Lead — An unqualified prospect who has shown interest but hasn’t been vetted by sales yet.
Understanding CRM terminology is the first step to getting real value from your CRM investment. Whether you’re evaluating platforms, onboarding your team, or working with developers on a SuiteCRM implementation, this glossary gives you clear, practical definitions grounded in real-world CRM context.
The building blocks of customer relationship management — the concepts every CRM user, admin, and decision-maker needs to understand.
The business concepts that shape CRM decisions — licensing models, cost analysis, compliance, and vendor evaluation.
Regulatory frameworks and security concepts that matter when your CRM handles sensitive customer data.
HIPAA — US federal law governing the protection of patient health information — critical for healthcare CRM deployments.
GDPR — EU regulation governing personal data collection, storage, and processing — affecting any business with EU customers.
CRM platforms use specialized terminology that creates confusion — especially when sales teams, marketing teams, developers, and management all need to speak the same language. This glossary bridges that gap with plain-English definitions written by the team at TechEsperto.
As the world’s only Official SuiteCRM Professional Partner, we’ve helped 150+ businesses across 20+ countries implement and optimize SuiteCRM. If any term here raises questions about your own CRM needs, our consulting team is happy to help.
01Workflow Definition A CRM workflow is an automated rule that triggers actions when specific conditio…
02GDPR Definition GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) is a European Union regulation that govern…
03CRM Definition CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management — both a business strategy and a cate…
04Lead Definition In CRM, a Lead is a person or organization that has shown interest in your product o…
05Sales Pipeline Definition A sales pipeline is a visual representation of all active deals your sales…
06Open Source CRM Definition An open source CRM is a customer relationship management platform whose s…
07Marketing Automation Definition Marketing automation is technology that manages marketing processes …
08Lead Scoring Definition Lead scoring is a methodology for ranking prospects on a numerical scale bas…
09Logic Hooks Definition Logic Hooks are PHP functions in SuiteCRM that execute automatically when spe…
10HIPAA Definition HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) is a US federal law ena…
11Data Migration Definition Data migration is the process of moving data from one system to another — …
12SMTP Definition SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) is the standard internet protocol for sending e…
13OAuth 2.0 Definition OAuth 2.0 is an authentication protocol that allows applications to access your…
14Webhook Definition A webhook is an automated HTTP callback — a way for one application to notify ano…
15RBAC Definition RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) is a security model where system permissions are as…
16SaaS Definition SaaS (Software as a Service) is a software delivery model where the application runs…
17ERP Definition ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) is a category of business management software that…
18TCO Definition TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) is the complete cost of running a CRM over a defined pe…
19Vendor Lock-In Definition Vendor lock-in is the situation where switching away from a software platf…
20REST API Definition A REST API (Representational State Transfer Application Programming Interface) i…
