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There’s a ton of CRM terminology out there, and learning it all can seem like a mammoth task. Our comprehensive CRM term glossary provides you with a breakdown of the terminology you NEED to know to simplify your CRM journey and ensure you’re always in the loop!
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A shared CRM vocabulary boosts team performance
Understanding key terms like “sales pipeline,” “lead attribution,” and “automation” ensures smoother communication between sales, marketing, and support teams—leading to faster onboarding, better collaboration, and more efficient processes.
CRM tools are only as effective as your understanding of them
Grasping concepts such as workflow automation, sales forecasting, and reporting enables professionals to unlock the full strategic potential of their CRM—driving better data analysis, customer engagement, and revenue outcomes.
Clear definitions drive alignment across departments
By standardizing terms like “lead,” “funnel report,” and “activity tracking,” marketing and sales teams can stay aligned on goals, qualification criteria, and performance metrics—reducing friction and improving handoffs.
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Understanding the correct CRM terminology and how to use it properly can go a long way to enhancing the user experience and make it easier to collaborate with team members. Knowing the names of the various related tools and elements can also reduce the CRM learning curve and improve CRM adoption across your organization.
That’s why we’ve compiled a comprehensive list of all the most important CRM terms to help you come to grips with these vital terms. This list covers every critical CRM term there is and more to ensure absolute clarity for you and your team. With it, your team can maximize the capabilities of your CRM system to boost sales performance and revenue.
Our full list is below, but we felt it best to start with our top 10 most crucial terms to know!
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a strategy businesses employ to better understand and enhance interactions and relationships with prospects and customers.
This process involves using CRM software to organize and manage customer data, which is used to develop better customer experiences and encourage an increase in customer lifetime value.
A lead is a company or person who has shown interest in your products or services and has been added to your CRM system as a lead at the start of your sales pipeline.
A sales lead can be unqualified when it first enters the sales funnel or qualified by the sales and marketing teams as a prospective customer. The company or person remains a lead until they either abandon the sales process or buy your product or service and become a customer.
A sales pipeline illustrates the steps your leads take as they move to the conversion stage and the activities and tasks your sales team takes to get them there.
It allows you to see all the opportunities in your pipeline at a glance and identify areas that work well and those that may require improvement. You can create multiple sales pipelines within your CRM for different products, services, and workflow processes.
A sales process is a system outlining your company’s sales approach to nurturing prospects and leads and closing deals.
This process details each step your sales reps should take to successfully move leads through your sales pipeline. With a CRM system supporting your sales process, you can map out and automate tasks and activities within the process to guide your sales team and boost productivity.
Automation is the process of using technology to automatically perform specified activities, usually sales, marketing, and customer service tasks.
Utilizing automation features in CRM improves team efficiency, allowing team members to focus on nurturing and converting leads. You can set up an automation action to take place based on a particular trigger.
An integration is a connection between your CRM system and another application that allows data transfer between them.
Modern CRM solutions like Nutshell offer native integrations, one-click integrations, and third-party integrations via applications like Zapier. Integrations enhance CRM functionality and streamline processes through automation.
Lead attribution is a process used to determine which marketing channels bring leads to your business.
CRMs with the lead attribution feature allow you to monitor where your best leads come from and provide insight into which channels you should focus on to improve your marketing and lead generation efforts.
A sales activity report provides an overview of sales team activities over a specified period.
You can generate a sales activity report in your CRM system to monitor your sales team’s actions and interactions with customers and leads over any given period. Activities detailed in your sales activity report include emails, phone calls, meetings, and more, which can be logged manually or set up to log automatically.
A sales forecast is a type of report that provides a projection of future sales and revenue figures.
You can generate a sales forecast report within your CRM to help you manage pipeline activities and plan for upcoming periods. Your CRM system uses historical sales data, trends, and other factors to make these predictions, which support strategic decision-making and resource allocation.
A sales funnel report helps you determine how well your sales funnel performs.
It gives you an overview of all the deals in your sales pipeline and their value, breaking them down per pipeline stage. The sales funnel report also provides metrics such as your average deal size and conversion rate per stage. With it, you can identify roadblocks within your sales funnel and make more accurate sales predictions for the current period.
A 360-degree customer view describes an all-encompassing overview of everything related to your customers, made possible with the right CRM.
You may have heard sales and marketing CRM users mention the 360-degree client or customer view. It includes each point of contact, conversation, marketing strategy, and experience with your business that influences their relationship with your brand.
Accounts are companies and organizations your business deals with in some way.
For instance, customer accounts are those to which you provide goods or services, while supplier accounts are ones from which you receive materials, parts, products, or services. Accounts in your CRM system will include the company or organization’s contact information, payment terms, correspondence, and important documentation.
Account management software allows you to organize and manage information related to the companies and organizations you work with.
Contact and account management is one of the core features of a CRM system, but this software lets you do more than just manage data. With account management software, you can track interactions and business dealings with accounts and the individuals linked to them, so you’re always in the loop.
Your account settings are the settings in your CRM system that allow you to customize your interface according to your preferences.
Modern CRM systems offer several customization options, including how company and contact information is displayed. Altering your account settings offers possibilities for organizing contact and company information the way you prefer, such as contact details, communication history, related tasks and activities, notes, and more.
An action is any step your team or system takes to complete a task within your pipeline or workflow.
