CRM, ERP and B2B Commerce glossary
Short, no-nonsense definitions of terms used in CRM/ERP implementation conversations. No marketing fluff.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
CRM is a system for managing customer relationships that consolidates the full history of contacts, sales deals and service interactions in one place — replacing scattered notes in Excel, emails and sales reps' heads.
ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning)
ERP is an integrated enterprise resource planning system that unifies orders, warehouse, production, invoicing and accounting in a single database — eliminating the need to manually copy data between spreadsheets and separate systems.
B2B Commerce
B2B Commerce is a sales platform for business customers — with individual price lists, product configurators, order history and ERP integration — letting clients place orders themselves without contacting the office.
TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)
TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) is the sum of all costs of a chosen system over 3-5 years — licences, implementation, maintenance, training, hosting and switching costs — allowing fair CRM/ERP comparisons beyond the monthly per-user price.
Vendor lock-in
Vendor lock-in is a situation where switching system providers becomes so hard or expensive that the company is 'locked' into the current vendor — typical for closed SaaS platforms, eliminated by open source.