CRM Glossary

Glossary

Plain-English definitions of the terms you'll run into evaluating or running a CRM.

White-Label CRM

A white-label CRM is a CRM platform that a reseller or agency rebrands with its own name and logo and resells to clients as if it were their own product.

Webhook

A webhook is an automated HTTP message a system sends to another system's URL the instant a specific event happens, letting apps stay in sync without either one polling the other.

Total cost of ownership (TCO) for a CRM is the full cost of running the system over time — subscription fees plus implementation, integrations, training, admin overhead, and add-ons — not just the sticker price per seat.

SLA

An SLA (Service Level Agreement) is a defined commitment for how quickly a team responds to or resolves a request, tracked in a CRM as a timer that flags when a lead, ticket, or deal is at risk of breaching it.

Self-Healing Agent

A self-healing agent is an AI system that detects when its own output or action failed and automatically retries, corrects, or escalates without a human triggering the fix.

Sales Pipeline

A sales pipeline is a visual model of every deal a sales team is working, organized by stage from first contact to closed sale, used to track progress and forecast revenue.

Sales Funnel

A sales funnel is a visual model of the stages a prospect moves through, from first awareness of a business to closed sale, showing where volume narrows at each step.

Sales Forecasting

Sales forecasting is the practice of predicting future revenue based on the current pipeline, deal stages, and historical close rates.

Sales Dashboard

A sales dashboard is a real-time visual summary of pipeline, revenue, and rep activity data pulled from a CRM, used to track performance without running manual reports.

Sales Cycle

A sales cycle is the sequence of stages a deal moves through from first contact with a prospect to a closed sale, and the average time it takes to get there.

Sales Automation

Sales automation is the use of software to handle repetitive sales tasks — follow-ups, data entry, lead assignment, reminders — without a rep doing them manually.

Pipeline Management

Pipeline management is the process of tracking every open deal through defined stages, from first contact to closed-won or closed-lost, so a team always knows what's in progress and what needs attention.

Opportunity Management

Opportunity management is the process of tracking, qualifying, and advancing potential sales through a defined set of stages until they close as won or lost.

Multi-Workspace CRM

A multi-workspace CRM lets one account run multiple separate, walled-off CRM instances — each with its own pipelines, contacts, and users — under a single login and billing relationship.

MQL vs SQL

An MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) has shown interest through marketing engagement; an SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) has been vetted as ready for a direct sales conversation.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is software that triggers marketing actions — emails, texts, lead scoring updates, ad audience syncs — based on rules and customer behavior, without a human sending each one manually.

Lead

A lead is a person or company that has shown interest in a product but has not yet been qualified as a fit or entered a sales pipeline.

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is the practice of assigning a numeric value to each lead based on attributes and behavior so sales reps know which prospects to contact first.

Lead Routing

Lead routing is the process of automatically assigning incoming leads to the right sales rep or team based on rules like territory, industry, or lead score.

Lead Qualification

Lead qualification is the process of evaluating a prospect against defined criteria — budget, authority, need, timing — to determine whether they're worth active sales effort.

Kanban Board

A Kanban board is a visual layout of cards in columns that shows where each deal, lead, or task stands in a process, moving left to right as work progresses.

Follow-Up Automation

Follow-up automation is a CRM feature that automatically sends, schedules, or reminds a rep to send a next-touch message based on a trigger like time elapsed or a prospect's action.

Drip Campaign

A drip campaign is a series of pre-written emails or messages sent automatically to a contact on a fixed schedule or in response to specific triggers, rather than all at once.

Disaster Recovery (SaaS)

Disaster recovery in SaaS is the set of systems and processes a vendor uses to restore service and data after an outage, data loss event, or infrastructure failure.

Deal Stage

A deal stage is a defined step in a sales pipeline that marks how far a deal has progressed, from first contact to closed-won or closed-lost.

Data Enrichment

Data enrichment is the process of automatically filling in missing or outdated contact and company details — like job title, company size, or phone number — from external data sources.

Customer Lifetime Value

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is the total revenue a business can expect from a single customer over the entire span of the relationship, discounted for cost and churn.

Custom Report

A custom report is a saved query in a CRM that pulls specific fields, filters, and groupings from contact, deal, or activity data into a table or chart tailored to one team's question.

Custom Field (CRM)

A custom field is a data field a team adds to a CRM record — beyond the default fields like name and email — to track information specific to their own business or sales process.

CRM

A CRM (Customer Relationship Management system) is software that stores and organizes a business's contacts, deals, and communication history in one place.

CRM Software

CRM software is a category of business applications that store contact, deal, and communication data in one system and automate the follow-up work of sales, marketing, and support teams.

CRM Migration

CRM migration is the process of moving contacts, deals, activity history, and configuration from one CRM platform to another without losing data or breaking active workflows.

CRM Adoption

CRM adoption is the degree to which a sales or service team actually uses a CRM day-to-day, as measured by consistent, accurate data entry rather than just having licenses assigned.

Contact Management

Contact management is the practice of storing and organizing information about prospects, customers, and business contacts so a team can track every interaction from a single record.

Contact Deduplication

Contact deduplication is the process of finding and merging duplicate contact or company records in a CRM so each person or organization exists as a single, accurate record.

Cold Outreach

Cold outreach is the practice of contacting prospects who have no prior relationship with your business, typically by email, phone, or LinkedIn, to start a sales conversation.

Churn Rate

Churn rate is the percentage of customers (or revenue) a business loses over a given period, and it's one of the clearest signals of whether a product is retaining the customers it wins.

Autonomous AI Agent

An autonomous AI agent is software that can plan and carry out multi-step tasks on its own — deciding what action to take next based on data and goals, rather than waiting for a human to trigger each step.

API Integration

API integration is the connection between a CRM and another piece of software that lets the two systems exchange data automatically, without manual export/import.

AI Assistant (CRM)

An AI assistant in a CRM is a built-in feature that reads a team's contact, deal, and activity data to draft messages, summarize records, and recommend next actions inside the workflow.

Account-Based Marketing

Account-based marketing (ABM) is a B2B strategy that targets a defined list of high-value accounts with coordinated, personalized outreach instead of casting a wide net across individual leads.