KudosCRM glossary

Most of these words exist in other tools with slightly different meanings. This is what each one means here, so an article that uses the word means the same thing you do.

Who this is for

Anyone new to KudosCRM, and anyone arriving from another CRM where the same word meant something else.

Before you start

• Nothing. Read the ones you need.

The terms

1. Lead
   Someone who has arrived but has not been qualified into an opportunity yet. A lead carries a score, a grade, a lifecycle stage and a source. Converting a lead is what produces a contact, a company and a deal.
2. Contact and company
   A contact is a person you hold a relationship with; a company is the organisation they belong to. Contacts roll up to companies, and companies can roll up to a parent, so an account view can total value across a hierarchy.
3. Score and grade
   The score is a 0–100 number built from rules you define across intent, firmographic, behavioural and negative signals. The grade is that score made readable: A at 80 or above, B at 60 or above, C at 40 or above, D below.
4. Lifecycle stage
   Where a record sits in the marketing-to-sales hand-off — lead, MQL, then SQL — with enforced legal transitions, so the hand-off is an explicit state on the record rather than an assumption.
5. Pipeline and stage
   A pipeline is the sequence of stages a deal moves through. Each stage carries a win probability, and you mark which stages mean closed-won and closed-lost.
6. Weighted forecast
   The total of your open deals with each one multiplied by the win probability of its stage, sorted into confidence buckets and shown against quota.
7. Audience
   A defined group of records you can act on together — the thing a campaign sends to. Built from filters rather than maintained by hand.
8. Sequence versus campaign
   A sequence is a multi-step outreach flow that individual contacts are enrolled into and move through over time. A campaign is a send to an audience. Sequences are per-person and paced; campaigns are one send to a group.
9. Workflow
   An automation: when a chosen event happens, optionally check conditions, then take actions. Workflows run in the background after the event that triggered them.
10. Ticket
    A support request with a status, an assignee and an SLA target. Tickets sit on the same contacts and companies as everything else, so an agent can see the deal and the project alongside the question.

What you get

• A shared vocabulary, so a conversation about 'the forecast' or 'a lead' means one thing.
• The two distinctions that trip people up most: lead versus contact, and sequence versus campaign.
• Enough context to read the rest of the help center without stopping to work out a term.

Frequently asked questions

What is the real difference between a lead and a contact?

A lead is pre-qualification and carries a score, a grade and a lifecycle stage. A contact is an established person record. Converting a lead creates the contact, the company and the deal together, so nothing is retyped.

Is an audience the same as a segment?

They are used interchangeably in most tools. Here, an audience is the built-from-filters group that a campaign sends to.

Should I use a sequence or a campaign?

A sequence when you want a paced, multi-step follow-up per person. A campaign when you want one message to a defined group. They are different shapes of outreach, not competing versions of the same thing.

What decides a lead's grade?

The score, via fixed thresholds — A at 80 and above, B at 60, C at 40, D below. You control the score by writing the scoring rules; the grade is just how that score is read at a glance.