An owner told me last month that his agency's report had four acronyms in the first paragraph and he did not know what two of them meant. He had been paying that agency for a year.
He had not asked, because asking after twelve months feels worse than asking in week one. So he nodded through the meetings and approved the invoices.
That is a bad position to be in with your own money. Some of these terms describe something genuinely useful. Others are a normal idea wearing a jacket. Here is what each one means and whether it should change anything you do.
ICP: ideal customer profile
What it means. A written description of the customer where you win most often, deliver well, and get paid properly. Company size, industry, the specific problem they have, who signs the cheque, how they buy.
Why it matters. It is narrower than a target market, and that is the whole point. A target market is everyone who could theoretically buy from you. An ICP is the group worth spending money to reach. Every channel decision, every piece of content, and every list you buy depends on it.
If your ICP is a sentence like "small to medium businesses in Western Canada", you do not have one. A real ICP tells you which trade shows to skip. If you want to do this properly, building it from your existing customer data beats a workshop full of guesses.
MQL and SQL: the lead stages
What they mean. An MQL, marketing qualified lead, is someone marketing thinks is worth a sales conversation. An SQL, sales qualified lead, is someone sales has spoken to and agreed is worth pursuing.
Why it matters. The gap between those two numbers is the single most useful diagnostic in B2B marketing. Marketing hands over 100 MQLs, sales accepts 12, and marketing reports a good month while sales says the leads are garbage. Both are telling the truth about different numbers.
Watch for the abuse. When MQL is defined as anyone who downloaded anything, the number goes up and means nothing. If your reporting shows MQLs climbing while pipeline is flat, the definition is the problem.
The fix is a conversation, not a tool. Sit both sides in a room and write down what a lead must be true of before sales will call it. Company size, role, and problem. Then hold both teams to that written definition for a quarter. Most of the argument between marketing and sales at small companies is two groups using the same word for different things.
CAC, LTV and payback: the money math
CAC is customer acquisition cost. Everything you spent to win customers, divided by the number of customers won. Everything means ad spend plus the salaries of people doing the work plus agency fees plus tools. Most companies count ad spend only, which makes the number look far better than it is.
LTV is lifetime value: the total profit from one customer over the whole relationship, not their first invoice. It sets your ceiling on what you can afford to spend winning one.
Payback is how many months of that customer's profit it takes to get your CAC back.
For a small business, payback matters more than the LTV to CAC ratio, because payback is about cash. A 4:1 ratio looks excellent on a slide and can still put you out of business if the money takes two years to return and you cannot fund the gap. Ratios are a health check. Payback is a cash flow question.
Two practical notes. Use gross profit rather than revenue in both LTV and payback, because revenue you spend on delivery was never yours. And calculate CAC per channel where you can, since one blended number hides the channel that is quietly costing three times the others.
Attribution: who gets the credit
What it means. Assigning credit for a sale to the marketing touchpoints that contributed. First-touch credits the first interaction, last-touch credits the final one, and multi-touch spreads it across several.
Why it matters, with a caveat. Attribution is always partly wrong. It cannot see the conversation at a conference, the colleague who recommended you, or the person who read your posts for eight months and then typed your name into Google. In your report that person is direct traffic, and every prior touch disappears.
Do it anyway. A consistently wrong measurement still shows you which channels are trending up and down, and that is what you need for a budget decision. Just never let anyone shut down a channel on the strength of a last-touch report alone. There is more on which attribution model to use at SMB scale if you are choosing one now.
SEO, GEO and AEO: getting found
Three names for three different places people find answers.
SEO is search engine optimization: getting your pages into the ranked list of blue links on Google.
AEO is answer engine optimization: getting into the answer boxes on that same results page. The featured snippet at the top, the People Also Ask list. The practical work is answering one specific question clearly, in a short passage, using the words people actually type.
GEO is generative engine optimization: getting your business named when someone asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews a question in your category. Instead of a list of links, the person gets a written answer with a few sources. GEO is the work of being one of those sources.
These overlap heavily. Good, specific, well-structured content helps all three. What differs is the format: SEO rewards a page, AEO rewards a clean paragraph answering one question, GEO rewards being quotable and being mentioned elsewhere on the web.
Schema markup
What it means. Hidden code on a page that tells machines what the page is. This is a business with this address. This is an article by this person published on this date. These are questions and their answers.
Why it matters. A human reads your page and understands it. A search engine or an AI system is inferring from layout and wording, and schema removes the guesswork. It changes nothing a visitor sees.
Two honest points. It is cheap, and most small business sites still do not have it. And it will not rescue thin content, so anyone selling schema as a standalone SEO fix is selling you the label on the tin.
Retainer, pipeline coverage and a few more you will hear
Retainer is a fixed monthly fee for an agreed scope of work. The thing to check is whether the scope is written in outcomes or in hours. A retainer that promises four blog posts a month is a purchase order. A retainer that promises a number of qualified conversations is a commitment. Most are the first kind sold in the language of the second.
Pipeline coverage is the value of your open deals divided by your target for the period. Three times coverage means you have three dollars of open opportunity for every dollar you need to close. It is a simple early warning: if coverage is below what your close rate historically requires, the quarter is already in trouble and no amount of activity in the final month fixes it.
Nurture is the sequence of emails or touches that keeps you present with someone who is interested but not ready. Most nurture programmes fail because they are a product newsletter in disguise. A good one answers the questions a buyer has at that stage and asks for nothing until they signal.
Retargeting, intent data and the dark funnel
Retargeting shows ads to people who already visited your site. It works when you point it at specific high-intent pages, so pricing and demo pages. It works badly as general awareness for a small audience, because the same 400 people see your ad forty times and start to resent you. Cap the frequency.
Intent data is a third-party signal suggesting a company is researching your category, usually inferred from what people at that company read across publisher networks. It identifies a company, not a person, and it is directional rather than certain. It earns its price only when a salesperson acts on it within days. Buy it after you have the sales capacity, not before.
The dark funnel is everything that happens where you cannot see it. Private Slack groups, WhatsApp threads, a podcast, a colleague saying "call these people". Someone reads your LinkedIn posts for a year, never clicks, then arrives at your site by typing your name.
You cannot track it. The response that works is to ask every new customer how they first heard of you, in their own words, and to write the answer down. That one question tells you more than most attribution software, and it costs nothing.
The takeaway
Three of these terms should change what you do: your ICP, your CAC payback, and the gap between MQLs and SQLs. Get those three right and the rest is detail.
And ask. Any agency or consultant who cannot explain a term in one plain sentence, without another acronym in it, either does not understand it or is counting on you not asking. Both are worth knowing.