As a contact is a person, an account is a business, organization, or group of people. An account may be associate with many contacts (e.g. multi purchasing agents, owners or officers in a single company)

The five-stage mental process all clients go through from learning the CRM to becoming dependent users of it. The stages are (1) Awareness: users learn the features and benefits; (2) Interest: users desire more information; (3) Evaluation: users assess whether the CRM is beneficial; (4) Integration: users integrate the CRM into there daily work-flow; (5) Adoption: users allow the CRM to enhance their performance.

These are marketing driven event such as mass emails, social media or direct mail promotions that deliver a specific message or offer to either the client base itself, or a list of potential clients. CRM Campaigns involve tracking the outcome of each attempt to determine effectiveness and ROI and thereby creating a feed-back loop to create better, more effective marketing campaigns.

This is the process of personalizing a CRM instance for a particular client or user such as modifying the tabs, labels or database; and/or creating unique reports or dashlets.

A person (by the process of direct qualification or validation) with whom you either have a mutual interest in working together or may become a client of your company. The contact is normally created in the conversion process from a lead and most often is directly associated with an account.

This is a function or service provided by the company that directly “faces” or interacts with the customer, such as, support, customer service, sales, etc.

Is a tiny window into another module that resides on the Home page of Sugar. By utilizing group of Dashlets a user can view the significant portions of his database on a single screen, and efficiently view as much as 90% of its CRM operations through these dashlets.

The designated field(s) that will determine what data will be presented to the user. For example, a date range could be used as a filter to view all the opportunities created in a specific month. Or a sales stage could be used as a filter to view on the closed- won opportunities.

A company’s deployment of a single CRM application is referred to as an instance. Each instance can have from one to hundreds of users. Each instance has a unique database structure.

Raw or unqualified data such as a name or company which has been collected by any reasonable means, including list purchases, trade shows, special events, etc. In a CRM a lead is most often identified by source and date and should always be suppressed against a master lead database prior to use in any campaigns. A lead is “converted” to a contact only when communication has been established and there is a understanding of needs.

A Module is a specific grouping of information or functions designed to make maneuvering through a large database easier. So, Leads, Contacts, Accounts, Reports, Projects, etc are all individual modules residing in the same database. They each present to the user information grouped in such a way as to make sense and make it easier to work with a large amount of information.

An Opportunity is the sales process beginning with the identification of an interested contact to the conclusion of the process, being either closed-won or closed-lost. An Opportunity must be associated with an account and a contact and has percentages assign to the various stages in the sales, or opportunity, process.

A Pipeline (or Sales Pipeline) is aggregated management report of the various stages of the sales process that can be generated from the CRM based multiple variables.

Used to describe the process of enhancing the productivity of the sales force through automation and tracking of key events

The step of the sales that any given opportunity currently resides. There may be many steps to complete before the close of a sale, these steps are the “sales stage”.

This is a specific task that must be accomplished, usually in relation to an account, that is not a meeting or call (such as, picking up a contract).

A group of users that are designated to work together or have some mutual interest that allows them to share specific information within Sugar. Members on the same team can view each others leads, contacts etc. as long as that team has been specified.

A method by which the application “knows” when someone receiving a campaign email has opened the email, or clicked on a link, or viewed the images, etc.

In CRM a Work Flow is an automated process performed by the system that is triggered by a date and/or specific event. An example would be a new lead arrival triggers the emailing of a thank you note to the lead themselves and the lead generator.