Automations within your pipelines and workflows rely on specified triggers that initiate pre-determined actions. Actions could include logging a call, sending an email, updating information within a contact record, and much more.
Activities are actions performed by your team members related to leads, people, and companies in your CRM.
These include emails, phone calls, meetings (in-person or virtual), and more. You can log activities manually or set up automations to log them when triggered by a specific action. And they can be tracked by generating an activity report within your CRM.
Ad-hoc reporting in CRM involves drawing once-off reports to obtain highly specific data when needed.
In other words, ad-hoc reports are not part of your regular monthly/weekly reporting. Equipped with business intelligence (BI) features, your CRM system can deliver detailed analytics and reports related to your sales, marketing, and service efforts on an ad-hoc basis.
An administrator is a CRM user with full access to your platform’s features, functionality, and data.
Administrators are responsible for overseeing CRM system usage and managing user permissions and access to information. They make sure that the system is configured correctly and runs as it should.
An alert is a type of notification generated when a specific action is performed or an event takes place within your CRM.
The purpose of the alert is to let users know when a significant action or event has occurred to ensure they respond promptly. When these actions and events relate to customers and leads, alerts help to ensure quick response times and positive customer experiences.
Analytics in CRM refers to data analysis that gives your business insights into sales, marketing, support, and company performance.
Your CRM system will analyze various data sets, including customer behavior and sales trends, to help you with strategic planning and decision-making. Leveraging the analytics features in CRM software can reveal revenue-boosting opportunities and ideas for improving efficiency.
An API (application programming interface) lets different software applications integrate and communicate with each other using various tools, protocols, and routines.
With an API, you can seamlessly link and exchange data between your CRM software and other systems to improve your business tech stack and overall functionality.
In CRM, tools and features that fall under the artificial intelligence (AI) umbrella are programs that perform intelligent tasks on their own.
Without AI, these tasks would require human intervention, such as logical thinking, analysis, perception, and decision-making. Your CRM software uses AI to summarize account timelines and Zoom call transcriptions, take voice-to-text notes, write emails, and more.
An assignment rule is a rule specified by a CRM user that automatically assigns contacts and leads to team members based on predefined criteria.
With it, you can ensure the correct sales, marketing, or customer support team members receive and take responsibility for contact assignments relevant to them. Assignments can typically be sent to specific users, or through a round-robin system, ensuring fair distribution.
An audit log is a record created by your CRM showing specific actions taken by users within your system.
The types of actions recorded in an audit log include user logins, list exports, bulk edits, and more.
An authentication token is a protocol that grants users access to APIs within a CRM system.
It ensures authenticated and secure interactions between systems and software. These tokens help to safeguard sensitive customer and company data and maintain security.
An autoresponder is a tool that automatically sends follow-up emails based on a specified rule or at scheduled intervals.
Autoresponders help teams maintain engagement with prospects and customers. Using an autoresponder saves team members time and ensures your company remains top-of-mind. Your CRM system should give you access to email marketing tools with autoresponder capabilities.
Automation is the process of using technology to automatically perform specified activities, usually sales, marketing, and customer service tasks.
Utilizing automation features in CRM improves team efficiency, allowing team members to focus on nurturing and converting leads. You can set up an automation action to take place based on a particular trigger.
BANT is a term your sales team will use when engaging prospects at the lead qualification stage of the sales pipeline.
It’s an acronym for the words Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing. This acronym defines a specific qualification framework that helps sales teams identify prospective leads based on these four criteria.
Board view is one of the pipeline layout options you can choose to view and manage the leads and deals in your pipeline.
This view lets users see all leads within the pipeline in a Kanban board layout. With different view options like board view, you can customize lead cards to match the needs of your teams and organization.
Most CRM solutions allow you to simultaneously send emails to a large group of customers, known as bulk email.
With bulk email, you can send important marketing messages quickly and efficiently to your customer base or segmented customer list. Nutshell gives you access to professionally designed email templates to make creating and sending eye-catching bulk emails even easier.
A business card scanner lets you scan a business card with your mobile device and automatically create a contact or lead within your CRM using the information from the card.
Nutshell’s business card scanner is available through the Nutshell mobile app on Apple and Android. It saves a photo of the scanned business card as an attachment to the contact record created for future reference.
Business intelligence (BI) refers to tools within your CRM software that help you analyze data to support business decision-making.
These tools offer comprehensive evaluation of information from CRM analytics, data mining, visualization, and more.
Calendar sync refers to the process of synchronizing your email platform calendar with your CRM system.
Synchronizing your CRM and calendar brings all your appointments, meetings, and events into a central hub. This makes it easy to book meetings within your CRM or email software and view your calendar where you work.
Campaigns include promotional activities aimed at achieving a particular goal.
Your company’s campaigns could include launching a new product/service, increasing sales with a special offer, etc. The marketing department usually executes these, and they often include segmenting target audiences and running email drip sequences using the email marketing features of a CRM system.
Campaign management refers to overseeing activities related to running a marketing campaign.
These activities typically include planning, executing, and analyzing the campaigns’ results. Campaign managers will leverage
When a customer or team member raises an issue related to an account, it’s called a case, ticket, or inquiry.
These issues could be as minor as a requested update in contact information and are typically assigned to a customer support workflow within your CRM to be addressed by your customer support team.
