The terms, in plain English.

Software customers pay for as a subscription — monthly or annually — rather than buying outright. Most modern business software works this way.

A clear description of the type of company most likely to buy from you and succeed as a customer — used to focus effort on the right prospects.

A prospect who's shown real buying intent through how they've actually used your product — not just someone who filled in a form.

The predictable revenue a subscription business can count on each year from active customers — the core health metric for SaaS businesses.

The total revenue you can expect from a customer for as long as they stay. Compared against CAC to judge whether growth is healthy.

What it costs, on average, to win one new customer — marketing and sales spend divided by customers won.

The rate at which customers cancel or stop paying over a given period. The number every subscription business is quietly trying to lower.

A simple score for how likely customers are to recommend you, based on one survey question, scored from -100 to +100.

A measurable number that shows whether you're on track toward a goal — the few numbers worth checking regularly, not everything you could measure.

A regular check-in with a key account to review performance, address issues, and plan ahead together — usually every three months.

A qualification framework for judging whether a deal is likely to close — Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify pain, Champion, Competition.

The opportunity within an existing account that hasn't been sold into yet — other teams, products or budgets you haven't reached.

A widely-used framework for leading change, moving from building urgency and a guiding coalition through to embedding the new way permanently in how a team works.

A model for the emotional stages people move through during change — denial, resistance, exploration, then commitment. Productivity typically dips before it recovers.

The risk that people quietly revert to the old way of working once attention and support move on — different from a project risk, and easy to miss.

A written, step-by-step way of doing a recurring task so it no longer depends on the one person who knows it. A good SOP also flags which steps genuinely need judgement — that's the line between delegating a task and abandoning it.

The core improvement cycle: plan a change, try it small, check what actually happened against what you expected, then act — standardise it or adjust and go again. The "check" is the step most teams skip.

Going to where the work actually happens and watching, rather than reading about it in a report. From the Japanese for "the real place". The discipline is observing without immediately fixing.

Asking "why" repeatedly — usually about five times — to get from a symptom to its root cause. The discipline is following the evidence rather than leading yourself to the answer you already suspected.

A structure for difficult feedback: the specific situation, the observed behaviour (not the inferred character), the impact it had, and the expectation going forward. It keeps the conversation about what happened rather than who someone is.

Imagining a plan has already failed, then writing the most plausible accounts of how — before you commit. It surfaces the boring failures (the unowned dependency, the untested assumption) that optimism hides in normal planning.

A decision test: how will this choice look in ten minutes, ten months and ten years (or ten days, weeks and months — scale it to the decision). It separates the discomfort of deciding from the consequences of the decision.

Checking that something landed by having the other person explain it back in their own words — or, in a team, asking questions that reveal whether people understood the why or memorised the what. Quiet is not the same as adopted.