TeamGram Terminology

Leads are people who may be interested in buying from you.

There is usually little information about leads. Most of the time a name and a phone number or email address is enough to create a lead. Leads are generated through marketing activities. Typical examples are trade show visitors who leave their business cards at your booth, people who call to ask for prices, website visitors who fill in a form for more information, etc. You need a steady stream of new leads to grow your sales.

Lead qualification is the process through which you determine if a lead is valuable or not.

The lead qualification process will help you select the leads that match your qualification criteria. Not every visitor who leaves a business card at your trade show booth will be an actual buyer. A well designed screening process will help you find which leads are qualified.

Customers are people or businesses who are seriously interested in buying from you, or have already bought from you.

When a lead is qualified, and you are talking to them about a specific deal, you can usually start referring to them as a customer, even if they haven’t bought from you yet.

Deals are sales opportunities you are working on.

A deal describes the overall opportunity (Example: A carpet seller may have an opportunity for “Carpets for Excelsior Hotel Renovation Project”). The deal doesn’t need to specify exactly which products the customer intends to buy. These are likely to change as the deal is negotiated. It is possible to negotiate for multiple deals with the same customer simultaneously. A customer may negotiate for multiple products as part of the same deal, and even place multiple orders over an extended period of time.

The pipeline is a visual representation of your open (in-progress) deals.

The deal pipeline can be arranged by deal stage, expected closing date, probability, etc. to get valuable insights about upcoming sales.

Quotes are documents you send to your customers to explain the prices, terms and conditions at which you propose to sell.

In most deals, you will need to write a quote at some point. Note that your primary goal is to win the deal. A quote is just a document needed at one point in the deal negotiation process. Your quote may be rejected, but that doesn’t always mean the deal is lost. During the course of negotiations you may need to revise your quotes multiple times to accommodate customer requests and respond to competition.

Orders are documents that specify the products your customer has accepted to buy from you, and the terms and conditions they have agreed to.

An order is the customer’s response to a quote. Note that an order and a deal are not the same thing. The sales team’s primary goal is to win deals. Getting an order does not necessarily mean the whole deal is won, and sometimes it is possible to consider a deal as won, even if no order is placed yet.

Companies are businesses you have relationships with.

These include your business customers, as well as other businesses like business partners, suppliers, etc.

Contacts are real people working for the companies you have relationships with.

When you are selling to businesses, your customer may be a company, but your personal relationships are with real persons working there. TeamGram keeps track of both, and knows the relationships between companies and the contacts working for those companies.

Products are the things you sell, including services and supplementary items like shipping.

Your product list will include information like brand, model, SKU, price, tax rate, etc. Having this information in TeamGram makes it much easier to write quotes and orders.

Activities are things you schedule to do in the future.

Meetings and follow-up calls are typical sales activities, but you can also have other types of activities related to your deals. These can include site surveys, installations, product demonstrations, etc. Scheduling activities in TeamGram helps make sure things get done on time.

Recurring activities are activities repeating at regular intervals.

Examples include monthly customer follow-up calls and yearly maintenance contract renewals.