Case escalation describes a procedure based on predefined rules to bring unresolved customer issues to the attention of teams at a higher level.
These processes are designed to speed up case resolution and improve the customer experience.
Like BANT, CHAMP is an acronym for a prospect qualification framework.
CHAMP is based on the following criteria: Challenges, Authority, Money, and Prioritization. It’s a more recent approach to qualifying leads, focusing on starting the conversation with the prospect’s challenges versus their budget.
A CRM changelog is a record of any changes that have taken place within a contact’s timeline.
Viewing your changelog effortlessly tracks and views engagement and actions across people, companies, and lead accounts within your CRM system.
Channels refer to both internal and external conduits for communication and collaboration.
Internal channels allow employees to share sensitive information securely. On the other hand, external channels, such as email, social media, etc., provide a means for companies and brands to deliver messages to their target audience.
Chart view is one of the pipeline layout options available within your CRM system.
Opting for a chart view allows you to see all the leads in a given pipeline in the form of a chart. Nutshell offers several layout options, allowing you to set up and view your pipeline in a way that makes the most sense for your sales process.
Click-through rate (CTR) refers to the rate at which a call-to-action or link within your email or ad campaign is clicked.
It’s calculated by dividing the total number of clicks within a campaign by the total number of emails sent or ad impressions and is represented by a percentage.
Click-to-call refers to an action users can take to call contacts directly from their CRM systems using click-to-call software.
CRM systems offer either native click-to-call solutions or integration with click-to-call software, making it easier for sales reps to make and manage phone calls.
A closed sale is a deal that has reached the end of the sales cycle or pipeline.
Closed sales include lost and won opportunities, but in both cases, they refer to the lead making a decision—either to buy and become a customer or to decline your offer.
A cloud-based CRM system is CRM software hosted online in the cloud.
Cloud-based CRMs are accessible from any device with an internet connection, giving teams flexibility and ease of access wherever they work. They minimize the need for a localized office infrastructure and support remote teams.
A connected form is a web form created using a third-party or native app that you connect to your CRM.
This connection allows your CRM system to capture prospect information entered into the form and create a new person, company, or lead within the system.
Contacts are people or companies stored in your CRM system.
Your sales, marketing, and support teams will deal with a specific person or people at a company known as a contact, whether they’re resolving a case, nurturing a lead, or building a relationship with an account. You’ll store detailed contact information and notes related to interactions with contacts in the contact record within your CRM.
Contact roles indicate the relationship between a particular person (contact) and a company account, lead, or case within your CRM.
For example, a specific contact may be the administrator of a particular account. Contacts can have multiple roles, depending on the account, lead, or case and the part they play in relation to it.
Contact management refers to the organization, monitoring, and overseeing of contact data within your CRM system.
A CRM is the ultimate contact management tool, helping you seamlessly store, clean, enrich, sort, group, list, tag, filter, and share contact data across your organization.
Contract management involves overseeing contract lifecycles, whether held with customers, suppliers, or partners.
A contract management system makes organizing, storing, and monitoring contract expiration and renewal dates and updates easy. You can integrate your CRM with advanced contract management systems to bring everything into your central CRM hub and streamline processes.
Conversion rate refers to the rate at which leads convert to customers.
You can calculate your conversion rate by dividing the number of deals won by the total number of leads brought into your pipeline over a specific period. This will give you your conversion rate over that period, expressed as a percentage.
When the status of your prospect or lead changes, it’s known as a converted lead.
This typically refers to a prospect your sales team has qualified as a worthwhile lead, in which case a lead account is created for the prospect in your CRM system.
CPQ is an acronym for Configure, Price, and Quote, which outlines a process sales reps follow to ensure they provide their prospects and customers with the best offering and proposal.
More specifically, it relates to configuring proposed products/services according to customer needs, calculating the price for the offering, and generating a quote to present to the customer.
Analytical reporting within your CRM system is the process of generating reports to examine customer data stored in your CRM platform.
These reports are used to identify patterns and trends related to customer buying behavior, demographics, and more. Businesses use the information gathered from CRM analytical reporting to make informed decisions about sales, marketing, and customer support strategies.
CRM software is a technological tool designed to help businesses manage and analyze prospect and customer relationships, interactions, and data.
Businesses use CRMs to store account information, communication records, notes, cases, queries, purchases, and more. CRM software is also often referred to as a CRM system or CRM platform.
A CSV (comma-separated values) file is a spreadsheet format used for exporting and importing data.
It’s a standard file format used for transferring contact data to your CRM system and can be created using spreadsheet, text editor, or database management software.
A customer database is a repository of information related to your customers.
Your customer database can include contact details, company information, job title, industry, products purchased, and more. Uploading and storing your customer database to your CRM system makes managing, grouping, and engaging your contacts easier.
Customer experience (CX) is a prospect or customer’s overall impression of a company after engaging with its brand and employees.
CRM systems provide insights into customer interactions, preferences, and behaviors and help deliver more personalized experiences to improve customer perception and satisfaction.
Customer experience management (CXM or CEM) is the strategic practice of overseeing and improving engagement with prospects and customers at every touchpoint.
Companies use tools, such as a CRM solution, to design and manage interactions to enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty. With a CRM system in place, teams across your organization have quick access to the same accurate information, giving them the information they need to provide the best possible service.
The customer journey describes the path a customer takes with a business or brand, from initial company awareness to interactions after making a purchase.
