Marketing ops has a language of its own, and CRM software has its own even more specific definitions. Before you set up a marketing measurement system, it’s important to understand what you’re looking at. Our Full Circle team pulled together the most important marketing terms with definitions as a resource:
1. A lead – in our platform, a lead is a set of information about an individual that represents a possible selling opportunity.
2. A Salesforce lead – an object where an individual’s personal and company data is stored in a single record inside your CRM such as Salesforce.com.
3. Account – an account is an organization, company, or consumer worth tracking for your company. This can be a customer, partner or competitor.
4. Contact – a contact does not have a status field and cannot be converted in the way that a lead can. It is always owned by a sales representative. It is not a sales opportunity.
5. Opportunity – an opportunity is the potential future sale. It is directly tied to revenue.
6. Inquiry – a lead generated by the marketing program where the prospect exhibited some interest. Lead and Inquiry can often be used interchangeably. Inquiry also refers to a top-level funnel stage.
7. Lead Status — a field typically used to communicate the status of a lead record to both the marketing users and the sales rep who is working the lead.
8. Target – a “cold” contact which has the right profile for a sales representative to initiate contact.
9. Digital Touch – a click on a digital ad or website by a prospect or customer.
10. Scoring – how companies measure a lead’s demographic information (e.g. what we know about them and how well that fits your customer profile) and activity information (e.g. what they did).
11. Nurture time-outs – a mechanism that facilitates a forced “time-out” after a sales representative has completed a sale or disqualified the Lead or Contact. This mechanism prevents over-contacting a prospect or customer.
12. Lead Lifecycle System – at Full Circle, instead of a linear process, this is the process you set up to nurture a lead or a contact. It provides complete visibility into how prospects interact with your marketing programs.
13. Response Management Process – the process of managing Leads and Contacts in your CRM platform.
14. Funnel Metrics – a set of metrics that measure the efficiency of the marketing and sales efforts which include volume, velocity, conversion rates from click to close, measuring from stage to stage.
[Ebook] Best Practices for Designing a Lead Life Cycle in Salesforce
Download this guide to get our recommendations on how to track funnel metrics using lead and contact statuses, stages, and campaign responses in Salesforce.
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