Playbook · Glossary
The words we use, defined plainly.
Every term on this site, in one sentence or two.
- AEO
- Answer engine optimization: making sure AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity name your company, describe it correctly and cite your pages.
- Automation level
- How much Claude does on its own for a play: level 1 drafts only, level 2 drafts and logs, level 3 sends on written rules. Every play starts at level 1.
- Engine owner
- The person on your team who runs the GTM Engine after handover: the weekly review, the approval queue and new plays.
- Forward Deployed Consultant
- A senior consultant who works inside your team, makes specific calls for your situation, builds the work with you and stays until your team can run it. Different from a research firm, which gives the pattern, and a management consultancy, which gives the plan.
- Gate
- A pass-or-fail checkpoint at the end of each build phase. A gate never passes with open items.
- GTM engine
- A go-to-market system with Claude in the middle, connected to the knowledge base, CRM, research, website, AI search, social and approvals, that turns buying signals into approved actions.
- Knowledge base
- The set of plain documents about your business that Claude reads before every task: ICP, positioning, product, pricing, proof, competitors, objections, voice and rules.
- New-hire test
- Twenty questions a new rep would ask in week one. Claude must answer all twenty correctly from the knowledge base, with sources, before anything is automated.
- Play
- A defined response to one signal: who it's for, what gets researched, what gets drafted, who approves it and how fast.
- Play card
- The one-page spec for a play: trigger, exclusions, research brief, message, approver, response time, automation level and what gets logged.
- Revenue per head
- Annual revenue divided by full-time headcount. It shows whether a company is getting more done per person. The GTM Engine is built to push it toward $1M.
- Signal to action
- Turning a buying signal, such as a pricing page visit or a new executive, into a researched, drafted and approved action within a set response time.
- States, not stages
- Tracking each account by what is true about it now (target, signal, engaged, opportunity, customer, paused) and the signal that changed it, instead of a linear funnel stage.
Talk to the person who builds it
No account team and no hand-off to a junior analyst. A 30-minute review with the consultant who builds your engine. Not ready yet? Get your score first.