glossary
Demand generation glossary
Plain-English definitions of the demand generation, funnel, and martech terms that matter — from MQL and SQL to CAC, pipeline, and attribution.
By The Marketinque TeamReviewed June 2026
- Demand Generation
- The marketing discipline of creating and capturing interest in a product across the entire buyer journey, so qualified buyers arrive ready to engage.
- MQL
- Marketing Qualified Lead — a lead whose engagement signals (content, fit, behavior) meet the threshold marketing agrees is worth passing toward sales.
- SQL
- Sales Qualified Lead — an MQL that sales has accepted as a genuine opportunity worth active pursuit.
- Dark Funnel
- The untrackable touchpoints — private communities, word of mouth, podcasts, peer reviews — that influence buyers before any attributable click.
- TOFU / MOFU / BOFU
- Top, middle, and bottom of funnel — shorthand for the awareness, consideration, and decision stages content and offers are mapped to.
- CAC
- Customer Acquisition Cost — the fully loaded sales and marketing spend required to win one new customer, usually paired with LTV.
- LTV
- Lifetime Value — the total gross profit a customer is expected to generate before churning; the ceiling on what you can afford to spend acquiring them.
- ROAS
- Return on Ad Spend — revenue attributed to an ad campaign divided by its cost; the standard efficiency yardstick for paid media.
- Pipeline
- The total value of open opportunities in the sales process; the demand-gen target that converts into bookings over time.
- Attribution
- The practice of assigning credit for a conversion to the marketing touches that influenced it, using models from first-touch to multi-touch.
- Lifecycle Marketing
- The discipline that runs the funnel after the sale: onboarding customers to first value, growing retention and expansion, and turning satisfaction into advocacy.
- Lead Generation
- Lead generation (lead gen) is the practice of converting interest into contactable records — form fills, tool signups, and demo requests — that sales or nurture can then follow up with.
- Growth Marketing
- Growth marketing is an experiment-led practice that applies testing, data, and iteration across the whole customer journey — from first touch through retention and referral — rather than a single channel or campaign.
- Positioning
- The deliberate choice of the place a product occupies in a buyer’s mind: the category it competes in, who it is for, and the one difference that makes it the obvious pick.
- ICP
- Ideal Customer Profile: the description of the account that gets the most value from your product fastest, used to focus targeting, messaging, and qualification.
- NRR
- Net Revenue Retention: this period’s recurring revenue from an existing customer cohort divided by that cohort’s revenue a period ago, counting expansion, contraction, and churn but no new logos.
- Churn
- The rate at which customers or their revenue leave: logo churn counts the customers lost in a period, revenue churn counts the MRR they take with them.
Part of the demand generation hub.