Glossary
Sales & CRM terms, in plain language.
Clear definitions of the terms revenue teams actually use — from lead capture and qualification to the sales pipeline, forecasting, and the customer 360 — and how each one works inside KudosCRM.
A
Accounts Receivable (AR)
Accounts receivable (AR) is the money customers owe a business for goods or services already delivered but not yet paid for — the outstanding invoices. It's tracked as an asset, and managing it well (knowing what's due, what's overdue, and chasing it) is what keeps cash flowing. The mirror image is accounts payable, what the business owes others.
In KudosCRM: KudosCRM tracks the receivable on the customer record — every invoice's due date, an automatically-computed overdue flag, and a mark-paid action — so you can see what's outstanding without exporting a spreadsheet.
AI sales assistant
An AI sales assistant is software that uses a large language model to do the language-heavy parts of selling — drafting and replying to emails, summarizing where a deal stands, and extracting details from a document. A good one is grounded in your CRM data rather than answering from generic knowledge, and it keeps a human in the loop: the assistant writes the draft, and a person approves it before anything sends or saves. It's the most common product form of generative AI for sales.
In KudosCRM: Kudos AI is the real thing — built on Anthropic's Claude and grounded in your records, it drafts and replies to emails, rewrites and translates, summarizes a deal or contact, extracts a document into fields, and builds a form from a prompt, all AI-labeled, human-in-the-loop, and usage-logged. (A conversational chat copilot and predictive scoring are on the roadmap, not claimed as live.)
AI email assistant
An AI email assistant uses a language model to help you write email — composing a fresh message, replying in context, rewriting or improving a draft, changing its tone, translating it, and suggesting a subject line. The useful version is grounded in the actual thread and record, so the draft references the real deal and people, and it's human-in-the-loop: it writes, you approve and send. It removes the slowest part of working a deal without taking the final word out of your hands.
In KudosCRM: The Kudos AI email assistant is live and real — a Claude call that composes from the thread and deal, replies in context, rewrites, retones, translates, and suggests subject lines and preheaders. Nothing sends until you approve it, and every use is logged and quota-guarded.
Audience segmentation
Audience segmentation is the practice of dividing your contacts or leads into reusable groups based on shared attributes — industry, region, company size, behavior, intent — so you can send the right message to the right slice instead of blasting everyone. A great message to the wrong list is wasted, which makes segmentation the real multiplier behind any campaign or cadence. Segments defined by filters stay current as your data changes, unlike a hand-picked static list.
In KudosCRM: Audiences are live — combine six filters (industry, country, company size, score, title, intent) into a reusable audience that resolves to a live lead segment, build lookalikes from a strong one, and the audience is delete-guarded while a campaign is using it.
B
BANT
BANT is a lead qualification framework that checks four things before you invest in a deal: Budget, Authority, Need, and Timing. It's the oldest and simplest of the major frameworks, which makes it fast to apply — best for higher-volume sales where you qualify quickly. Newer frameworks like MEDDIC and CHAMP add depth for more complex, multi-stakeholder deals.
In KudosCRM: KudosCRM is framework-agnostic — encode BANT's measurable criteria as rule-based scoring and capture budget, authority, and timing as custom fields on the lead, so your chosen framework runs consistently.
C
Customer 360 view
A customer 360 view is a single record that brings together everything you know about a contact or account — every email, call, meeting, note, task, deal, and file, on one timeline. The "360" means you see the customer from every angle in one place, instead of assembling the story from separate tools. A true 360 captures every interaction automatically rather than waiting for someone to log it.
In KudosCRM: The 360 view is live — the contact and company record auto-captures connected email and meetings, carries deals on the same record, and rolls won/open/lost value up across the account and its parent/child hierarchy.
CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote)
CPQ stands for Configure, Price, Quote — software that helps a sales team assemble the right products, apply the right price, and produce an accurate quote without manual math or pricing errors. It's the front half of quote-to-cash: CPQ makes the quote right, before approval and acceptance get it signed. CPQ ranges from heavy, rules-based enterprise configurators to the lightweight catalog-plus-pricing-plus-quote that most growing teams need.
In KudosCRM: KudosCRM provides the Configure-and-Price foundation plus quoting — a product catalog, scoped price books with quantity tiers, an automatic pricing-resolution engine, and a quote builder with discounts and approvals — built for product and service catalogs rather than heavy rules-based configuration.
