CRM glossary: every term in plain English

ABCDFLNOPRSTUW

A

Account — A company or organization record in a CRM, linked to the contacts who work there and the deals with it.

Account-based selling — Targeting a defined set of high-value accounts with coordinated, personalized outreach across the buying committee.

Activity capture — Automatically recording emails, meetings, calls and documents into a CRM without manual entry.

AI CRM — A CRM that uses artificial intelligence — machine learning and large language models — to capture interactions, extract information, predict outcomes and suggest actions.

AICRM — AI customer relationship management: a CRM built on AI from the ground up, where the system does the clerical work and people do the thinking.

Audit trail — A chronological record of every change and action in a system.

B

Book of business — All of a salesperson's or firm's customer and prospect relationships.

C

Churn — Customers stopping or failing to renew over a period, often expressed as a rate.

Churn prediction — Identifying customers likely to leave before they do, using behavioral and relationship signals.

Commitment — A promise made by you or to you in a business relationship, with an owner and due date.

Consent management — Recording and enforcing whether a contact has agreed to be contacted on a given channel.

Contact — A record for an individual person in a CRM, typically linked to an account.

Conversational CRM — A CRM you operate by asking questions in natural language rather than clicking through menus and reports.

CRM — Customer relationship management: the practice, and the software, a business uses to manage relationships with customers and prospects — storing contacts, recording interactions, tracking deals and reporting on revenue.

CRM adoption — The degree to which a team actually uses a CRM consistently.

CRM implementation — Rolling out a CRM: process mapping, setup, data migration, training and review.

CRM software — Applications that implement customer relationship management: contact and account records, interaction history, sales pipelines, tasks and reporting.

Cross-sell — Selling a customer a different, complementary product.

Customer health score — A composite score, often 0–100, that summarizes how healthy a customer relationship is.

Customer lifetime value — The total revenue (or margin) expected from a customer over the whole relationship, often abbreviated LTV or CLV.

Customer retention — Keeping existing customers active and renewing.

D

Data entry — Manually typing information such as call notes and stage changes into a CRM.

Data migration — Moving contacts, deals and history from one system into another.

Deal room — A shared online space where a seller and buying committee keep proposals, documents and questions for a deal.

Deal stage — A defined step in the sales process, such as qualification, proposal or negotiation.

F

Follow-up — A planned next contact after an interaction.

L

Large language model — An AI model trained on large amounts of text that can understand and generate language; abbreviated LLM.

Lead — A person or organization that has shown interest but hasn't yet been qualified as a sales opportunity.

Lead scoring — Ranking leads by likelihood to convert using fit and behavioral signals.

N

Next best action — An AI-recommended next step for a specific relationship, chosen to maximize the chance of a good outcome.

O

Opportunity — A qualified potential sale with an estimated value, stage and expected close date.

P

Pipeline — The set of open opportunities organized by stage from first contact to close.

Pipeline velocity — How quickly deals move through the pipeline, commonly calculated as (number of opportunities × win rate × average deal size) ÷ sales cycle length.

Predictive analytics — Using statistical models and machine learning on historical and live data to forecast outcomes.

Prospect — A potential customer who has been identified as a fit and is being actively pursued.

R

RAG status — A red, amber or green indicator summarizing whether something is on track.

Relationship health — An assessment of how strong and active a relationship is, based on frequency, responsiveness and sentiment.

S

Sales cadence — A defined sequence and timing of outreach touches to a prospect.

Sales cycle — The time from first contact with a prospect to a closed deal.

Sales forecast — A projection of future revenue based on the pipeline, historical win rates and judgment.

Sentiment analysis — Using AI to judge the tone of communication as positive, neutral or negative.

Suspect — A contact who might be a fit but hasn't yet engaged or been qualified — the earliest stage before lead or prospect.

T

Time to close — The average number of days between first contact and signature.

U

Upsell — Selling a customer a higher tier, more seats or additional products.

W

War room dashboard — A live command view of key revenue metrics for a team or business.

Win rate — The percentage of opportunities that close as won out of all opportunities that reached a decision.