Glossary of sales automation, CRM and AI
Quick answer
This glossary gathers short, direct definitions of the main terms in sales automation, CRM and artificial intelligence applied to sales. Use it as a quick reference to understand concepts like lead scoring, pipeline, RAG, omnichannel and WhatsApp Business API.
- Sales automation
- The use of software to automatically run repetitive tasks of the sales process — lead capture, first response, qualification, scheduling and follow-up — without manual work. It enables automatic 24/7 service and organizes the sales funnel.
- Sales CRM
- Customer relationship management software focused on sales. It organizes the funnel into a visual pipeline, centralizes contacts and the history of every deal, and helps the team convert leads into customers. Different from a generic or service CRM.
- AI agent
- An artificial intelligence assistant that talks in natural language, serves leads 24/7, answers questions, qualifies interest and hands off to a human at the right moment. It understands context and does not rely on fixed menus, unlike a traditional chatbot.
- Chatbot
- A program that automates conversations following a fixed decision tree, with predefined answers and menus ("type 1 for sales"). Useful for simple flows, but it breaks when the user goes off-script — unlike an AI agent, which understands natural language.
- Lead scoring
- An automatic scoring system that ranks leads based on engagement and profile. Hotter leads get a higher score and rise in the priority ranking, helping the team focus first on those most likely to buy.
- Pipeline (sales funnel)
- A visual representation of the stages a lead goes through from entry to close — for example: new lead, qualification, proposal, negotiation, won. In a CRM, it usually appears as a Kanban board, with each stage in a column. Also called the sales funnel.
- Omnichannel
- A strategy that integrates all service channels — WhatsApp, Instagram, website, email — into a single inbox, with unified history per contact. The customer is served continuously, regardless of the channel they came through.
- WhatsApp Business API
- Meta's official interface that lets companies integrate WhatsApp with systems like CRMs and AI agents. It supports multi-agent service, automations, HSM templates and sending at scale, with the number officially linked to the company account.
- HSM template
- A message template pre-approved by Meta (Highly Structured Message), used to send WhatsApp messages outside the 24-hour window after the customer's last interaction. It lets you re-engage leads and customers with standardized, approved messages.
- Lead
- A person or company that has shown interest in your product or service and provided a way to make contact — for example, by filling out a form, clicking an ad or messaging on WhatsApp. It is a potential sales opportunity.
- Follow-up
- The act of reconnecting with a lead who has not yet bought, to re-engage them and advance the sale. It can be manual or automatic. Automatically, spaced message sequences are triggered until the buying decision, without relying on the salesperson's memory.
- RAG
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation: a technique in which the AI agent retrieves relevant passages from the business's knowledge base before generating the answer. It ensures accurate responses aligned with the product and company policy, instead of generic or invented ones.
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