Client Portal
A client portal is a secure, self-serve web page where a customer can watch the work you're doing for them — progress, files, and updates — without back-and-forth email. For project delivery it lets clients check status on their own, which cuts status meetings and keeps everyone aligned. The best ones are read-only and let you control exactly what's shared.
In KudosCRM: KudosCRM has a built-in client portal on every delivery project — a password-protected, expiring link, section-gated (tasks, files, timeline, billing), read-only, that never exposes your budget or your team's email addresses.
CRM analytics
CRM analytics is the measurement and reporting built on the data inside your CRM — leads, contacts, deals, activities, and projects — so the work your team logs becomes numbers you can act on. Sales analytics is the revenue-focused slice of it (pipeline, win rate, forecast). The value of CRM analytics is that the data is already there: no separate warehouse or BI pipeline is needed to read your core metrics.
In KudosCRM: CRM analytics is live — pre-built reports, a Command Center 'Your Day' home, and Ops Mission Control with a grounded Ops AI Standup, all reading from your real records. Composable custom dashboards and natural-language 'ask your data' Q&A are on the roadmap, not live.
CRM automation
CRM automation is using your CRM to do repetitive work for you, automatically, based on rules — the pattern is "when this happens, do that." When a deal is won, create an onboarding task; when a form is submitted, route the lead and send a reply. You define the rule once as a workflow and the CRM runs it every time the triggering event occurs, so the work gets done without anyone remembering to do it.
In KudosCRM: CRM automation is live — a real trigger to condition to action engine runs asynchronously, with 20+ triggers that fire from real events across the journey and 17 actions (including real Claude AI steps), all built in a no-code visual flow.
E
E-signature (electronic signature)
An electronic signature is a signer's intent to agree to a document captured electronically rather than on paper. In the US the ESIGN Act and UETA give it the same legal standing as a handwritten signature for most commercial agreements, provided there's intent to sign, consent to transact electronically, association with the document, and a retained record. For standard sales quotes a simple type-to-sign signature with an audit trail is normally enough; qualified or notarised signatures need a specialised provider.
In KudosCRM: When a customer accepts a quote through its secure, no-login link, KudosCRM captures their typed name, IP address, and a timestamp against that exact quote version — the audit trail behind a simple electronic signature — and acceptance converts the quote to an order automatically.
F
First Response Time (FRT)
First response time (FRT) is how long a customer waits for the first human reply to a support request — one of the most-watched support metrics, because a fast first response shapes the whole experience even before the issue is resolved. It's distinct from resolution time, which measures how long until the problem is actually fixed.
In KudosCRM: KudosCRM's support insights dashboard tracks first-response and resolution time from your real ticket data, and SLA targets let you set a first-response goal per priority with automated escalation if it slips.
G
Generative AI for sales
Generative AI for sales is the use of language models — software that produces text from a prompt and context — to do the writing and reading work in a sales workflow: drafting emails, summarizing accounts, extracting data, generating a first draft of a form or follow-up. It's strongest on language tasks where a model with real context saves time; it's a poor fit for predicting which deal will close, which is usually a rule-based or statistical problem rather than a generative one.
In KudosCRM: KudosCRM applies generative AI where it genuinely helps — the email assistant, record summaries, document extraction, the form builder, and AI workflow steps are real Claude calls grounded in your data. Predictive scoring and a conversational copilot are deliberately marked 'Soon' rather than dressed up as generative AI.
H
Help Desk
A help desk is the system and team that receives, tracks and resolves customer (or employee) support requests — usually as tickets, with statuses, priorities and assignment. It centralizes support so nothing gets dropped and response times can be measured. A help desk built into a CRM also sees the customer's deals and orders, which a standalone one can't.
In KudosCRM: KudosCRM's help desk lives on the customer record — tickets from email and your web form, SLA targets and escalation, macros, automations and an internal knowledge base — so support sees the whole relationship.
I
ICP (Ideal Customer Profile)
An ideal customer profile (ICP) is a description of the company that gets the most value from your product and is most likely to buy and stay — defined by firmographics like industry, company size, and region. It's the yardstick qualification measures fit against: the closer a lead matches your ICP, the higher it should score. An ICP describes the account; a buyer persona describes the person inside it.
