Last month, BrainSell went on the offensive to fight the good fight against confusing industry jargon by putting together a list of the top thirty business terms we’re regularly asked to define. We started with the first half of the list – now here’s the second half!
CRM is a type of business software that manages your business’s relationships – with customers, contacts, contractors, and partner – and interactions with customers or potential customers.
The ultimate goal of a CRM platform is to keep you connected with your contacts, streamline your sales processes, track your processes, and improve profitability. Customer relationship management as a business practice is considered a cornerstone of successful businesses, which is why a CRM platform is such an important tool to have in your technology stack.
Further Reading: CRM Software: 5 Main Benefits To Your Business
A perpetual license is a type of software license that grants the right to access a software platform for life and doesn’t expire.
A subscription license is a type of software license that grants the right to access a software platform for a definite amount of time (usually a monthly or yearly basis). This license requires you to renew your relationship with the vendor to continue using the platform.
The main point in the debate of perpetual vs. subscription licenses among vendors has to do with the comparison between the value of long-term subscription payments and a one-and-done perpetual payment. Among users, the debate has to do with the option of switching to different products, vendors, or versions. There are different benefits to both types of licenses – the decision between the two will depend on personal preferences.
Further Reading: Software Subscriptions vs. Perpetual Licenses: The Pros and Cons
A named license is type of software user license that is assigned to one username. Only this user can access the instance of the software platform designated to this license.
A concurrent license is a type of software user license that is assigned to several usernames. All assigned users can access the instance of the software platform designated to this license. However, only one user can be logged into the platform at a time. Once that user logs out, another user can log in.
Both named and concurrent licenses can either be perpetual or subscription licenses. It’s important to remember that named and concurrent refer to how a license works, whereas perpetual and subscription refer to how a license is purchased and who owns the license.
Further Reading: What is the Difference Between Named and Concurrent User Licenses?
A workflow is a function within a piece of software that streamlines and automates a business process, such as a sale, a payment order, a contract negation, or a marketing schedule. You can use a workflow to track and expedite business processes by automating tasks, assigning action items to team members, automatically maintaining records, and enforcing deadlines. Think of it as live playbook.
All levels of business processes can be improved with a workflow. You can build a workflow for a sales cycle. You can build a workflow for a step in that sales cycle. You can even have a workflow for the day-to-day actions in that step of that sales cycle. Workflows can take on many forms. Sometimes they’re not something you can see or read – they’re just a chain of automated actions that your software executes for you. But more often than not, workflows are interactive diagram or flowchart modules within your software that act as a visual checklist or tracker.
It’s worth noting that not all workflows are automated, nor are they all captured in a piece software. They can be a sloppy illustration on a whiteboard in a conference room – but that doesn’t sound too helpful.
Further Reading: 6 Reasons Why Workflow is Important for Your Business
A bottleneck is a phase of a business process when all resources – team members, departments, facilities, materials, technologies, etc. – are already working at full capacity and additional demand is placed on them.
This demand could be anything from loss of specific resources, to changes in workflow, to an expediated deadline, to requests from clients or contractors. A bottleneck can discourage team members and kill morale, diminish the quality of work, threaten the likelihood of closing a deal, or even slow down progress to a halt.
Not all processes have predetermined or predictable bottlenecks. Sometimes bottlenecks develop in processes that are otherwise unaffected by them due to unforeseen circumstances.
Further Reading: Process Bottleneck Analysis: Answer these 4 questions.
Digital transformation is a foundational change in how a business delivers valuable products or services to customers.
Digital transformation is not the result a new technology, employee, or process – it’s the result of a radical and all-encompassing reinvention or readjustment of your business, your processes, your motivations, and your core values. This is not a light undertaking, as it requires cross-departmental collaboration, alignment of business philosophies, and rapid and effective application developmental models.
Further Reading: The What, Why & How of Digital Transformation
Growth-hacking is a business strategy used by marketing, business development, sales, and customer success teams to identify areas of their business that need to grow. Traditionally, growth-hacking refers to expanding target customer demographics and growing customer bases with new clients, but it can apply to any aspect of a business that may need a green thumb.
Further Reading: Common Growth Hacking Myths (and How Growth Actually Works)
A KPI is a quantified principle or standard that businesses use to judge, track, and assess business processes and gauge performance.
You can use KPIs as criteria for determining the success or failure of certain processes. For example, marketing departments use KPIs to determine how well their inbound and outbound strategies work to pique the interest of prospects. Some of those KPIs might include lead scores, SEO traffic reports, incremental sales percentages, or customer acquisition costs. Sales, business development, administration, and customer success departments can also use KPIs to gathering information about the effectiveness of their processes.
