ABCs of CRM

CRM is typically seen as a technology solution to solve a business problem. But in reality, if you don’t have a clear understanding of CRM as a functional entity and don’t appreciate its need for your organization, no amount of great technology can help you succeed.

Today, as a primer in CRM, we would like to introduce you to 26 key words or concepts in CRM, each mapping to a letter of the alphabet. A fun way to learn CRM!

A – Accounts: Any organization external to the company implementing CRM. For example: Customers, Partners, competitors etc.

B – Books of Business: Using books to organize your company data allows you to control your data visibility by setting appropriate business rules.

C – Contacts: Contacts are individuals that your company currently conducts business with or expects to conduct business within the future. For Example: Employees of other companies, independent consultants, vendors, or personal acquaintances etc.

D – Deduplication: The elimination of redundant duplicate data during the data migration. For example, same contact getting repeated in two records, with a slight name change or spelling error.

E – Email Marketing: Powerful, integrated tool to run campaigns to bulk contacts in your CRM system using Email.

F – Forecasting: Estimating the sales (of a particular product or to a particular account) in a given period.

G – Group: Set of users in the system who share their system, records, calendar etc.,

H – Hierarchy: Defines the parent – child relationship between Accounts / Products or other CRM objects.

I – Integration: Process of integrating CRM system with external third-party applications / backend data sources / others.

J – Job Role: A particular role of an individual in the system. Every role has a set of access privileges given to perform action (Adding, Editing, Viewing, Deleting, Exporting etc.,)

K – KPI: Key Performance Indicators: Analyses / Measures performance / productivity of the entity / user through different reports and dashboards.

L – Leads: A sales prospect, later this may get converted to an opportunity.

M – Mail Merge: Process of merging CRM information in an outgoing Email / Printed letter.

N – Negotiation: Dialogue between two or more people or parties, intended to reach an understanding. Example: Sales Negotiation may include discussions about price, delivery timeframe etc.,

O – Opportunities: A person/ group who genuinely, show interest in a particular Product/ Service. They are also termed as qualified leads.

P – Products: Sellable goods / services.

Q – Quotes: Promise to sell something, to somebody, in a certain price.

R – Reports: Aggregated Tabular / Graphical presentation of CRM Data. Example: Daily Sales Report.

S – Sales Stages: Life cycle of an opportunity before leading to a closure stage (Win/ lose).

T – Territory: Geographical subdivision for better analyses of revenue generation. Typically, it is an area assigned to the field Sales executives to meet their targets and close the deals.

U – Users: End user of a CRM System, who interact with data by creating / modifying / deleting / querying / running reports against them.

V – Visibility: Business rules that determine who get access to what CRM Data.

W – Workflow: An automatic action performed by the system when a change occurs. (Example, on deletion of an account, Email sent to the Account Owner)

X – XML: Extensible Markup Language, Used for data transfer across multiple systems in a generic manner.

Y – Year end: Subset of Fiscal / Financial Year. A financial year is divided into 4 Quarters and the 4th Quarter is usually termed as a Year end.

Z – Zone: Large Regions used for grouping, analyses of various CRM data such as Sales, Service Performance, Client Satisfaction etc., (Example: US, Asia Pacific, Europe and Middle East)