In other words, every interaction, touchpoint, and experience a customer has with the business forms part of their customer journey. Mapping current customer journey’s gives you insight into the potential journeys of prospective customers, helping you optimize your sales and marketing processes.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a strategy businesses employ to better understand and enhance interactions and relationships with prospects and customers.
This process involves using CRM software to organize and manage customer data, which is used to develop better customer experiences and encourage an increase in customer lifetime value.
Customer self-service (CSS) relates to tools and systems implemented by companies that empower customers to find information and resolve issues independently.
This way, customers can deal with any potential problems in their own time and without assistance from a customer support team. Businesses usually offer CSS services via their website or an online or cloud-based portal, including a knowledge base, peer-driven communities, information requests, support tickets, and more.
The tools used to streamline and automate customer support processes are known as customer service and support (CSS or CS&S) automation software.
Customers can interact with CSS platforms to lodge complaints and resolve issues through a ticketing or call management system. A company help desk is an example of this.
Customer success management is the process of helping customers achieve their goals after they become customers.
Also called account management, it encompasses the tools, individuals, and systems companies employ to ensure customer success. This process aims to retain customers through quality products and services, positive engagement, relationship building, and long-term customer satisfaction.
Custom fields refer to contact data fields within your CRM system that you can tailor to meet your specific company needs.
These fields allow you to personalize the information your team captures when entering contact data. They also provide additional options for contact list filtering and custom reporting.
A CRM dashboard visually represents key metrics and data at a glance.
It provides real-time insights into sales performance and trends. Customizable dashboards allow you to prioritize the data and metrics most important to your organization. Setting up your CRM dashboard according to your needs lets you make quick, informed decisions.
Data enrichment is the enhancement of company, people, and lead data within your CRM.
Enriching your data provides sales, marketing, and customer service teams with deeper insights into their contacts. Data can be enriched with all sorts of useful information, including a company’s history, a person’s social interests, and a lead’s past purchases and current competitor considerations.
When you first set up your CRM software, you’ll need to perform a data import, which involves importing all your current contact data into the system.
Your CRM may offer a few different ways to do this, but the most common method is uploading a contacts list in CSV format. With Nutshell, you can also import data via an address book, phone contacts, email marketing platform, or another CRM system. You can also take advantage of our white-glove data import services.
Data security describes the measures taken to protect customer data within your CRM software.
With adequate security in place, sensitive customer data should remain private and safe from a cyberattack. Robust data security practices ensure that your business meets regulations regarding sharing and storing personal information and go a long way to building customer trust.
A dead lead is a lead that has removed itself from the buying process.
This person or company has indicated a lack of interest in your products or services, usually by telling you outright that they aren’t interested. When sales teams identify a dead lead, they typically avoid pursuing it.
A deal is a potential revenue-generating event or sales opportunity with monetary value linked to a lead within your CRM pipeline.
Sales teams are responsible for moving leads through your pipeline to close the deal and convert the lead to a customer. When managed effectively, deals provide essential data for forecasting and sales target achievement.
Demand generation is the process of a company executing a targeted marketing strategy to generate awareness and interest in its brand, products, and services.
The objective is to attract potential customers and drive sales where prospects are not yet aware of your product or service. In essence, these campaigns aim to create demand where none exists.
Email automation is the process of automatically sending templated emails to your prospects and customers.
You can set up automated emails to send to your recipients from your CRM platform when a specific trigger occurs. A trigger could be an event, action, or activity, such as completing a sales call or moving a lead from one stage of the sales pipeline to the next.
An email drip sequence is a series of templated emails set up to send to recipients in a scheduled sequence.
Sales and marketing teams may create drip sequences within their CRMs for email campaigns targeting a specific audience with messages encouraging them to take a particular action. Depending on the nature of the campaign, you can configure a drip sequence to stop sending to a recipient when they respond to an email.
Email marketing is an umbrella term encompassing everything related to sending emails to leads and customers to encourage some form of conversion.
Whether an individual personalized email breaking down the benefits of your products or a campaign sent to an extensive mailing list to promote a free resource, it all falls under email marketing. Modern CRM systems like Nutshell provide comprehensive email marketing tools to help you nurture and engage with leads and customers.
Email marketing migration describes the process of migrating email marketing data from a third-party tool to CRM email marketing software.
Companies that use a third-party email marketing tool may want to migrate to the native email marketing software in their CRM system for a more integrated solution. Facilitating your email marketing activities from your CRM makes it easier to manage and segment audiences using your stored contact data.
Email sync refers to automatically synchronizing emails, calendar events, and contacts between your CRM system and email client.
Linking these ensures you can track and record all email communication within your CRM. This provides you with a complete history of your email interactions with a contact and improves collaboration among team members.
An email template is a pre-designed email format you can customize and reuse.
Email templates streamline professional email, newsletter, and broadcast creation, allow sales and marketing teams to save time, and ensure their messages align with the company’s brand and vision.
An email writing assistant is a tool within a CRM system that uses AI to help you write and improve the quality of your emails.
These tools help sales, marketing, and support teams quickly craft effective emails to engage with contacts effectively, saving them time.
An escalation occurs when a team on the front lines needs assistance from a more senior or specialized team to resolve a customer’s issue.
Efficient escalation processes help ensure swift resolution of customer problems and reduce operational costs. Implementing a solid escalation process within your organization can also promote positive customer experiences.