In KudosCRM: Your ICP becomes firmographic scoring rules — add points for target company size, industry, and region — so good-fit accounts rise to the top automatically the moment they're captured.
Invoice
An invoice is a document a seller sends a customer to request payment for goods or services delivered — listing the line items, quantities, prices, tax, total, and a due date. It's the formal record of what's owed and the starting point for collecting revenue. An invoice differs from a quote (an offer) and an order (a confirmed purchase): the invoice asks to be paid.
In KudosCRM: In KudosCRM you draft an invoice straight from a confirmed order — it takes an INV- number, freezes a snapshot of the agreed lines and totals, tracks due and overdue, and you mark it paid, all on the customer record.
K
Knowledge Base
A knowledge base is a searchable library of articles that answer common questions — for a support team (internal) or for customers to self-serve (public). It turns repeated answers into a single source of truth, so support is faster and more consistent. The best knowledge bases track which articles actually help.
In KudosCRM: KudosCRM has an internal knowledge base your agents write, publish and search — content sanitized on save and serve, with helpful and view counters. A public, customer-facing help center is on the roadmap.
L
Lead capture
Lead capture is the process of collecting people who show interest in your product — through a form, a booking, a campaign, or an import — and turning them into structured records you can follow up with. Good lead capture attaches where the lead came from at the moment it arrives, so attribution isn't reconstructed by hand later. The goal is simple: nothing interested gets lost, and nothing lands without context.
In KudosCRM: Leads can be captured from online forms (13 field types, hosted or embedded), booking links, your own inbound forms, and CSV import — each landing as a tracked lead with its source, campaign, and UTM attached.
Lead grading
Lead grading rolls a lead's score up to a simple letter grade — typically A to D — so reps can read its quality at a glance without decoding a raw number. Where the score is for tuning the model, the grade is the quick "who do I call first?" read. Grading and scoring are two views of the same underlying fit-and-intent assessment.
In KudosCRM: Lead grading is live — every lead's 0–100 score maps to an A–D grade (A ≥ 80, B ≥ 60, C ≥ 40, D below), kept up to date automatically and shown on the leads list and the detail.
Lead routing
Lead routing is the automatic assignment of each new lead to the right owner the moment it arrives, so no lead waits in an unassigned queue. Rules decide the owner — a fixed rep, a rotation across a pool, or the rep who owns a matching territory — usually with a fallback so nothing is ever ownerless. It's how a scored lead actually reaches someone who can work it.
In KudosCRM: Lead routing is live — priority-ordered rules assign each lead by fixed rep, round-robin pool, or territory, with a default-owner fallback and every assignment written to the timeline.
Lead scoring
Lead scoring assigns each lead a value based on how well it fits your ideal customer and how engaged it is — combining signals like firmographic fit, intent, behavior, and negative signals. The score helps reps work the most promising leads first instead of just the newest. It's the bridge between capturing a lead and deciding what to do with it.
In KudosCRM: Lead scoring is live — leads are scored on intent, firmographic, behavioral, and negative signals, then expressed as an A–D grade the moment they arrive.
Lead source attribution
Lead source attribution is the practice of tying each lead — and ultimately each deal — back to the channel, campaign, or source that produced it, so you can see which efforts actually generate pipeline. Done at capture time, it removes the guesswork of reconstructing where revenue came from after the fact. It's how you decide where the next marketing dollar should go.
In KudosCRM: Source attribution is live — leads arrive tagged with their source and UTM, and source-attribution reporting connects captured leads through to pipeline so you can see the return per channel.
Lifecycle stage
A lifecycle stage marks how far a lead has progressed on the path from raw inbound to customer — commonly lead → MQL → SQL → opportunity → customer. Unlike a grade, which measures quality, a stage measures progress and whose bar the record has cleared. Enforcing a legal order between stages keeps the marketing-to-sales hand-off honest and stage reporting meaningful.
In KudosCRM: Lifecycle stages are live — KudosCRM moves records through lead → MQL → SQL with a server-enforced map of legal transitions, so a lead can't skip the gate.
