Not every glossary entry deserves 200 words. These eight get them because the standard definition misses the working detail that changes decisions.
What is a system prompt?
The persistent instructions an LLM reads on every turn of a conversation, invisible to the end user. In practice: how you get consistent behavior out of a chat interface without the user having to re-explain who the AI is on every message. When people say "we prompted it," they usually mean the user turn; when I say "we shipped a system prompt," I mean the persistent contract. If the assistant sometimes forgets who it is, your system prompt is either missing or too clever.
What is brand positioning?
Where you sit in the buyer's head relative to their alternatives, not the words on your homepage. Real positioning fits in a sentence: who it's for, what it competes against, and what makes it the obvious call for that person. Most B2B homepages describe features. That's not positioning; that's inventory. A CMO who cannot state their positioning in one sentence usually can't produce campaigns that work either.
What is Claude Team?
Anthropic's mid-tier Claude plan, $30/user/month, with higher usage limits than Pro and access to Projects for shared workspaces. Practical use case: small-to-mid teams (5-50 people) that want organizational governance without Enterprise pricing. In my experience, most teams under 20 people can start on Team and only need Enterprise once they're integrating Claude into internal apps or need SSO and audit logs.
What is a marketing qualified lead (MQL)?
A lead marketing considers ready to hand off to sales, based on some threshold of engagement signals (page visits, content downloads, form fills). MQL is a marketing-owned definition; SQL is what sales agrees to accept. The gap between them is where every B2B pipeline actually leaks. If your MQL-to-SQL conversion is under 30%, marketing and sales don't agree on what a lead is, and the MQL definition is the fix.
What is multimodal AI?
AI systems that process more than text: images, audio, video, sometimes structured data. Claude, GPT-4o, and Gemini all now handle image inputs; some handle audio too. Practical use: pointing an LLM at a screenshot of your Salesforce dashboard and asking it to explain what changed. The interesting business applications are usually "read this image and pull structured data out," not "generate a new image."
What is outbound marketing?
Pushing your message to prospects who didn't ask for it: cold email, cold calls, targeted ads, LinkedIn DMs, direct mail. Opposite of inbound (where the prospect comes to you). The old wisdom that "outbound is dead" is wrong; the reality is outbound-that-reads-like-a-blast is dead. Well-researched outbound to specific named accounts, referencing something the prospect actually did or said, still converts.
What is third-party data?
Data collected by an organization that doesn't have a direct relationship with the person the data describes. Ad networks selling audience segments they compiled by tracking users across sites. Privacy-wise, this is what Chrome's third-party cookie deprecation and Apple's ITP were built to kill. Practical implication for B2B: most third-party intent data is worse than it looks, and most attribution based on it is worse than it looks.
What is zero-click search?
A search result that answers the user's question directly on the results page, so they never click through to a website. Google's AI Overviews are the dominant form now, followed by featured snippets, knowledge panels, and direct answers. Practical implication for SEO: many high-volume queries no longer send meaningful traffic to any site. If your content strategy depends on ranking for "what is X"-style queries, you need to check which of those queries still send clicks before investing more.