The first touch is the point at which a prospective customer experiences their initial contact with a business or brand.
Potential touchpoints include the business’s website, a social media post, a Google ad, a landing page, etc. Each touchpoint is designed to encourage prospects to engage further with the brand beyond their first touch, leading them into the business’s conversion funnel.
Funnel velocity is the time it takes for a prospect to move from one pipeline stage to the next within your sales funnel.
A high funnel velocity relates to a lead moving quickly through the funnel, while a low funnel velocity indicates a slower sales cycle. Determining your funnel velocity between stages can help you pinpoint any potential roadblocks and areas for improvement.
A health score is a metric used to assess the overall well-being of your business’s relationship with a customer.
You can use your CRM to determine and denote an account or email health score for a contact based on factors like engagement, satisfaction, and activity levels. Assigning a health score to your customer accounts helps your team prioritize low-scoring accounts for retention efforts.
A lead is considered “hot” if the lead indicates that they have significant intent to purchase your products or services.
Sales reps can manually mark a lead as “hot” in their CRM systems or set up sales automations triggered by a specific action to automatically mark a lead as “hot.” Actions that trigger an automated hot lead categorization are those identified as common among customers who made a purchase.
An integration is a connection between your CRM system and another application that allows data transfer between them.
Modern CRM solutions like Nutshell offer native integrations, one-click integrations, and third-party integrations via applications like Zapier. Integrations enhance CRM functionality and streamline processes through automation.
When a lead is categorized as “junk,” it means the prospect does not meet the minimum requirements of a qualified lead.
Junk leads are typically removed from the sales process. Regardless of whether a lead is interested in your product or service, if they don’t fit your basic customer criteria, such as being in a region outside your range of business, they’re considered a junk lead.
A knowledge base is an online library of support information for customers, prospects, and employees.
They can access and search this information when they need to know more about the company’s products or services. This digital resource is typically housed on the company website and includes articles to help customers set up services and troubleshoot issues. This is one of the key tools used to boost customer support through self-service.
Last touch refers to the last point at which a prospect or lead engages with your business or brand before buying your product or service and converting to a customer.
A customer’s last touch could be an online interaction, email, call, meeting, and more. Marketers make a point of identifying a customer’s last touch to determine the factors that lead the customer to convert.
A lead is a company or person who has shown interest in your products or services and has been added to your CRM system as a lead at the start of your sales pipeline.
A sales lead can be unqualified when it first enters the sales funnel or qualified by the sales and marketing teams as a prospective customer. The company or person remains a lead until they either abandon the sales process or buy your product or service and become a customer.
Lead advancement is the process of moving a lead through the various stages of your sales pipeline, from first contact to conversion.
Advancement through these stages takes place based on lead qualification and engagement throughout the sales cycle. With effective lead advancement strategies in place, your team can enhance conversion rates and reduce the length of your sales cycle.
Lead assignment refers to the distribution of incoming leads to specific sales teams or representatives.
These assignments typically occur based on predefined criteria to ensure adequate lead follow-up and balance workloads. When done correctly, lead assignment also can potentially increase sales conversion rates.
Lead attribution is a process used to determine which marketing channels bring leads to your business.
CRMs with the lead attribution feature allow you to monitor where your best leads come from and provide insight into which channels you should focus on to improve your marketing and lead generation efforts.
Lead confidence is a measure of how likely a lead is to convert to a customer.
To determine lead confidence, you must consider factors such as engagement, interest, and product fit. The higher the lead confidence score, the more likely the prospect is to purchase your product, making them a priority for your sales team.
The lead conversion process includes all the steps a sales rep or team takes to convert a lead to a customer.
It includes generating and qualifying leads, nurturing them with personalized email sequences, calls, and meetings, and moving them through the sales pipeline to win the deal.
Lead conversion rate measures the percentage of your total potential customers, or leads, who become actual customers over a specified period.
It’s a great way to establish the efficacy of your sales and marketing campaign efforts. A high conversion rate indicates a successful sales process and marketing strategy.
Lead generation is the process of identifying and attracting potential customers and capturing their essential contact information.
This involves creating awareness and interest in your product or service, gathering contact data, and using that information to reach out and nurture leads. Sales teams typically capture lead information within their CRM software. If you’re a Nutshell user, you can take advantage of our ProspectorIQ tool, which searches a database of more than 200 million people and companies to find the ideal prospects and leads for your business.
Lead management is the management of leads throughout the sales process.
This encompasses everything from capturing prospect contact information to building relationships with leads and converting them into paying customers. The process is usually a combined effort between sales and marketing teams and involves lead organization, prioritization, valuation, and nurturing.
The lead qualification process aims to identify whether a prospect meets specific requirements and has the potential to become a customer.
Sales and marketing teams conduct lead qualification assessments, often evaluating factors like budget, authority, need, and timeline (BANT). This process reduces wasted time spent on unqualified leads and increases team productivity and lead conversion rates.
Lead-to-cash is a term that describes the conversion of a lead to a sale.
A lead converts—or becomes a customer—when they make a purchase, which translates to cash (or revenue) for the business. This describes the lead-to-cash point of the sales process.
List view in your CRM software lets you display your pipeline leads in a list format.