Large language model (LLM)
A large language model (LLM) is an AI system trained on vast amounts of text to understand and generate human language — the technology behind modern AI assistants that draft, summarize, translate, and extract. When grounded with the right context (your CRM record, say), an LLM produces output specific to your situation rather than generic. It's the engine under 'generative AI'; whether a feature truly uses one is the honest test for whether it's 'real AI' at all.
In KudosCRM: Kudos AI's writing and extraction features call Anthropic's Claude — a large language model — grounded in your real records, with usage logged and metered. Features that don't actually call a model (a chat copilot demo, rule-based scoring) are marked 'Soon' rather than labeled AI.
Lead enrichment
Lead enrichment is the process of filling in the missing detail on a lead — verified email, job title, company size, industry — usually by matching the record against a data provider. It turns a thin record into one you can actually score, route, and reach. In a prospecting flow, enrichment is the step that converts a raw search result into a usable, contactable lead.
In KudosCRM: Enrichment is live through Apollo lead discovery on your own API key — people search, then a credit-costing People-Match enrichment step, then convert to a tracked lead. Any fit or confidence labels shown are KudosCRM's own estimates, not figures from Apollo.
M
MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead)
A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a lead that marketing has judged ready for a closer look — usually because it crossed a fit-and-engagement threshold, like downloading something or scoring above a bar — but isn't yet ready for a direct sales push. Marking a lead as an MQL signals "worth sales' attention soon," not "call them now." It's the first qualification gate in the lifecycle.
In KudosCRM: Lifecycle stages (lead → MQL → SQL) are live, so you can promote a lead to MQL as it crosses your qualification bar and track where it sits in the funnel.
Milestone Billing
Milestone billing is invoicing a client when a defined stage of a project is completed — a deposit, a phase sign-off, a final delivery — rather than all at once or purely by the hour. It ties cash flow to delivered progress, which is common in agency and professional-services work. Each milestone becomes a billable event.
In KudosCRM: In KudosCRM you can flag a project task as a billing milestone, and completing it can raise a draft invoice through a workflow — connecting delivered work to billing.
N
No-code automation
No-code automation is building automated workflows by configuring them visually — picking a trigger, adding conditions, and dropping in actions — instead of writing code. The point is that the person who understands the process can build the automation directly, without a developer, a DSL, or YAML. The skill becomes deciding what should happen, not how to express it.
In KudosCRM: No-code automation is live — workflows are built in a visual flow builder (node cards edited in a side drawer), with 16 one-click templates and a dry-run simulator. Developers can optionally add signed webhooks and scoped API tokens.
P
Predictive lead scoring
Predictive lead scoring uses a machine-learning model to infer a lead's score from patterns in historical data, rather than from rules a person writes. It can surface signals a human might miss, but it's opaque — when a rep asks why a lead scored high, there's no rule to point to — and it needs a large, clean history to work. It trades transparency and control for automation.
In KudosCRM: KudosCRM deliberately uses transparent, rule-based scoring instead of predictive/AI scoring — every point traces back to a rule you set, so the grade is explainable and the model stays in your control. That explainability is the differentiator, not a limitation.
Pipeline stage
A pipeline stage is one step a deal moves through on its way to a close — for example Discovery, Proposal, or Negotiation. Each stage should mark a genuine change in the deal's odds and carries a win probability used to weight the forecast. Stages measure progress, separate from how big or how good a deal is.
In KudosCRM: Stages are live and fully configurable — set each stage's win probability, color, SLA, exit criteria, and required fields, mark the terminal won/lost stages, and add rules that restrict skipping or backtracking.
Pipeline velocity
Pipeline velocity is how quickly revenue moves through your pipeline — classically (number of deals × average deal value × win rate) ÷ average sales-cycle length. It tells you how much pipeline turns into revenue per unit of time, and which lever — more deals, bigger deals, a higher win rate, or a shorter cycle — would move the number most.
In KudosCRM: The inputs are live — KudosCRM tracks win rate, average deal, and time-in-stage on the Command Center, so you can see velocity and where deals slow down.
Price book
A price book is a named, scoped price list — an override of a product's default list price for a specific customer tier, territory, or partner. It lets the same product carry different prices for different relationships, with effective dates and quantity tiers, instead of a single universal price or a tangle of manual overrides. When a product is quoted, a pricing engine resolves which book and tier apply.
