Understand the language of modern CRM
Straightforward definitions for the terms teams encounter across sales, customer management, automation, and operations.
API Key
A credential used by an external application or service to authenticate controlled API access.
Activity
A scheduled or recorded piece of work such as a call, meeting, task, or follow-up.
Automation Trigger
An event or condition that starts evaluating whether a workflow should run.
CRM
Customer Relationship Management: the processes and system used to organize customer data, sales work, interactions, and follow-up.
Churn Rate
The rate at which customers, subscriptions, or accounts stop being active during a defined period.
Contact
A person or communication identity associated with customer or business activity.
Conversion Rate
The percentage of records that move from a defined starting state to a desired outcome.
Custom Field
A configurable field added to a record type to capture business-specific structured data.
Customer Lifetime Value
An estimate of the economic value a customer relationship may generate over its lifetime.
Customer Timeline
A chronological view of important interactions, changes, and events related to a customer record.
Follow-Up
A planned next interaction or task intended to continue a customer or sales process.
Idempotency
The property that allows the same operation to be processed repeatedly without creating unintended duplicate business effects.
Inventory
The products or stock quantities a business tracks across one or more storage locations.
Invoice
A commercial document requesting or recording payment for delivered products or services.
Kanban
A visual board that displays records as cards grouped into workflow or pipeline columns.
Lead
A potential sales opportunity being qualified or moved through a sales process.
Lead Owner
The user primarily accountable for progressing and following up a lead.
Lead Source
The channel, campaign, referral, form, or origin through which a lead entered the CRM.
Opportunity
A qualified commercial possibility that may result in a sale or agreement.
Organization
A company, institution, or business entity related to one or more people and CRM records.
Quotation
A sales document that presents proposed products, services, quantities, and commercial terms before a final invoice.
Role-Based Access Control
An authorization approach that groups permissions into roles assigned to users within an access context.
Sales Pipeline
An ordered set of stages used to represent the progress of leads or opportunities.
Sales Stage
A named step in a sales pipeline that represents the current commercial position of a lead.
Stock Movement
A recorded change to inventory caused by receipt, transfer, issue, sale, return, or adjustment.
Tag
A lightweight label used to classify or segment CRM records without changing the core schema.
Tenant
A customer company or isolated workspace whose data and permissions must remain separated from other companies in a SaaS application.
Warehouse
A logical or physical location used to group and track inventory balances.
Workflow
A defined sequence of triggers, conditions, actions, waits, and transitions used to automate business behavior.
Workflow Enrollment
The association that places a business record into a specific published workflow version for execution.