Which English sales terms do you need at work?
English sales vocabulary sorts into three groups: finding customers ("lead", "prospect", "cold call", "follow-up"), offers and deals ("quote", "discount", "order", "close a deal") and targets and numbers ("sales target", "revenue", "profit", "commission"). Watch the typical traps: the department is "sales", a price for specific goods is usually a "quote", and the German "Provision" is "commission".
- Three groups: customers, deals, numbers.
- False friends: "Provision" = commission, "Rabatt" = discount.
- The department is "sales", with an "s".
B1 · Sector Vocabulary · 10 minSales English for work, taught brick by brick.
A structured lesson for B1 learners who deal with sales, selling or account management at work. Hear the core sales terms in context, meet the organising idea from a human tutor, then practise the vocabulary in interactive drills and a final quiz. The typical traps for German speakers, such as "Sale", "Angebot", "Rabatt" and "Provision", are included. It takes about ten minutes and nothing requires a signup.
- CEFR levelB1 · Intermediate
- Time to completeAbout 10 minutes
- SkillsVocabulary, Listening, Writing, Speaking
- Bricks10 blocks
01 / 06
What sales English at work covers
If you work in sales or with sales teams, you talk about customers, offers and numbers every day — and in international companies, often in English. You may know many of the terms already, because German sales jargon uses words like "Lead", "Deal" or "Sales" too. That is exactly why a closer look pays off: some German words look or sound English but mean something else in English. The core vocabulary sorts into three groups. The first group describes how you find customers: "lead", "prospect", "cold call", "follow-up" and "pipeline". The second group is about offers and deals: "quote", "offer", "list price", "discount", "order" and "close a deal". The third group covers targets and numbers: "sales target", "sales figures", "revenue", "profit" and "commission". If you file each new word into one of these groups, you can keep track of them and recognise more quickly what a conversation is about. This lesson follows exactly that order and shows you, for each group, where German speakers tend to stumble — above all with "Vertrieb", "Angebot", "Rabatt" and "Provision".
02 / 06
Finding customers: leads, prospects and cold calls
The department that sells is "sales" or "the sales department", and if you work there, you say "I work in sales". A person who sells for a company, often out in the field, is "a sales rep", short for "sales representative"; "salesperson" is the gender-neutral word. A possible customer is "a prospect", and many teams call a contact who has already shown interest "a lead" — exactly where the line lies differs a little from company to company. New contacts come from trade fairs, the website or recommendations, for example. A call to someone you have had no contact with before is "a cold call"; the verb is "to cold-call someone". After a first conversation comes "a follow-up", an email or a call that continues the contact. As a verb, you "follow up on a lead" or "follow up with a customer": "I'll follow up with them next week." All the possible deals you are working on at the moment make up your "pipeline": "We have twelve deals in the pipeline." Large, especially important customers are "key accounts", and the person who looks after them is "a key account manager". Customers you already have are "existing customers"; work won from new customers is often called "new business": "Most of our revenue comes from existing customers."
03 / 06
Offers, prices and closing the deal
The German word "Angebot" has several English equivalents. When a customer wants to know what specific goods or services will cost, you send them "a quote", or more formally "a quotation": "Could you send us a quote for 200 office chairs?" A detailed offer for a project, with a suggested solution and prices, is often called "a proposal". "An offer" is broader: a special offer, a job offer, or what you offer in a negotiation ("Our best offer is 5% off the list price"). The normal price before any reduction is "the list price", and the reduction itself is "a discount": "We can offer you a 10% discount on orders over 500 units." The conditions of payment are the "payment terms", for example "payment within 30 days". When the customer buys, they "place an order", and you confirm it with "an order confirmation". On the customer's side, the order document is often "a purchase order", and the department that buys is "the purchasing department". For the deal itself, there are fixed combinations: "close a deal", "win a contract" or "sign a contract". When you discuss terms, you "negotiate the price" or "negotiate a deal". And when a deal goes through, a short sentence is enough: "We closed the deal yesterday."
04 / 06
Targets, revenue and commission
In sales, a lot gets measured. What you are expected to sell in a period is your "sales target", in some companies also your "quota". You "meet", "reach" or, more informally, "hit" a target, and if it does not work out, you "miss" it: "We missed our target by 5%." The amount or value sold is your "sales figures" or simply "sales": "Sales rose by 8% in the second quarter." Here "sales" means the figures, not the department. The money that comes in from sales is "revenue" or "sales"; "turnover" is common too, but it can also mean the rate at which staff leave a company ("staff turnover"). The key distinction is between revenue and "profit": profit is what is left after all costs. The sentence "Revenue was €4 million, but profit was only €200,000" shows the difference. A prediction for the coming months is "a sales forecast". People in sales often earn "commission" on top of their basic salary, a share of the value of what they sell: "She earns 5% commission on every deal." If most of your pay comes this way, you "work on commission". An extra payment for reaching a target is "a bonus". For reporting numbers, a few verbs are enough: sales "rise" or "fall", "go up" or "go down", and a figure can be "up" or "down" compared with the year before: "Revenue is up 12% on last year."
05 / 06
False friends: Sale, Provision, Rabatt and co.
Sales has a few false friends that trip up even experienced learners. First, "Sale": in German shop windows, "Sale" means reduced prices. In English, "a sale" is first of all one act of selling ("make a sale"), though "a sale" can also be a time when prices are reduced ("the summer sale"). The department and the field of work, by contrast, are "sales": "I work in sales", "our sales team". Second, "Provision": your German Provision is "commission" in English. English "provision" usually means supplying something ("the provision of services") or a clause in a contract or a law. Third, "Rabatt": a price reduction when you buy is "a discount". English "rebate" normally means money paid back after you have paid, for example a refund for buying large quantities. Fourth, "Prämie": an extra payment for good results is "a bonus"; "a premium" is, for example, the amount you pay for insurance or an extra charge on top of a price. Fifth, "Gewinn": the English noun "win" is a victory or a success ("a big win for the team"), but the money a company makes after all costs is its "profit". You will find more pairs like these in the lesson "false-friends-de-en-1". Learn such words deliberately together: the misleading German word and its English equivalent right beside it.
06 / 06
Sales English at work
In conversations with customers, you mostly need these words in short, polite sentences. When you announce a quote: "I'll send you a quote by Friday." When you offer a discount: "We can offer you a discount on larger orders." When you follow up: "I'm just following up on the quote I sent last week." When you report internally: "We closed three deals this month, and we're at 85% of our sales target." Watch the word order. German often puts the main verb at the end of the sentence: „Wir können Ihnen einen Rabatt anbieten.“ In sentences like this, English puts "offer" early, right after "can", and only then come the person and the thing: "We can offer you a discount." Politeness works differently, too: English has only "you" for both Sie and du, so politeness comes from phrases such as "Could you…?" or "Would you like…?". When you have to turn down a customer's request, "I'm afraid we can't go below this price" sounds much friendlier than a short "No". Practise these sentences aloud once, and they will be there when it counts.