About the SDR / Sales Agent Glossary
A reference layer for one specific surface of the agentic-AI domain — the SDR / outbound-sales workflow at the intersection of classical sales-engagement vocabulary, signal-based selling, AI-SDR products, and deliverability + compliance posture. Built and maintained by the AgentsBooks team.
Why an SDR-focused glossary
Sales / SDR vocabulary in 2026 has fragmented across three lineages: classical outbound (ICP, ABM, sequence, MQL/SQL, BANT/MEDDIC), signal-based selling (trigger event, intent data, technographic, employee-change signal), and agentic AI for SDR (research agent, sequence-writer agent, reply-classifier agent, BDR-out-of-the-box). Plus deliverability (SPF/DKIM/DMARC, sender reputation, warm-up, blocklist) and compliance (CAN-SPAM, GDPR Art. 6 LIA, CCPA, EU AI Act Art. 50) — the legal-and-technical floor of cold outbound.
This glossary is the single look-it-up surface where those four lineages meet. Every entry is one canonical primary-source citation, dated. Each one resolves cleanly into a copy-pasteable definition for a sales playbook, an RFP response, a sequence-governance policy, or an internal review of an AI-SDR vendor.
The framing
“Sales reps spend roughly 28% of their time actively selling — the rest absorbed by admin, prep, and research.”
“Commercial email must include a clear opt-out, accurate header information, and a valid physical postal address. Civil penalties up to $51,744 per violation.”
“Providers and deployers of generative AI systems must ensure that AI-generated content is detectable and disclosed where it could be mistaken for human-authored content.”
Audience
Sales leaders setting outbound strategy, BDR/SDR ops managers running sequence platforms, RevOps teams owning the data-and-tooling stack, founders building the first outbound function, and product teams shipping AI-SDR features. This site assumes you can read a CRM funnel report; it does not assume you know the difference between MEDDIC, MEDDICC, and MEDDPICC — that is the point of looking it up.
The eight primitives
The vocabulary AgentsBooks uses for everything: Identity · Brain · Heart · Memory · Control · Knowledge · Friends · Shares. An SDR agent fleet is one composition of those primitives: identity per agent, brain choosing model, heart shaping outreach voice, memory holding prior interactions, control governing what the agent may send, knowledge of ICP and offer, friends representing fleet coordination, shares tracking attribution. See Anatomy of a Firm for the full set.
Family of properties
This glossary sits inside the AgentsBooks portfolio of authority properties:
- Agentic Glossary — deep narrative entries for ~31 flagship terms across the whole agentic-AI space.
- Compliance Glossary — 81 compliance terms (NIST, EU AI Act, ISO 42001, SOC 2, FATF). Sibling to this site for the compliance overlap (CAN-SPAM, GDPR, CCPA, EU AI Act Art. 50).
- Agent Memory Glossary — 78 RAG, vector-store, and agent-memory terms.
This site is the focused reference for the SDR / outbound-sales workflow. Where the deep glossary is the authority on flagship agentic concepts, this glossary owns the SDR surface specifically — vendor terms (Outreach, Salesloft, Apollo, Salesforce Agentforce SDR, 11x), framework terms (MEDDIC, MEDDPICC, BANT), engagement primitives (sequence, cadence, touchpoint), and the agentic AI surface where vendor-specific terms need a vendor-neutral reference.
Voice and discipline
- Operator-grade, plural first-person, citation-anchored.
- No hyperbole without a number; no editorialised “X is the best” without a method footnote.
- Vendors are referenced as compatible substrates, not as adversaries. Outreach, Salesloft, Apollo, HubSpot, Salesforce, Cognism, ZoomInfo, Gong, Chorus, Lavender, Clay, 11x, AiSDR — every vendor entry cites the vendor's own primary documentation.
- Where AI-SDR vendor framings are contested (e.g., the “BDR-out-of-the-box” promise; hallucination as a load-bearing risk) we mark the entry with a Contested flag and acknowledge the disagreement.
- Deliverability and compliance entries cite the regulator or RFC directly (FTC, EDPB, California AG, Google sender guidelines, RFC 7208/6376/7489) — never a vendor's summary of the rule.