Growth & RevOps Glossary

The Four P’s

Next Curve Partners’ framework for diagnosing growth plateaus: People, Process, Platforms and Product. Most stalled businesses have friction in more than one, and fixing only the easiest one rarely unblocks growth on its own. See the Four P’s on the homepage.

GTM Strategy (Go-to-Market Strategy)

The definition of who you sell to, why they buy, and how you reach them — ideal customer profile, positioning, packaging, pricing and channel. Sits upstream of sales process and team structure. See GTM Strategy.

ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)

A specific, checkable definition of the customer a business is built to win — precise enough that a sales team can disqualify a bad-fit deal in the first call, not the fourth.

RevOps (Revenue Operations)

The discipline of aligning sales, marketing and customer success process, data and tooling into one system, so revenue reporting is trustworthy and the CRM reflects reality instead of a guess. See Sales Process & RevOps.

Founder-Led Sales

A sales motion where the founder personally runs most or all of the sales process. The right model early on; becomes a ceiling once pipeline volume exceeds what one calendar can carry. See Founder-Led Sales Is a Feature, Until It’s a Ceiling.

Fractional CRO / Fractional Executive

A senior commercial leader engaged on a part-time, ongoing basis rather than as a full-time hire — providing executive-level leadership on a rhythm that matches what the business actually needs right now. See Fractional Executive Engagements.

The Second Curve

Charles Handy’s model: sustainable growth requires starting a new curve before the current one peaks, at a point of apparent strength rather than visible crisis. See The Second Curve.

Greiner’s Growth Model

Larry Greiner’s model of six growth phases, each ending in a specific, predictable crisis that only a structural change resolves. See Greiner’s Growth Model.

Working Backwards

A method borrowed from Amazon: define the destination — what’s true when something is working — before designing how to get there. Next Curve Partners applies this to building a commercial engine. See Our Method.

MEDDICC / BANT

Sales qualification frameworks. MEDDICC (Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, Champion, Competition) suits complex, multi-stakeholder deals; BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing) suits simpler, faster-moving ones. The right choice depends on deal complexity, not preference.

Pipeline Hygiene

The discipline of keeping CRM data — stage, next steps, close dates — accurate and current, so the pipeline reflects reality rather than aspiration. Usually a culture problem wearing an admin costume.

Sales Playbook

Every repeatable habit that governs how a business sells — pricing approach, qualification shortcuts, deal approvals, onboarding. Has an implicit half-life and needs deliberate review as the business scales. See The $2m Playbook That Breaks at $10m.

Workaround Creep

A Next Curve Partners term for the process by which individually reasonable workarounds accumulate into systemic operational risk, each one locally rational but collectively corrosive. See Death by a Thousand Workarounds.

The Founder Ceiling

A Next Curve Partners term for the point at which founder-led sales capacity, not market demand, becomes the limiting factor on growth. See Founder-Led Sales Is a Feature, Until It’s a Ceiling.

The Kinked Curve

A Next Curve Partners term for reading a revenue chart as a series of slope changes, each one a fingerprint of a specific internal event, rather than as one smooth line. See The Kinked Curve.

Land and Expand

A go-to-market motion focused on winning an initial, smaller footprint with a customer, then growing revenue within the account over time, rather than maximising deal size upfront.

Span of Control

The number of people one manager can effectively lead. A common structural failure point in scaling businesses: span of control that worked at ten people quietly breaks at thirty.

Forecast Accuracy

How closely predicted revenue matches actual closed revenue. Usually degrades first in scaling businesses because qualification and stage definitions were never made explicit — not because the market changed.

The Curve Diagnostic

Next Curve Partners’ free 12-question self-assessment across People, Process, Platforms and Product, used to locate a business on its growth curve in about fifteen minutes. Take the Curve Diagnostic.

The Amplifier Effect

A Next Curve Partners term for how AI actually behaves inside a commercial engine: it amplifies whichever process already exists, for better or worse. A disciplined process gets faster; an undefined one produces the same dysfunction at higher volume and a more confident tone. See Leveraging AI in GTM.