Viewing your leads in list form makes it easy to sort and filter the contact data. For some, the list view enhances data accessibility and simplifies the management of a pipeline containing a significant number of leads.
Machine learning is a section of artificial intelligence (AI) that allows systems to learn and improve from experience without additional programming.
These systems use algorithms to evaluate data, pinpoint patterns, predict next steps, and decide on responses. CRM systems include AI tools that use machine learning to improve processes and enhance productivity.
Map view is another lead pipeline display option in your CRM system, allowing you to view leads geographically on a map.
The map view option makes it easy for sales team members to determine lead locations where territory management is essential. It’s also a handy way for outside sales teams to view and plan routes and visits to prospects.
A lead categorized by your marketing team as an ideal customer is referred to as a marketing-accepted lead (MAL).
Your marketing team will consider certain company-specific demographic and geographic parameters to determine MALs. These leads will likely have shown interest in your products and services and may be ready to make a buying decision.
Marketing automation refers to the use of tools and software, such as a CRM system, to streamline marketing team processes through task automation.
Automating repetitive tasks can improve marketing team efficiency, lead nurturing, and customer engagement. Teams can leverage marketing automation to run email campaigns, score leads, personalize messaging, segment audiences, forecasting, and more.
The marketing funnel illustrates the customer journey from their awareness of a brand and its offerings to the purchase stage.
It’s \represented by a cylindrical funnel and visually depicts the different stages the prospective customer goes through, from first touch to conversion, allowing businesses to track progress, spot roadblocks, optimize processes, and measure conversion rates.
Leads deemed by your marketing team as potentially valuable are considered marketing-qualified leads (MQLs).
Marketing-qualified leads in your CRM database are those that have met your marketing team’s qualification criteria and indicated interest in your products and services. Sales teams run MQLs through a qualification process of their own to ensure the prospect is a good fit and worth pursuing.
A meeting scheduler is a vital tool within your CRM platform that lets you book meetings and appointments directly from your CRM.
With a meeting scheduler, you can also synchronize your bookings and events with your synced calendar service. This tool makes it easier to schedule bookings and coordinate your availability, reducing the back-and-forth often associated with setting up appointments.
Natural language processing is a machine learning process that falls under the artificial intelligence (AI) umbrella.
It relates to a machine’s ability to manipulate, evaluate, and comprehend written and spoken human language. CRM systems use NLP to analyze and summarize data and communications, including voice notes and meeting transcriptions.
A new leads report is a document generated by your CRM listing all newly acquired leads within a specified timeframe.
This report provides insights into your team’s lead generation performance and helps you assess the efficacy of your sales outreach and marketing efforts.
A notification is an alert your CRM generates to inform your team members of crucial events related to customers and prospects.
These include task updates and contact responses and help ensure your team takes action or responds promptly. Notifications keep your team on track and prevent critical activities from slipping through the cracks.
Onboarding is the process of getting new users set up and utilizing their CRM systems.
It usually includes formal training and the provision of resources to help users effectively adopt the new system. Implementing a successful onboarding process within your organization ensures your team is comfortable with your CRM software and can leverage its full capabilities.
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Any prospective deal or sale, whether with an existing or new account, can be considered an opportunity.
Once an opportunity is identified, you’ll use your CRM platform to manage and monitor all progress related to the opportunity from the time it enters your sales pipeline until you close the deal.
Opportunity management describes the activities related to managing potential deals within your sales pipeline.
These activities are the primary focus of your sales team. CRM software makes opportunity management easier and allows you to automate tasks and activities within the process, so your sales team can focus on the most critical next-action sales tasks.
Performance tracking involves monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of your sales and marketing efforts.
The reporting and analytics features within your CRM system make it easier to track sales and marketing performance metrics. These metrics offer businesses an opportunity to identify areas for improvement and develop strategies to enhance outcomes. Regular performance tracking also keeps your team aligned with your company’s goals.
A personal email sequence is a series of emails set up to be automatically sent in sequence using pre-written templates but tailored to individual contacts.
These emails are designed to nurture lead and customer relationships and increase conversions and customer loyalty. With automated personal email sequences, your teams can maintain consistent communication and encourage more engagement.
Pipeline distribution refers to allocating leads to relevant pipelines based on your stipulations.
An advanced CRM system offers you the ability to set up multiple pipelines to suit your various processes. Effectively distributing leads to your sales pipelines ensures that your sales team remains efficient and that no lead is left unattended.
Pipeline management involves overseeing your sales pipelines and how your leads progress through them.
Your sales team is predominantly responsible for this process. Part of pipeline management includes sales reps actively nurturing leads from one pipeline stage to the next, with the goal of encouraging a purchase and turning them into customers.
Post-sale activities involve managing customer relationships and providing support after a sale.
An effective post-sale system focuses on activities that promote customer satisfaction, retention, and potential upselling opportunities. These activities are vital for building long-term customer loyalty and increasing customer lifetime value (CLV).
Predictive analytics is a process powered by artificial intelligence (AI) that evaluates and dissects current and historical data.
This AI process leverages sophisticated machine learning, algorithms, and analytics to assess and filter information. Predictive analytics aims to identify and forecast trends and potential key results, so your business can reduce risks and plan and strategize effectively.
A lead’s probability (or probability to close) describes its likelihood of converting to a successful sale.
