Katrina Oko-Odoi
Sr. Content Marketing Manager
Trying to keep up with CRM terminology can be downright dizzying. It seems like every company out there has its own definition for terms related to customer relationship management, and with new CRM buzzwords popping up all the time, trying to keep up can be exhausting.
That’s why we created this unabridged CRM glossary that includes our must-know CRM definitions to help broaden your knowledge.
A comprehensive alphabetical list of CRM definitions
Here are all the must-know definitions to make understanding CRM terminology a bit more manageable:
Account/Company: An organization you’re engaged with or hope to do business with in the future. More than one Person can be associated with a Company record.
Activities: The actions and tasks related to prospects and customers that are performed and tracked inside a CRM system.
Administrator: Also known as Admins, they’re users with access to all your CRM’s features. Admins can add users, control access, and adjust system settings.
Analytics: An overview of a company’s data via reports that include information on revenue, performance and more. Analytics help organizations track and understand success around key performance indicators (KPIs).
Automation: The process of making manual business tasks, like scheduling meetings and assigning tasks, automated to save time and resources. This is often referred to as workflow automation.
Company/Account: An organization you’re engaged with or hope to do business with in the future. More than one Person can be associated with a Company record.
Contacts: People who you communicate with about business opportunities. Contacts can be partners, suppliers, a point of contact, board member, mutual connection or someone else who connects you to potential prospects.
Contact role: A contact role refers to a contact’s position in relation to an Opportunity or Account. Some contact roles include owner, CEO, decision-maker, influencer, administrative staff, buyer and more.
CRM: CRM is an acronym that stands for customer relationship management, and it refers to the strategies, processes and tools used to improve customer relationships. A CRM system is a software solution that helps manage customer relationships.
Customer data: Any information related to a customer or contact that has been shared with your organization. This can include names, basic contact information and more in-depth information about the customer’s preferences and habits.
Customer journey: The entire customer lifecycle from the first moment of interest to the first purchase, throughout the purchasing cycle and post-sale and loyalty/advocacy stages.
Dashboard: A visual representation of your company’s critical data, including key performance indicators (KPIs) and other pertinent information.
Field: A single piece of data inside a Record (like email address, name, opportunity value).
Email templates: Templates that enable you to send the same email to different recipients at different times without having to manually retype it each time.
Export: The process of gathering and transferring data from a system (like CRM) to an external source(s).
Invoice: A document issued by a seller to a purchaser that includes the products or services rendered, quantities and the total price/payment due.
Integrations: An integration links your CRM system to other business software — like Gmail, Google Drive, Quickbooks, Mailchimp, RingCentral, Slack and more.
Import: The process of collecting and transferring data from external sources into your CRM system.
Knowledge base: A digital space where organizations store all their support documents for customers, prospects and/or employees.
Get the latest from our blog every month
Lead/prospect: Also referred to as prospects, these are people who have shown interest in your company or product. Leads may be physically separated from your regular contacts in the CRM system, and get converted to Contacts once you’ve engaged with them and have identified a potential opportunity.
Lead conversion rate: The number of successfully closed leads divided by the total number of leads pursued.
Lead generation: The processes and activities performed to identify potential customers and their contact info.
Lead management: Lead management is the practice of finding, engaging and nurturing prospects to move them further down the sales funnel.
Lead qualification: The process of deciding whether leads are worth pursuing further, at which point they typically are converted into marketing qualified leads (MQLs) or sales qualified leads (SQLs).
Multi-select field: A field that lets you choose more than one value. For example, an agency CRM might need multiple options for the services the prospect is interested in, so rather than having a drop-down selection, users could choose SEO, PPC, Video Marketing and Social Media rather than just selecting one field.
Nurturing: The process of warming leads up and keeping them engaged with your brand. The process involves monitoring processes, building relationships, providing education and more, with the goal of pushing them farther down the buyer’s journey.
Opportunity: A request for service, potential partnership, potential business deal, prospective sale or open case that your company tracks from beginning to end.
Opportunity stage: The step at which an opportunity falls in the buying cycle. Some common examples of opportunity stages include:
- Prospecting
- Qualification
- Negotiation
- Closed won
- Closed lost
Person: An individual contact, including a prospect, business partner, customer, vendor, board member or other stakeholder with whom your company has a relationship.
Pipeline: A visual representation of critical stages that your opportunities might go through. Often referred to as a sales pipeline.
Pipeline stages: Where a prospect is in the sales cycle, represented visually.
Prospect/lead: Also known as leads, prospects are people who have shown interest in your company or product. Prospects may be physically separated from your regular contacts in your CRM system, and get converted to Contacts once you’ve engaged with them and have identified a potential opportunity.
Record: Any account found in your CRM system. Common record types include “Person,” “Company” and “Opportunity.”
Recurring event: An activity or event that occurs repeatedly.
Relationship management: The primary purpose of CRM software is to build and maintain relationships with your organization’s current and potential customers and other stakeholders, like partners or investors.
CRM for growing businesses
Build better relationships with Copper
Start a free 14-day trial to see why small and mid-size businesses love Copper.
Report: Data presented in an easy-to-digest format that often includes visuals.
Roles: A user’s status within an organization’s user hierarchy inside the CRM system that illustrates which team members have access and visibility to what data.
Segmentation: Categorizing and separating customers into separate groups based on their behavior, demographics and/or purchasing patterns.
Software as a service (SaaS): Cloud-based CRM software sold via a subscription service, instead of needing to be installed on your local devices. (Many of today’s leading tech companies are product-led SaaS organizations).
Tag: A unique identifier to help group records together. Tags are more flexible than fields and can be removed and added easily.
Tasks: Day-to-day activities like emails, meetings and phone calls.
User: A person that has access to your CRM system. Depending on their role and permissions, the user can create and manage Records inside the CRM system.
Use your CRM knowledge to level up your customer relationship management
Whether you’re a real estate company just getting started with CRM software or a business consulting firm looking to power up your customer relationship management knowledge, this glossary can help you do just that.
If you’re ready to start building better business relationships, we can help. Copper is the only CRM that’s a Recommended for Google Workspace app, and we’re laser-focused on helping our customers strengthen their customer relationships – no complicated jargon required.