In KudosCRM: Price books are live — scope them to a tier, territory, or partner, set effective dates and a priority, and add quantity-tier breaks; KudosCRM's pricing engine picks the most specific active book and the best tier automatically when a product hits a quote.
Proposal (sales proposal)
A sales proposal is the document you send a prospect that lays out what you'll deliver and what it costs, for them to accept. In transactional B2B sales the proposal and the quote are usually the same artifact — a branded, priced offer with line items, discounts, tax, and terms. Longer, narrative proposals add context and design, but the commercial core is the priced offer the customer signs.
In KudosCRM: KudosCRM's quote builder is the priced-proposal core — line items, per-line and order discounts, tax, terms, a branded PDF, and online acceptance with an e-signature — built on the deal so an accepted proposal becomes an order automatically.
Professional Services Automation (PSA)
Professional services automation (PSA) is software that runs a services business end to end — winning the work, delivering the project, and billing for it — as one connected motion instead of separate CRM, project, and invoicing tools. It's most useful for agencies, consultancies, and firms that sell and then deliver client engagements. The goal is no re-keying between the sale and the delivery.
In KudosCRM: KudosCRM covers the deal-to-delivery core of PSA on one record — a won order becomes a delivery project with health, budget and a client portal, and orders raise draft invoices. Team time-tracking, timesheets and resource management are on the roadmap.
Project Health
Project health is an at-a-glance rating of whether a project is on track — typically good, at-risk, or off-track — derived from signals like overdue or blocked tasks, schedule slip, and budget. A good health indicator is computed from real data rather than set by hand, so it surfaces trouble before a deadline does.
In KudosCRM: KudosCRM scores each delivery project good / at-risk / off-track automatically from overdue tasks, blocked work, staleness, schedule slip and budget overrun, and a "Risk Radar" lists the specific reasons.
Q
Quote-to-cash
Quote-to-cash (QTC) is the end-to-end process from quoting a customer to collecting the revenue — configure and price, build and send the quote, get internal approval, have the customer accept it, and turn it into an order and an invoice. It's the commercial backbone between agreeing a deal and getting paid, and it runs cleanest when each hand-off is automatic rather than re-keyed across separate tools.
In KudosCRM: KudosCRM runs the quote-to-cash chain on one record — a quote built from price books, discount approvals, online acceptance with an e-signature, then an order that marks the deal won and raises a draft invoice and delivery project (sending and collecting the invoice is the later billing stage).
R
Round-robin scheduling
Round-robin scheduling rotates incoming meetings across a pool of reps so each one is shared fairly and no single person is overloaded. When a prospect books, the meeting is assigned to the next rep in the rotation — so a qualified lead always reaches someone who can actually take the call, rather than landing in a generic queue. It's the fair-distribution alternative to everyone fighting over one shared calendar.
In KudosCRM: Round-robin host assignment is live on booking links — rotate an event type across a pool of reps, or pin it to a single host when the same person should always handle it.
Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)
Role-based access control (RBAC) manages permissions by assigning people to roles — like admin, manager, or member — and granting access to the role rather than to each individual. It keeps data secure and administration simple: change what a role can do, and everyone in it updates at once. Most business software uses RBAC as the backbone of its permission model.
In KudosCRM: KudosCRM enforces access with a layered, deny-wins role engine — admin, manager, member and viewer roles, plus audited per-role and per-user overrides — and assigning a user's role is done in the admin console.
Referral program
A referral program is a structured way to turn customers and partners into a sales channel — giving them shareable links or codes, attributing the leads and deals they send, and rewarding them with a commission. Because the referrer is a trusted voice, referred deals tend to close faster, which makes referrals some of the cheapest pipeline a team can generate. It's how the end of the revenue loop feeds back into its beginning.
In KudosCRM: Referrals are live — shareable /r/ links with a first-touch cookie, promo codes (percent or fixed, with limits and expiry), and a commission ledger that records automatically when a referred deal is won (idempotent, anti-self-referral, in your per-tenant currency). Commission is tracked, not auto-paid; automated payouts are on the roadmap.
S
Sales territory
A sales territory is a defined slice of your market — a region, an industry, or a company-size band — owned by a specific manager and reps, so accounts are divided clearly instead of fought over. Territories let you route work by who should own a segment rather than writing a rule per rep, and a hierarchy lets larger territories contain smaller ones. Effective dates let you plan a reorg in advance instead of switching everything live.
