Sales glossary.

B2B (business-to-business) sales is the process of selling to other companies rather than individual consumers (B2C). It typically involves longer sales cycles, multiple stakeholders (a champion, a budget-holder, sometimes a technical evaluator), and a higher average deal size than consumer sales.

B2B sales training usually covers discovery (uncovering the buyer's real problem before pitching), objection handling, and multi-threading — building relationships with more than one contact at a target account so the deal doesn't die if a single champion goes quiet.

See DialDynamics' B2B objection library →

Cold calling is the practice of phoning a prospect who hasn't requested contact and has no existing relationship with you or your company. It's "cold" because there's no warm-up — no referral, no inbound signal, no prior touch to lean on.

Despite frequent predictions of its death, cold calling remains one of the fastest ways to get a real-time conversation with a decision-maker, especially in B2B and commercial real estate where email response rates are low. The skill isn't the dial itself; it's the first 15 seconds (the opener), staying in control through objections, and ending with a specific next step instead of a vague "I'll follow up."

Practice live cold calls with AI buyer personas →

Conversation intelligence platforms (Gong, Chorus, and similar tools) record and transcribe sales calls, then use that data to flag talk-time ratios, competitor mentions, and deal risk for managers to review.

Conversation intelligence is diagnostic, it tells you what already went wrong on a real call with a real prospect. It's a different category from practice/roleplay tools, which let a rep rehearse before the call happens, with no real deal at risk.

A discovery call is the first substantive conversation with a prospect, focused entirely on understanding their situation: what problem they're trying to solve, what they've already tried, who else is involved in the decision, their budget and timeline, and what a good outcome looks like for them.

The most common mistake on a discovery call is pitching too early. A good discovery call ends with a mutually agreed next step, not a canned demo pitch that ignores what the prospect just told you.

Read: The 3x3 Discovery Call Framework →

High-ticket sales refers to selling products or services at a high price point, commonly used for offers in the thousands to tens of thousands of dollars per deal (coaching programs, enterprise software, commercial real estate, luxury goods). Because the price is high, the sales process is typically more consultative than transactional. It leans on trust-building, deeper discovery, and handling higher-stakes objections around price and ROI.

Reps moving into high-ticket sales usually need to unlearn high-volume, script-heavy habits and instead slow down, ask better questions, and get comfortable with longer, higher-stakes conversations.

Objection handling is how a rep responds when a prospect pushes back, "it's too expensive," "we already use someone else," "send me an email instead." The goal isn't to argue the prospect out of their concern; it's to acknowledge it, ask a clarifying question, and keep the conversation alive long enough to actually address the underlying issue.

Reps who handle objections well tend to have a small set of proven responses memorized for the handful of objections that come up constantly, rather than improvising from scratch on every call.

Drill real objections free →

A sales engagement platform (Outreach, Salesloft, and similar tools) helps reps sequence and track outbound touches, calls, emails, LinkedIn messages, across a structured cadence, so leads don't fall through the cracks between the second and fifth touch.

These platforms manage when and how often a rep reaches out. They don't teach a rep what to say or how to handle pushback on the call itself, which is the gap sales training and roleplay tools are built to fill.

A sales pipeline is the visual representation of every open deal a rep or team is working, organized by stage (prospecting, discovery, demo, proposal, closed). Pipeline health is usually measured by volume (enough deals at each stage), velocity (how fast deals move stage to stage), and coverage (total pipeline value relative to quota).

A common early-career mistake is treating pipeline as something that happens passively. It doesn't; healthy pipeline requires consistent prospecting activity every week, not just when a rep is behind on quota.

Sales roleplay is rehearsal: running a sales conversation, an opener, a discovery call, an objection, against a simulated buyer instead of a real prospect. Traditionally this meant a manager or peer playing the buyer. AI roleplay tools (DialDynamics included) replace that with an AI buyer persona that can push back, object, and stay in character on a live call.

The value of roleplay is repetition without cost: a rep can run the same tough objection ten times in a session, something that's impractical to do with a real prospect or even a busy manager's time.

Try a live AI roleplay call →

An SDR (Sales Development Representative) is a rep whose job is prospecting and qualifying, not closing. SDRs cold call, cold email, and work inbound leads to book qualified meetings, which are then handed off to an Account Executive (AE) to run the full sales cycle and close.

The SDR role is usually the entry point into a B2B sales career, and is where reps build the foundational skills, cold outreach, objection handling, discovery, that carry into every later sales role.