Probability is a metric stipulated as a percentage, and it typically increases as your lead moves through the pipeline toward closing. Sales team members may seek to determine a lead’s probability to close for progress reports and short-term sales revenue forecasts.
A prospect is a company or individual that meets specific ideal custom criteria and that your sales or marketing team has deemed worthy of pursuing.
Before a potential customer becomes a lead, they enter your CRM pipeline as a prospect. However, they may not have shown interest in your products or services yet. Sales reps must do further research and contact prospects to ask a few discovery questions before qualifying them and converting them into leads.
Prospecting involves identifying and contacting prospective customers to generate new sales leads.
The process typically includes some research, cold email outreach, and an initial phone call or meeting engagement to qualify the leads. Effective prospecting ensures you maintain a healthy sales pipeline, targeting leads that are a good fit for your products and services and driving business growth. Nutshell provides an advanced prospecting tool to help you find prospects and fill your pipeline with leads that are an idea fit for your business.
A raw lead is a company or individual that has engaged with your business or brand in some way but has yet to be qualified by your sales or marketing team.
You would capture information related to this lead through marketing channels, such as a landing page with a gated resource download or through webinar registration.
Relationship intelligence is the process of generating customer or business relationship intelligence data using your CRM software and its stored data.
The intelligence gathered provides your sales, marketing, and customer support teams with crucial information about the history of your business’s relationships with prospective and existing customers.
Remarket leads refer to prospects brought in by your company’s sales and marketing efforts that did not meet all the criteria to qualify them as a lead and could be a good fit for your business in the future.
These leads remain on your marketing team’s audience and mailing lists for retargeting and further nurturing until they’re either ready to enter your sales pipeline or become dead leads.
A reminder is an automated prompt delivered by your CRM software alerting users about upcoming appointments, tasks, follow-ups, and more.
Reminders ensure critical activities don’t fall by the wayside and help keep your team efficient in their interactions with leads and customers. You can set up custom reminders within your CRM to ensure the most important activities for your sales process are attended to in a timely manner.
Reply rate is a measurement of the percentage of recipients who respond to your emails.
You and your team can establish the reply rate for any personal email, bulk email, newsletter, or broadcast you send via your CRM platform. This percentage indicates the success of your email marketing campaigns, and a high reply rate demonstrates a viable strategy.
Roles in a CRM system define the user permissions and access levels the CRM administrator assigns.
These roles are usually determined by user job functions, ensuring appropriate data security and functionality. Clear user role definitions help manage access and protect sensitive information.
A sales-accepted lead (SAL) is a marketing-qualified lead (MQL) considered sales-team ready.
Sales-accepted leads are prospects that your marketing team has reviewed through their lead qualification process and deemed to have met the qualifying criteria for your sales team to engage with and pursue.
A sales activity report provides an overview of sales team activities over a specified period.
You can generate a sales activity report in your CRM system to monitor your sales team’s actions and interactions with customers and leads over any given period. Activities detailed in your sales activity report include emails, phone calls, meetings, and more, which can be logged manually or set up to log automatically.
Sales automation refers to the automated processes teams can set up within their CRM systems to streamline day-to-day activities and improve productivity.
Your CRM system lets you automate several tasks, including sending personal email sequences, generating funnel reports, running sales forecasts, and moving leads from stage to stage through the pipeline when specified actions are taken.
A sales forecast is a type of report that provides a projection of future sales and revenue figures.
You can generate a sales forecast report within your CRM to help you manage pipeline activities and plan for upcoming periods. Your CRM system uses historical sales data, trends, and other factors to make these predictions, which support strategic decision-making and resource allocation.
Not unlike a marketing funnel, a sales funnel is a visual funnel-shaped representation of all the sales lead opportunities currently in your pipeline.
It takes on a funnel form because companies typically have more leads at the early stage of the sales cycle, represented by the top of the funnel, and fewer as they approach the closing stage. The sales funnel illustrates each pipeline stage and offers an easy way to pinpoint bottlenecks within your sales process.
A sales funnel report helps you determine how well your sales funnel performs.
It gives you an overview of all the deals in your sales pipeline and their value, breaking them down per pipeline stage. The sales funnel report also provides metrics such as your average deal size and conversion rate per stage. With it, you can identify roadblocks within your sales funnel and make more accurate sales predictions for the current period.
Sales performance management (SPM) entails assisting sales teams in monitoring, managing, and enhancing their overall productivity and performance.
The point of SPM is to ensure every sales rep’s actions and results align with your company’s goals. Sales performance managers will carry out tasks such as tracking and overseeing sales activities, quotas, incentives, training, forecasting, and more to ensure the sales team hits its allocated targets.
A sales pipeline illustrates the steps your leads take as they move to the conversion stage and the activities and tasks your sales team takes to get them there.
It allows you to see all the opportunities in your pipeline at a glance and identify areas that work well and those that may require improvement. You can create multiple sales pipelines within your CRM for different products, services, and workflow processes.
A sales process is a system outlining your company’s sales approach to nurturing prospects and leads and closing deals.
This process details each step your sales reps should take to successfully move leads through your sales pipeline. With a CRM system supporting your sales process, you can map out and automate tasks and activities within the process to guide your sales team and boost productivity.
A sales-qualified lead (SQL) is a prospect deemed ready for sales engagement.
