Glossary
The vocabulary of professional contact data
Short definitions of the terms you will meet on ExpressReach and in your sales, recruiting and data-quality work.
- Account qualification
- Checking a target company before investing sales time: who holds the function you sell to, and whether that contact is current.
- Bounce
- An email that could not be delivered. Hard bounces (address does not exist) should be removed from a list; soft bounces (full mailbox, temporary error) may be retried.
- Buying committee
- The group of people involved in a purchasing decision at a company — the function that uses, the one that pays and the one that signs.
- Career history
- The succession of roles and employers a professional has published about themselves: current position, past positions, location.
- Catch-all domain
- A mail domain that accepts every address, which makes individual deliverability impossible to confirm. Results from such domains are flagged as unverifiable.
- Decision-maker
- The person who holds the function your product or offer is addressed to, and who can take or influence the decision.
- Deliverability
- Whether an email address can actually receive mail, checked through the domain's mail servers without sending a message.
- Directory listing
- An entry in a published business or telephone directory: the holder as listed, the number, the address of the establishment.
- Disposable address
- A temporary mailbox created for a one-off sign-up. Flagged by verification so it is not used for follow-up.
- Email format
- The pattern a company uses for its business addresses (first.last@, f.last@, first@…), derived from published addresses on the domain.
- Enrichment
- Completing a contact record with additional professional details (company, role, business email, office number) from public and professional sources.
- Fair use
- The usage limits of the subscription, such as the number of detailed reports per month.
- Homonym
- Two professionals with the same name. Adding the company or the city is what separates them in a people search.
- Line type
- Whether a phone number is a landline, a mobile, a VoIP line or a premium-rate number. Useful to know what kind of line you are about to call.
- Numbering plan
- The structure of a country's phone numbers: country code, prefixes, length and the ranges assigned to each line type.
- Public source
- Information anyone can read without logging in: company websites, public professional profiles, published directories.
- Reverse email lookup
- Starting from an email address to find the professional and the company it belongs to, when published sources allow it.
- Reverse phone lookup
- Starting from a phone number to find the publicly listed holder — usually a business or a directory entry. Unlisted numbers return nothing.
- Role address
- A generic mailbox such as info@ or sales@. Fine to contact a company, not a person.
- Sales intelligence
- The practice of collecting and verifying professional information about companies and decision-makers to prioritise and prepare outreach.
- Switchboard
- The main published line of a company or establishment, from which calls are routed to a function or a person.
- Talent sourcing
- Identifying and reaching professionals who match an open role before they apply, through the professional profiles they published.
- Unlisted number
- A phone number whose holder asked not to appear in directories. Such numbers are not returned by the service.
- Verification
- Confirming that a contact detail is valid and current — a deliverable email address, an active line, a company still active.
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