In KudosCRM: Territories are live — build a hierarchy with effective dates, priorities, and managers, and assignment routes leads, companies, and deals to the matching territory with a full assignment-history audit.
SQL (Sales Qualified Lead)
A sales qualified lead (SQL) is a lead that sales has accepted as worth active selling — it's been vetted beyond the marketing bar and a rep is ready to work it as a real opportunity. The move from MQL to SQL is the formal hand-off from marketing to sales. Treating it as a distinct stage keeps both teams honest about what "qualified" really means. (Not to be confused with SQL the database query language.)
In KudosCRM: The lead → MQL → SQL lifecycle is live, so the marketing-to-sales hand-off is an explicit stage on the record rather than an informal nod.
Sales pipeline
A sales pipeline is the set of stages a deal moves through from a qualified opportunity to a closed deal. It lets you see where every deal stands, measure progress, and forecast what's likely to close. A pipeline differs from a funnel: a funnel describes volume across the market, while a pipeline describes the specific deals a rep is actively working.
In KudosCRM: Pipelines are live — work a visual drag-and-drop board (plus list, forecast, and timeline views), run multiple pipelines with their own stages and rules, and get a weighted forecast built in.
Sales quota
A sales quota is the revenue (or deal) target a rep or team is expected to hit in a period — a month, quarter, or year — and attainment measures progress toward it. Quotas turn a forecast into accountability: they're the bar the weighted pipeline is measured against.
In KudosCRM: Quotas are live — set them per rep and period, and KudosCRM shows attainment (closed-won plus weighted pipeline against target) with a period-over-period delta on the forecast.
Sales order
A sales order is the confirmed record of what a customer has agreed to buy — created once a quote is accepted. It freezes the agreed line items and totals so the record can't drift, and it's the hand-off point into fulfillment, invoicing, and delivery. Sales order management is the practice of tracking that order from confirmed through fulfilled.
In KudosCRM: Sales orders are live — an accepted quote converts to an order in one step (a frozen snapshot), which marks the linked deal won, moves through confirmed → in-fulfilment → fulfilled, and can spin up a delivery project and a draft invoice with campaign and partner attribution.
Service Level Agreement (SLA)
A service level agreement (SLA) is a commitment to respond to or resolve a support request within a set time — for example, a first response within one hour and a resolution within eight. SLAs set customer expectations and hold a support team accountable. In practice they're defined per priority, and the clock usually pauses while you're waiting on the customer.
In KudosCRM: KudosCRM lets you set first-response and resolution SLA targets per priority and pause the clock while you wait on the customer — and when a timer elapses, an automation escalates the ticket. (An auto-computed breach flag is on the roadmap.)
Sales analytics
Sales analytics is the practice of measuring your sales activity and outcomes — win rate, funnel conversion, activity volume, forecast, and productivity — to understand what's happening and decide what to do next. At its core it's descriptive: it reports what already happened, from your real records, rather than predicting the future. It's the feedback loop that shows where deals leak, whose follow-through slips, and whether the whole motion is improving.
In KudosCRM: Sales analytics is live — five pre-built reports (deal performance, sales funnel, sales activity, revenue forecast, task productivity) computed from real records and rendered in your workspace currency, with one-click CSV export on the core reports.
Sales funnel
A sales funnel is the volume-and-conversion view of how deals narrow from many opportunities down to a few closed customers, stage by stage. Where a pipeline tracks the specific deals a rep is working, the funnel aggregates them into per-stage counts and the conversion rate between stages. Its main job in analytics is to expose the bottleneck — the stage where the most deals leak.
In KudosCRM: The sales funnel report is live — it shows per-stage deal counts and stage-to-stage conversion computed from your real pipeline, so the biggest conversion drop (your bottleneck) is easy to spot. Export it to CSV to slice by rep or source.
Sales engagement
Sales engagement is the practice of reaching prospects and customers through coordinated, well-timed touches — email sequences, calls, campaigns, and social — to move them toward a conversation and a deal. It's less about any single channel and more about running the whole outreach motion consistently: the right message, to the right person, at the right cadence. It differs from marketing automation, which is broader and more one-to-many, and from sales enablement, which equips reps rather than doing the outreach.