Further Reading: 18 Key Performance Indicator Examples & Definitions
A metric is a measurement used to record information about a task, activity, or other aspect of a business process.
A metric is often confused with a KPI, but they’re not the same thing. Metrics are small pieces of information about parts of business process, but they can’t tell you much about the process itself unless you apply it elsewhere – like to a KPI calculation. KPIs are often based on several metrics. For example, a metric can be something as simple as the number of times an ebook was downloaded. But that doesn’t tell you much about how the ebook affects lead generation. You can plug this metric into a KPI calculation to determine how many of the people who downloaded this ebook fit your ideal client profile – thus becoming marketing-qualified leads.
Further Reading: The Real Difference Between Metrics and KPIs
A scorecard is a set of measurements that leadership teams track and review on a regular basis to predict future performance of employees and processes.
A good scorecard relies on leading indicators, which are metrics and KPIs that can be influenced to change a predicted trend in future performance. For example, leading indicators of consumer interest might include website traffic and new lead generation. On the other hand, lagging indicators of consumer interest are sales or revenue – metrics and KPIs that can’t be influenced. A scorecard that relies on lagging indicators doesn’t yield proactive insights that can help you predict future performance.
Further Reading: Developing a Scorecard for Your Business
Reporting is a data visualization function that allows you to extract and compile data from existing sources in charts, tables, interactives, and other images. Reporting tools make it easy for user to find and present useful information.
A good reporting tool is designed to be extremely user-friendly and intuitive. Customization and personalization are key to successful reporting, as this will allow users to create visualization that are most appropriate for their intended audiences. Some reporting tools are standalone applications that need to be integrated with platforms that hold data, but many reporting tools are built into business intelligence, CRM, ERP or marketing automation platforms where your data lives.
It’s important to understand that reporting is not analytics. Reporting is the translation of raw data into a visual reference, it is not the calculation of insights or meaning of that data. You may find a tool that offers both reporting and analytics, but these are two different functions.
Further Reading: What is the difference between traditional reporting and data visualization?
An omnichannel strategy is a marketing, sales, and/or service approach used to create an integrated and cohesive customer experience on any – or all – channels of customer interaction. Channels may include social media, call centers, mobile apps, customer support portals, and even brick-and-mortar storefronts.
This means that all platforms are integrated and all data from multiple disparate sources is in one place. At any given moment, you can pull up all a customer’s information – which may have been scattered in different channels – and give them a seamless experience.
Further Reading: 7 Examples of Brands with Excellent Omni-Channel Experiences
CMS is a type of business software that manages the creation and modification of digital content. CMS platforms typically include web-based publishing, SEO-friendly URL creation, asset libraries, format management, history editing and version control, and indexing tools.
There’s a little confusion about the function of a CSM platform. They can be extremely different in design and range of functionality, depending on the role of the intended user. For example, in the marketing field, CMS platforms are website-publishing applications such as WordPress. But in the administration field, CMS platforms are rolodexes for digital content such as Microsoft SharePoint. These platforms have different features and applications, but still serve the same ultimate goal: managing content.
Further Reading: Do You Really Need a CMS?
Marketing automation is a type of business software that automates marketing processes and activities. Marketing automation can help streamline repetitive tasks involved in email campaigns, social media presence, and content distribution.
Marketing automation is designed to simplify some of the most time-consuming and complex responsibilities of the modern marketing teams, from lead qualification, to planning digital advertising campaigns, to website maintenance. Some conflate marketing automation with email marketing or CMS platforms – but marketing automation includes email marketing and CMS, along with a plethora of other invaluable functions.
Further Reading: What is the Difference Between Email Marketing and Marketing Automation?
In the simplest terms, a lead is someone who has expressed a higher-than-average interest in your business.
After a lead is identified, your marketing, business development, and sales team will work together to covert that lead into a customer by moving them along in their buyer’s journey. This is where the definition of a lead becomes extremely complicated and subjective, depending on your business processes. Generally, a lead becomes a marketing-qualified lead, then a sales-qualified lead, and then an opportunity before making a purchase and becoming a customer. This conversion is referred to as the lifecycle stages of leads and contacts.
Further Reading: Using lifecycle stages in HubSpot
Source: https://www.brainsell.net/blog/2018/12/business-jargon-dictionary-top-30-terms-part-ii/
Publish Date: December 11, 2018 |
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