Terms and Concepts

Customer relationship management—often called CRM, CRM system, or CRM software—is a business solution that helps companies improve marketing, sales, and service engagement with their customers to drive organizational efficiency, while helping to improve customer experience.

A deal means a sales opportunity. It can be created directly by a Sales Rep, from the conversion of a marketing lead, or other sources. A deal represents any kind of business development effort that you would like to track and move along through a sales pipeline.

A contact represents a customer or an individual in the organization associated to a deal.

An activity is an act of assigning special to-do action related to a deal.

A pipeline is a linear series of sales stages. The pipeline is used as a visual aid to indicate the sales progress along a path. You can easily move a deal from one stage to the next by simply clicking on the deal and moving it forward to the correct stage. You can also simply click and move the deal to the Won or Lost stages.

A percentage certainty that the deal will close at some point in the future.

Issues are the work packets in JIRA. Each issue can be further defined by assigning the issue an issue type. For example, if you're running a project in an office, issues could represent the tasks you need to do to complete that project. Each issue type would be a type of task, like administration task, filing task, or create document task. If you're using JIRA for asset tracking, an issue could represent an asset (or inventory item) and the issue type could be the types of assets (laptops, monitors, printers etc.). Issues then progress (or move) though JIRA via a associated workflow that dictates what can and can't (or more correctly, what should and shouldn't!) happen to that issue.

In Kanoah CRM, deals, contacts, activities and organizations are issues, so you can take advantage of all features available on JIRA.

So how do I group issues? What if I want a construction project, and I also want to track my assets for that project in JIRA, how can I do that? Well, you use projects! Projects are a way to group your issues, and apply a set of defaults. These defaults make sure all your issues have the information that they need to be progressed and tracked through your workflow. Each project can have an administrator, who is typically the project lead, and they're responsible for administering the project.

In Kanoah CRM, you create a CRM Project to group deals, contacts, activities and organizations.

Great! You now know issues are the work, and they're grouped in projects. But what's the workflow, and how does it effect the issues? Workflow dictates how an issue can be progressed in a project. The workflows can be as simple or as complex as you need them. Workflows are often modeled on existing processes, and are made up of statuses (or steps) and transitions (movements between statuses).

In Kanoah CRM, a workflow is used to define the sales pipeline, each status of the workflow is a sales stage.

JIRA can be used to track many different types of issues. In addition to the default issue types available on JIRA, Kanoah CRM introduces new ones: deal, activity, contact and organization. In Kanoah CRM, a workflow is used to define the sales pipeline, each status of the workflow is a sales stage.