a quarter missed, a regulatory deadline, a competitor announcement, a layoff.

The unit your pricing scales on: per seat, per workflow, per transaction, per location, per outcome. A good value metric satisfies three tests: customer value scales with the metric, metric is observable, growth aligns with customer success.

The explicit list of stylistic, tonal, and vocabulary rules every prompt and agent in the playbook follows. The single most-important Brief field for AI-era marketing because the Brand Voice Agent agent enforces it before publish.

Where a specific persona reads, listens, attends, and posts. Persona-specific publications, podcasts, conferences, Slack and LinkedIn communities. Drives paid-media targeting and PR pitching.

The canonical AI Web Specialist agent. Owns website performance monitoring, copy variant drafting, A/B test orchestration, and SEO metadata hygiene. Reports to the Director of Demand Gen. One of the first three agents every marketing function ships.

The Monday meeting where Marketing, Sales, and CS review the top 10 deals, slipping deals, and next actions. The cadence that earns the CMO seat at the table.

Closed-won deals divided by all closed deals (won + lost) in a period. Tracked overall and by named competitor.