In KudosCRM: The growth engine is live — multi-step email sequences that auto-send from your own mailbox and auto-stop on a reply or booked meeting (with manual call, LinkedIn, and video task steps), plus bulk campaigns with real privacy-aware tracking. There is no SMS channel.
Sales cadence
A sales cadence is a planned sequence of touches — emails, calls, and social — spaced over days or weeks and aimed at a single prospect, designed to follow up persistently without becoming annoying. A good cadence stops the moment the prospect engages, so you never keep chasing someone who has already replied. It's the core unit of a sales engagement motion, and the one-to-one counterpart to a one-to-many campaign.
In KudosCRM: Cadences are live as email sequences — the email steps auto-send from the rep's own mailbox on a per-sequence sending window and auto-stop on a reply or booked meeting; call, LinkedIn, and video steps are manual tasks the cadence waits on, not automated outreach.
T
Trigger (automation)
A trigger is the event that starts an automated workflow — for example a deal won, a lead created, a form submitted, or a quote accepted. It decides both when a workflow runs and what data the rest of the flow can use. A good automation engine fires triggers from real events rather than listing placeholders that never actually run.
In KudosCRM: Triggers are live — 20+ events fire workflows across deals, contacts, leads, forms, meetings, quotes, orders, invoices, projects, campaigns, and partners. Scheduled (cron) and manual run-now triggers are on the roadmap, shown with a "Soon" pill.
U
UTM parameters
UTM parameters are tags added to a URL — utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, and friends — that record where a visitor came from before they converted. When a form carries those tags through to the submission, you can later prove which channel and campaign actually produced a lead. They're the plumbing behind honest source attribution.
In KudosCRM: UTM capture is live — every captured lead arrives tagged with its source, medium, campaign, and UTM parameters (plus the landing URL), carried through hidden fields and tracking on the form.
W
Web-to-lead
Web-to-lead is the mechanism that turns a website form submission directly into a lead record in your CRM, with no manual re-keying in between. Instead of a form emailing someone who copies the details into the CRM later, the submission writes straight onto a record — keeping the data clean and the source attached. It's the difference between "a form on your site" and "a form wired into your CRM."
In KudosCRM: Web-to-lead is live two ways — build a native form (hosted or embedded), or keep your own form and point it at the inbound endpoint, where common fields auto-map onto a new lead.
Weighted forecast
A weighted forecast counts each open deal at its value times the win probability of its stage, rather than at full value — a $50k deal at a 60% stage contributes $30k. Summed across the pipeline, weighting turns a list of optimistic deals into a realistic number, and because the weights are the stage probabilities you set, it's transparent and easy to defend.
In KudosCRM: Weighted forecasting is live — every open deal is weighted by its stage probability (with a per-deal override) and bucketed into committed, likely, and pipeline; the number updates the moment a deal moves.
Win/loss analysis
Win/loss analysis is the practice of studying why deals are won or lost to find patterns you can act on — pricing, competitors, timing, the stages where deals stall. It turns the outcome of every deal into feedback that sharpens both the pipeline and the pitch. The richer and more consistent the captured reasons, the more useful the analysis.
In KudosCRM: Win/loss analysis is supported — closing a deal requires a reason (and an optional competitor) from a taxonomy you control, and those reasons roll up into win-rate and lost-reason reporting.
Win rate
Win rate is the share of closed deals you won — won deals divided by total closed (won plus lost) over a period. It's one of the cleanest sales metrics because it's a simple ratio of outcomes you can compare across reps, periods, and segments. Read it as a trend: a win rate falling period over period is a far stronger signal than the single number.
In KudosCRM: Win rate is live — it's the headline figure on the deal performance report (won vs. closed, broken out by owner), computed from your real closed deals and comparable across periods.
Workflow automation
Workflow automation is the practice of stringing individual rules into a multi-step flow — a trigger, conditions that filter what runs, branches that route it, and a sequence of actions — so a whole process runs end to end on its own. Where a single rule reacts to one event, a workflow handles the branching reality of real work: different cases, different paths, all in one place.
In KudosCRM: Workflow automation is live — build a flow as node cards in a visual builder with AND/OR nested conditions (13 operators), N-way branches with an else path, and run history that traces every node so you can retry from a failed step.
FAQ
Common questions about these terms
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