CRM & Data Glossary

A CRM (customer relationship management) system is the central database where a business stores and manages its interactions with prospects and customers — contacts, companies, deals and activities. It gives Sales, Marketing and Service one shared, up-to-date view of every relationship.

A CRM object is a type of record a CRM stores — such as contacts, companies, deals or tickets. Each object holds records of that type, has its own properties (fields), and can be associated with other objects to model how your business actually works.

A CRM property (or field) is a single piece of information stored on a record — a contact's email, a deal's value, a company's industry. Properties define what data a CRM captures, and well-structured properties are the foundation of reliable segmentation and reporting.

An association is the link between two records in a CRM — connecting a contact to the company they work for, or a deal to the people involved in it. Associations turn a CRM from isolated lists into a connected map of your business relationships.

A single source of truth (SSOT) is one authoritative system where a given piece of data lives and is trusted across the whole organization. In RevOps it usually means the CRM: every team reads and writes customer data in one place, so reports don't disagree.

Lead source and original source both record where a contact came from, but at different grains. In HubSpot, original source is the first channel that brought a contact to you and never changes; lead source is usually a custom property capturing the origin of a specific lead or deal. Confusing them corrupts attribution.

Data enrichment is the process of automatically filling in or updating CRM records with additional information — firmographics, contact details, technographics — from third-party sources. It makes records more complete without manual research, improving segmentation, routing and scoring.

Deduplication is the process of finding and merging duplicate records in a CRM — the same contact or company entered more than once. Duplicates split activity history, distort reporting and cause double outreach, so dedupe is core CRM hygiene.

CRM data migration is the process of moving data — contacts, companies, deals, activities — from one system into a CRM, with mapping, cleaning and validation along the way. Done well it preserves history and relationships; done badly it imports years of mess into a fresh system.

Field mapping is defining how data fields in a source system correspond to properties in the destination CRM during a migration or integration — for example mapping “Account Name” to HubSpot's “Company name.” Accurate mapping ensures data lands in the right place and stays usable.

A CRM workflow (or automation) is a set of rules that performs actions automatically when conditions are met — updating fields, sending emails, creating tasks or routing records. Workflows remove manual, repetitive work and enforce process consistently across the team.