SQLs will have undergone a sales qualification process, during which your sales team will have engaged with the lead to ask a few discovery questions. A lead is considered sales-qualified due to its strong buying interest and alignment with your company’s criteria. The sales team usually prioritizes these leads for follow-up and sales conversion efforts.
A sales quota is a target you set for your sales representatives or teams that specifies the minimum expected sales revenue they should achieve over a given period.
Sales quotas help sales teams work toward a sales revenue total that ensures the business makes enough money to function and grow. They also provide a great source of motivation for sales reps. Meeting or exceeding sales quotas can often lead to additional compensation and obtaining performance incentives.
Sales-ready leads (SRLs) are marketing-qualified prospects ready to interact with the sales team.
They have a clear need for your product and the authority to make a purchase. These leads are primed for discussions that could lead to a buying decision.
A sales report summarizes various metrics and results related to sales team efforts, including sales activities, performance, and deal outcomes.
These reports provide deeper insight into your team’s progress toward their goals and help you pinpoint any trends that might need addressing. Generating regular sales reports provides sales managers with the information they need to manage team performance and plan effectively for the upcoming sales period.
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Sales stages are the distinct pipeline phases a lead passes through, from initial contact to closing.
Your CRM system should allow you to customize stages within your sales pipeline to fit your company’s sales process, helping you track progress and forecast revenue.
Sales velocity, also known as pipeline velocity, tracks the speed at which deals move through the sales pipeline.
Faster progression indicates a healthier sales process. You can create reports within your CRM system to help your sales teams identify bottlenecks and optimize their strategies for quicker conversions, thus improving your sales velocity.
A self-service portal (SSP) is an online resource where customers can find information and tools to address their issues without direct support.
The portal is often housed or accessible from the company website and typically includes a knowledge base, support articles, and tools to help customers. It empowers customers to resolve problems at their convenience, improving satisfaction and reducing support costs.
Single sign-on (SSO) is an authentication method that allows users to access multiple applications with one set of login credentials.
SSO simplifies user access management and enhances data security. It also reduces the need for multiple passwords, making logging into company software and systems more convenient. You can set up SSO to allow quick and easy access to your CRM software.
A snapshot is a quick, visual summary of key CRM metrics and data.
Snapshots provide an at-a-glance view of performance and status. They help users assess current sales and marketing conditions quickly and make informed decisions for more effective strategizing.
Suspects are potential customers identified by a company who have not yet been contacted or shown interest.
These leads are at the very beginning of the sales funnel and require initial outreach to gauge their potential. Sales teams will employ cold outreach strategies and tactics to qualify and nurture suspects to convert them to prospects and leads.
A task is a specific activity with a deadline assigned to a user within your CRM system.
Tasks assigned to CRM users generally also include additional details about the task they should complete, providing managers an easy way to track and manage their team’s workflow. Assigning tasks within your CRM holds team members accountable and helps them prioritize their day-to-day activities.
A timeline in a CRM is a chronological record within each contact profile of every interaction your team has had with a lead, person, or company account.
This gives everyone with access to your CRM database a comprehensive history of communication and your organization’s relationship with each contact. With this vital information and context at hand, sales, marketing, and support teams have the information they need to deliver better customer experiences.
Timeline summarization describes the process of condensing your detailed contact record timeline into key highlights and takeaways.
This offers your team a quick overview of the most significant events and interactions that took place with that particular lead or customer. Summarized timelines help users quickly grasp essential information without sifting through extensive records, saving them loads of time.
Transactional reporting provides detailed records of exchanges between a company and its customers.
Data included in transactional reports include deal amounts, relevant parties, and any agreements in place. These reports offer insights into sales performance and financial health.
Transcription refers to converting spoken language into written text.
Your sales, marketing, and customer support teams would typically transcribe words into text through conversational AI tools in your CRM system. Modern CRMs, like Nutshell, allow users to transcribe Zoom meetings with the click of a button. Transcription offers an ideal way to track and analyze your communications within your CRM.
The voice of the customer (VoC) captures the feedback, needs, and preferences of customers through various channels.
Your company can gather this information from customers through various channels, including surveys and social media. It includes both stated and unstated customer insights. This information is crucial for improving products, services, and overall customer satisfaction.
Voice transcription is the automated conversion of spoken words into text.
With an advanced CRM system like Nutshell, you can leverage powerful voice-to-text tools for enhanced note-taking within your lead and customer accounts. With accurate voice transcriptions stored, you can use your CRM’s search capabilities to find detailed notes and records in a flash.
Warm leads are prospects who have expressed interest in a company’s offerings but have not yet committed to making a purchase.
You’re likely to identify warm leads further down the sales funnel, beyond the qualification stages of your sales pipeline. They are more likely to convert than cold leads, making them valuable targets for sales efforts.
A web form is an online form typically embedded on your website.
Web forms are used to capture information from website visitors and generate leads. You can use web forms to gather all sorts of data and automatically feed it into the CRM for lead generation and follow-up. Web forms streamline data collection and help improve lead management.
A workflow is a set sequence of actions required to complete a specific business process.
Workflows can be sequential or parallel, depending on your needs. Well-defined workflows enhance efficiency and ensure consistency in task execution.
Workflow automation in CRM usually involves integrating tools and software to build automations into your sales, marketing, support, and other project processes.
Similar to sales automation, workflow automation includes setting up triggers and resultant actions between your CRM system and integrated applications to automate tasks and activities and make your teams more efficient.
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