Glossary

Lead reactivation, in plain English

The vocabulary of reactivation and compliant outreach — defined the way we'd explain it across a kitchen table.

Lead reactivation: Contacting people already in a business's own records — quotes that never closed, past customers, old inbound leads — to restart a buying conversation, rather than acquiring new leads. Distinguished from lead generation by the source of the contact (existing records) and from speed-to-lead by the age of the contact.
Stalled opportunity: A record in a CRM that represents potential revenue but has stopped progressing: no recent activity, no close, and no explicit loss. The category includes unsold estimates, quotes awaiting a decision, and proposals that went unanswered. Stalled is a description of activity, not of intent — some stalled opportunities are still live, and some are effectively dead.
Unsold estimate: A quote that was issued but never became a job — not won, not explicitly lost, just quiet. The concept applies in any CRM that tracks quotes, estimates, or proposals. What distinguishes it from a cold contact is that the person requested a price and received one.
Database reactivation (DBR): Running structured re-engagement campaigns against contacts a business already holds — unsold estimates, dormant customers, old leads — instead of buying new ones. The practice is long-established in industries with large customer databases, such as automotive dealerships, and is now offered as a service by marketing agencies across many verticals.
Rehash: Sales slang for re-working quotes that didn't close — contacting them again after the initial decision point. Usage is most common in industries with a quote-then-decide sales cycle.
Dormant customer: A past customer with no job in a long stretch (often defined by the business as 12, 18, or 24 months). Distinct from an unsold estimate: there is no open quote, but there is a prior service relationship.
Aged lead: A lead that has gone some length of time without converting. There is no standard threshold — definitions range from a few weeks to several months depending on the industry and the sales cycle, so the term is only precise when the period is stated. A resale market exists in some industries for aged leads originally generated by other businesses.
Speed-to-lead: How fast a business responds to a brand-new inbound lead — a different discipline from reactivation, which works old leads. Adjacent market, often confused.
Multi-touch cadence: A scheduled series of contact attempts across days or weeks. The right number and spacing depend on lead age, channel consent, project type, and the business's own response data.
A2P 10DLC: The US carrier registration system for application-to-person texting over standard 10-digit numbers. Sending business texts through software generally requires a registered brand (the business identity) and campaign (the use case), filed through The Campaign Registry. Unregistered traffic is subject to filtering or blocking, and fees are set by the registry and passed through by messaging providers.Sources: The Campaign Registry (The Campaign Registry), Programmable Messaging and A2P 10DLC (Twilio Docs)
TCPA: The Telephone Consumer Protection Act — a US law governing certain calls and texts to consumers. Consent requirements vary by channel, technology, purpose, and current FCC rules, so automated outreach should be reviewed with qualified counsel.Source: Rules and Regulations Implementing the TCPA (consent revocation) (Federal Communications Commission)
PEWC (prior express written consent): The TCPA's highest consent standard — a written agreement to receive marketing messages delivered by automated means. The FCC has stated that calls using AI-generated voices fall within the TCPA's artificial-voice restrictions, which generally require this level of consent for marketing calls. Whether it applies to a given message depends on the channel, technology, and purpose, and the rules change, so review your own outreach with qualified counsel.Source: TCPA treatment of AI-generated voices (Federal Communications Commission)
CAN-SPAM: The US law for commercial email. Its core requirements: don't use false headers or deceptive subject lines, identify the message as an advertisement, include a valid physical postal address for the sender, tell recipients how to opt out, and honor opt-outs promptly. Compliance is a legal floor, not a standard for good outreach.Source: CAN-SPAM Act: A Compliance Guide for Business (Federal Trade Commission)
Opt-out propagation: Suppressing a contact across every channel when they unsubscribe or text STOP on any one channel, rather than only on the channel where the request arrived. Commonly missed in practice, because opt-out lists are often maintained per channel or per tool.
Verified booking: A booking counted only when three events are matched in sequence: a campaign message sent to a contact, a subsequent engagement from that same contact (reply, click, or tracked call), and a booking created in the CRM within a defined attribution window. The stricter the matching, the fewer bookings qualify — the trade-off is undercounting in exchange for not claiming credit for bookings that would have happened anyway.
Influenced revenue: Bookings that appeared within the attribution window without a tracked engagement event linking them to a campaign. Reported for visibility rather than counted as a verified booking, since the campaign's role in them is unproven.
List hygiene: Removing invalid addresses and numbers, merging duplicates, and honoring prior opt-outs before any send. Protects deliverability — and since sending infrastructure reputation is shared, it protects everyone else's too.
Sending ramp-up: Gradually increasing send volume from a new account or domain rather than blasting on day one. Receiving servers treat sudden volume from an unknown sender as spam; ramp-up is how legitimate senders build reputation.