CMO Academy Glossary

A

AARRR

Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue. Dave McClure's growth funnel, often called "pirate metrics" for the way the acronym reads aloud. The framework forces a growth team to define a single primary metric at each stage, so optimization at one step does not silently break the step before or after it. Use it when a growth funnel has more vanity metrics than diagnostic ones, or when no one on the team can name the actual drop-off step.

E

ESOV

Excess Share of Voice. The Binet and Field finding that brands grow when their share of voice (the proportion of category advertising they own) exceeds their share of market (the proportion of category sales they win). Positive ESOV predicts future share gains; negative ESOV predicts decline. The implication is that a brand at five percent share that buys ten percent share of voice will tend to grow toward ten percent share, while the same brand buying three percent share of voice will tend to shrink toward three.

G

GRR

Gross Revenue Retention. The percentage of revenue retained from a cohort one year later, calculated without the uplift from expansion (upsells, cross-sells, seat additions). GRR isolates pure churn and downgrade risk. A B2B SaaS with 110 percent NRR but 80 percent GRR is hiding 20 points of churn behind aggressive expansion, which is fragile because the expansion stops when growth stops. Healthy companies show both numbers high.

I

ICP

Ideal Customer Profile. The narrow description of the customer who buys fastest, pays the most, stays the longest, and refers the highest-quality leads. ICP is not a target market and not a persona; it is the single tightest set of attributes that the rest of the buyer base statistically resembles. Used at the top of B2B funnels to score inbound leads, at the brief stage to focus creative work, and at the strategy stage to disqualify segments that look attractive but are not the ICP.

J

JWT

J. Walter Thompson, the historic American ad agency founded in 1864 and absorbed into WPP in 2018. JWT is most often cited in CMO contexts as the home of the T-Plan brief format and a long line of planning-tradition thinking. When a reference mentions JWT without further context, it is almost always pointing at the planning lineage, not a specific contemporary office.

K

K-factor

Viral coefficient. The average number of new users each existing user invites who themselves stick. A K-factor of 1.0 means each user replaces themselves once before churn, which is the floor for true viral growth. Most products run at K under 0.3 and rely on paid acquisition for the rest. The metric matters because it is the only growth lever that compounds without recurring spend, but it is also the lever most products cannot actually move, so honest measurement matters more than chasing it.

L

LTV/CAC

Lifetime Value to Customer Acquisition Cost ratio. The standard health check on a paid acquisition motion. A ratio under 1 means the business loses money on each customer; a ratio of 3 is the widely cited healthy floor for B2B SaaS; ratios above 5 often signal under-investment in acquisition. Be careful with LTV inputs, which are often inflated by assuming retention rates that the cohort has not yet earned.

M

MEDDIC

Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identified pain, Champion. The B2B sales qualification framework developed at PTC in the 1990s and standard issue in enterprise sales orgs since. A rep working a deal asks for each letter explicitly: what numerical metric will improve, who actually signs the purchase order, what criteria the committee will use, what steps the procurement process runs through, what specific pain the buyer is solving, and who inside the account will sell the deal for you when you are not in the room.

MMM

Marketing Mix Modeling. The econometric technique that decomposes a sales time series into the contribution of each marketing channel, plus baseline and external factors. MMM became standard practice when last-click attribution stopped tracking accurately across cookie-blocked browsers and app-tracking-restricted devices. Pairs with brand tracking to give a CMO defensible answers to "what did paid actually contribute?"

N

NPS

Net Promoter Score. Fred Reichheld's single-question loyalty metric: "On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?" Promoters (9 to 10) minus Detractors (0 to 6) equals NPS, expressed as a number from minus 100 to plus 100. The metric is controversial inside academic marketing (the scoring math is unusual, and the predictive power for actual referral behavior is weaker than the brand claims), but it remains the most widely used loyalty benchmark in B2B and consumer alike.

NRR

Net Revenue Retention. The percentage of revenue retained from a cohort one year later, including expansion revenue from upsells, cross-sells, and seat growth, minus churn and downgrades. NRR above 100 percent means the cohort generates more revenue this year than last even without new customers, which is the gold standard for B2B SaaS health. NRR of 120 percent or more signals a product with strong expansion mechanics; under 90 percent signals real churn risk.

P

POEM

Paid, Owned, Earned, Media. The practitioner shorthand for the four layers of a channel strategy. Paid is rented reach, owned is controlled narrative, earned is third-party credibility, and media is the integration layer that lets the team compare results across the other three on a single page. POEM is the planning-room version of the same distinctions the IPA databank measures separately for effectiveness research.

S

SAR-O

Situation, Action, Result, Outcome. The structure used in behavioral interviews and case-study writing to keep a story from drifting into abstraction. Situation names the context, Action names what the protagonist actually did, Result names what changed measurably, and Outcome names the second-order consequence (what the result enabled or prevented). Used in CMO portfolio work to convert vague "I led a brand refresh" stories into concrete proof of judgment.

SMP

Single-Minded Proposition. The one idea a campaign must communicate, from the British creative tradition of brief writing. The discipline of the SMP is that it forces the brief writer to delete every supporting reason that does not serve the single idea, which is why the work it produces tends to be sharper than work briefed against a list of equal-weight benefits. The American equivalent is "the one thing" or "the central claim."

STP

Segmentation, Targeting, Positioning. The Kotler-era strategic marketing sequence that still anchors most MBA marketing curricula. Segmentation breaks the market into addressable groups, Targeting selects the groups worth pursuing, and Positioning chooses what the brand will mean to the selected groups. STP is the upstream frame that a positioning statement, a channel plan, and a pricing decision all flow downstream from.

V

VRIO

Valuable, Rare, Inimitable, Organized. Jay Barney's framework for assessing whether a resource the firm controls is the source of a sustainable competitive advantage. A resource must be Valuable (it lets the firm exploit an opportunity or neutralize a threat), Rare (competitors do not have it), Inimitable (competitors cannot copy it cheaply), and Organized (the firm is actually structured to use it). Used in Module 8 to test whether a claimed competitive advantage will hold up under pressure or evaporate the moment a well-funded competitor pays attention.