Account. The organisation you sell to, as opposed to the individual people inside it. Keeping accounts and contacts separate is what lets you see that four enquiries came from the same company.
Activity. Any recorded interaction with a lead or customer: a call, a message, a meeting, a note. Activity history is what makes a handover possible without a briefing.
Assignment rule. A rule that decides who owns a new lead, usually by territory, product, source or round robin. Its main job is to remove the delay between arrival and ownership.
Attribution. The method used to credit a closed deal to the source that produced it. Every attribution model is a simplification, and choosing one is a management decision rather than a technical one.
Automation. Any rule that performs work without a person triggering it, such as sending a follow-up, creating a task or changing a stage. Useful in proportion to how boring the work is.
Bounce rate. The share of emails that could not be delivered. A rising bounce rate usually means your list is ageing rather than that your content is wrong.
Cadence. A planned sequence of contact attempts across channels over a defined period. A cadence is a commitment about effort, not a guarantee about outcome.
Churn. Customers lost over a period. In small businesses churn is often invisible because nobody defines when a quiet customer counts as lost.
Closed lost. A deal that ended without a sale. A closed lost record without a reason is a wasted record, because the reason is the only part with future value.
Closed won. A deal that resulted in a sale. The date that matters for reporting is usually the commitment date, not the invoice date.
Cold lead. Someone with no recent engagement and no expressed intent. Cold does not mean bad, it means the next contact has to earn attention rather than assume it.
Consent. A recorded permission to contact someone through a specific channel. Consent needs a timestamp, a source and a scope, or it will not help you when it is questioned.
Contact. An individual person record with contact details and history. Duplicate contacts are the most common cause of embarrassing double outreach.
Conversion rate. The share of records moving from one stage to the next. It only means something when the stage definitions are stable, which is why hygiene precedes measurement.
CRM. A system of record for customer relationships: who they are, what was said, what is open and what happens next. The definition people argue about is the last part.
Custom field. A field you add for your own data. Each one adds a small tax on data entry, so the useful test is whether anyone would filter or report on it.
Dashboard. A saved view of chosen measures. A dashboard nobody opens on a Monday is decoration, and most teams need two views rather than ten.
Deal. An opportunity to sell something specific, with a value, a stage and an expected date. Some teams call it an opportunity, which means the same thing.
Deduplication. The process of finding and merging records that describe the same person or company. It is never finished, which is why prevention at entry matters more than cleanup.
Deliverability. Whether your email reaches an inbox rather than a spam folder. It is affected far more by list quality and sending patterns than by wording.
Discovery. The part of a sales conversation where you find out what is actually needed. Notes from discovery are the highest-value text in the whole system.
Drip campaign. A series of scheduled messages sent automatically over time. The word drip is doing a lot of work: the pace matters as much as the content.
Field sales. Selling that happens in person, at a customer site or in a territory. Field teams need mobile capture, because anything requiring a desk gets entered late or never.
Follow-up. A planned next contact with a date and an owner. Most lost revenue in small businesses is not lost to competitors, it is lost to follow-ups that never happened.
Forecast. An estimate of what will close in a period. A forecast built from stage probability alone is arithmetic, not judgement, and needs a human review to be useful.
Funnel. The narrowing sequence from enquiry to sale. Useful as a mental model, misleading when it implies that progress is one-directional.
Handover. The transfer of a relationship from one person to another, such as sales to service. Handovers fail on missing context, not on missing intent.
Hot lead. A record showing recent, specific buying signals. The value of the label is entirely in how quickly it changes what someone does next.
Integration. A connection that moves data between two systems. Every integration is a maintenance commitment, so the question is what breaks when it stops.
Lead. A person or company that might buy but has not been qualified yet. Teams that call everything a lead lose the ability to measure anything.
Lead scoring. A method of ranking leads by likely value or readiness. Scores are useful when they change the order of work and pointless when they are only displayed.
Lead source. Where a record came from. Recording it consistently at entry is far cheaper than reconstructing it later, and almost nobody does it.
Lifecycle stage. Where a record sits in the overall relationship, such as lead, opportunity, customer, lapsed. It is distinct from deal stage, which describes one transaction.
MQL. A marketing qualified lead: a record that has met an agreed engagement threshold. The threshold has to be agreed by both teams or the label starts an argument.
Nurture. Ongoing low-intensity contact with people who are not ready yet. The failure mode is nurture that is really unattended silence with occasional newsletters.
Onboarding. The first period after a sale, where the customer learns to get value. Most avoidable churn is created here and discovered much later.
Opt-out. A recorded request to stop receiving a type of contact. It must be honoured across channels and systems, not only in the tool where it was received.
Pipeline. The set of open deals with stages and values. A pipeline is only a plan if every deal in it has a dated next action.
Pipeline coverage. The ratio of open pipeline value to the target for a period. Useful as a rough sufficiency check, dangerous when treated as a prediction.
Playbook. The written version of how your team sells: stages, questions, objection language, rules. It is worth having even when it is only a few pages.
Qualification. Deciding whether an opportunity is worth pursuing, and being willing to say no. Disqualification speed is an underrated measure of a healthy team.
Quote. A formal price offer with scope and validity. Quotes that expire without a follow-up task are the most consistently wasted asset in small business sales.
Renewal. The point at which a customer decides whether to continue. Renewals started in the final month are negotiations, not conversations.
Reporting period. The window a report covers. Comparing periods of different lengths or with different cut-off rules is the most common source of misleading dashboards.
Sales cycle. The elapsed time from first meaningful contact to close. Measure the median rather than the mean, because a handful of very long deals distort the average.
Segment. A defined group of records sharing criteria, used for reporting or outreach. A segment that cannot be rebuilt from stored fields is a one-off list, not a segment.
Sequence. An automated series of steps across channels with entry and exit rules. The exit rules matter most: a sequence that keeps sending after a reply damages trust.
SLA. An agreed standard for response, such as contacting a new enquiry within a set time. An SLA nobody measures is a preference.
Stage. A defined step in a deal, with entry criteria that are observable rather than felt. Stages defined by feeling produce forecasts that cannot be questioned.
Territory. A defined area, segment or account list owned by a person. Ambiguous territory definitions produce internal disputes that cost more than the deals involved.
Win rate. The share of closed deals that were won. Read alongside disqualification rate, since a high win rate can simply mean you only pursue the obvious.