A Glossary of Key Sales & Business Development Terms for HR & Recruiting Professionals in Keap
In today’s interconnected business environment, HR and recruiting professionals often find themselves collaborating closely with sales and business development teams. Understanding their specialized vocabulary is crucial for seamless communication, effective process integration, and ultimately, building a more robust talent acquisition and retention strategy. This glossary deciphers common sales and business development terms, offering clarity and highlighting their relevance within an HR or recruiting context, particularly when leveraging platforms like Keap for automation.
CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, a technology used to manage all your company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. The goal of a CRM system like Keap is to improve business relationships to grow your business. For HR and recruiting, a CRM isn’t just for sales; it can serve as a powerful database for talent pools, candidate pipelines, and even employee relationship management. Integrating candidate data from applicant tracking systems (ATS) into Keap can help recruiters track interactions, nurture passive candidates, and automate communication sequences, treating candidates with the same personalized attention as high-value clients. This ensures a consistent candidate experience and helps build a strong employer brand.
Lead
A lead is an individual or organization who has shown some interest in your product or service. This interest might be expressed through downloading content, visiting a webpage, or interacting with a social media post. In sales, leads are the initial step in the sales funnel. For HR, a “lead” can be analogous to a potential candidate who has shown preliminary interest in a role or your company, perhaps by attending a career fair, engaging with recruitment marketing content, or signing up for job alerts. Automating lead capture through Keap forms for candidate inquiries, paired with automated follow-up sequences, ensures no potential talent slips through the cracks, allowing recruiters to efficiently qualify and nurture prospects for future roles.
Prospect
A prospect is a qualified lead who has been evaluated as having the potential to become a customer. This means they fit the target demographic, have a clear need for the product or service, and possess the authority and budget to make a purchase. In recruiting, a prospect would be a candidate who has been identified, screened, and validated as having the necessary skills, experience, and cultural fit for a specific open position. Keap can be used to manage prospect pipelines, allowing recruiters to segment candidates by skills, industry, or experience level, and automate personalized outreach campaigns based on their qualification status. This precision ensures recruiting efforts are focused on the most promising individuals.
Sales Funnel / Pipeline
The sales funnel (often visualized as a funnel or pipeline) represents the journey a potential customer takes from initial awareness to becoming a paying customer. It typically includes stages like awareness, interest, consideration, intent, evaluation, and purchase. In HR and recruiting, this concept translates directly to the candidate journey or recruitment pipeline. From initial application to interview stages, offer, and eventual hire, a well-defined pipeline helps recruiting teams track progress, identify bottlenecks, and forecast hiring needs. Keap’s campaign builder allows for the creation of automated workflows that move candidates through these stages, triggering specific communications or tasks for recruiters, ensuring a smooth and efficient hiring process.
Conversion Rate
Conversion rate is the percentage of users who complete a desired goal (a “conversion”) out of the total number of visitors. In sales, this could be the percentage of leads who become customers. For HR and recruiting, conversion rate is a critical metric for evaluating the effectiveness of various stages in the hiring process. Examples include the percentage of applicants converted to interviews, interviews to offers, or offers to hires. Tracking conversion rates within a Keap-integrated system allows HR professionals to pinpoint areas for improvement, such as optimizing job descriptions, refining screening processes, or enhancing candidate engagement strategies. Automation can significantly impact conversion rates by ensuring timely and consistent candidate communication.
Customer Lifecycle
The customer lifecycle refers to the entire journey a customer takes with a company, from initial contact and purchase through ongoing engagement, retention, and advocacy. It typically covers phases such as acquisition, engagement, retention, and growth. In an HR context, this parallels the employee lifecycle, from recruitment and onboarding to development, retention, and offboarding. Understanding this lifecycle is essential for building a strong talent strategy. Keap can be used to automate various stages of this lifecycle, not just for external customers but also for internal talent management, creating personalized journeys for employee growth, training, and development to foster loyalty and reduce churn.
Keap Campaign
A Keap Campaign is a series of automated marketing, sales, or service actions triggered by specific events or conditions. These can include email sequences, task assignments, text messages, or internal notifications, all designed to guide contacts through a desired journey. For HR and recruiting, Keap Campaigns are invaluable for automating candidate nurturing, onboarding processes, or even employee engagement. For instance, a “New Candidate” campaign could automatically send a welcome email, schedule a screening call, and assign a follow-up task to a recruiter. This automation saves significant administrative time, ensures consistency, and provides a highly personalized experience for both candidates and employees.
Automation Playbook
An automation playbook is a documented set of standardized procedures and workflows designed to automate specific business processes. It outlines the triggers, actions, and outcomes of automated sequences, ensuring consistency and efficiency. In sales, a playbook might detail how to automate lead follow-up or customer re-engagement. For HR and recruiting, an automation playbook could define automated hiring workflows, from initial application acknowledgments to interview scheduling and offer letter generation. Documenting these playbooks within a system like Keap ensures that even complex, multi-step processes are executed flawlessly, reducing human error and freeing up HR teams to focus on strategic initiatives rather than repetitive administrative tasks.
Customer Segmentation
Customer segmentation is the process of dividing a customer base into distinct groups based on shared characteristics such as demographics, behaviors, or needs. This allows businesses to tailor marketing and sales strategies to specific segments for greater effectiveness. In recruiting, the equivalent is candidate segmentation, where a talent pool is categorized by skills, experience, industry, location, or career interests. Using Keap, recruiters can tag and segment candidates, enabling highly targeted outreach campaigns for specific roles or talent initiatives. This precision ensures that the right message reaches the right candidate at the right time, significantly improving recruitment efficiency and reducing time-to-hire.
Upselling / Cross-selling
Upselling is a sales technique designed to persuade customers to purchase a more expensive, upgraded, or premium version of an item or service. Cross-selling encourages customers to buy related or complementary items. While these are core sales concepts, their principles can be loosely applied to internal talent development. For HR, “upselling” might involve encouraging employees to take on higher-level responsibilities or advanced training. “Cross-selling” could mean promoting opportunities in different departments or lateral moves that broaden an employee’s skill set. Automation through Keap could facilitate internal talent mobility programs by identifying employees with specific skill sets and automatically notifying them of relevant internal opportunities or development paths.
Churn Rate
Churn rate is the rate at which customers discontinue their service or stop purchasing products from a company over a given period. It’s a critical metric for businesses reliant on recurring revenue. In HR and recruiting, the analogous concept is employee turnover or attrition rate. High churn indicates potential issues with employee satisfaction, management, or culture. While Keap is not a primary HRIS, it can integrate with HR systems to track key employee engagement data points and automate check-ins or feedback surveys that might preemptively identify at-risk employees. Understanding and mitigating “churn” in talent is as vital as in customer relationships, impacting recruitment costs and organizational stability.
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a prospect who is more likely to become a customer compared to other leads, based on their engagement with marketing content and their demographic information. They’ve shown sufficient interest to be deemed ready for further engagement by the marketing team before being passed to sales. In recruiting, an MQL might be a candidate who actively engages with your employer brand content, downloads a career guide, or attends a virtual hiring event, signaling a strong interest in your company even without directly applying for a role. Keap can track these engagements and automate nurturing sequences to further qualify these candidates before passing them to a recruiter for direct contact.
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
A Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) is a prospect who has been thoroughly vetted by the marketing and sales teams and is considered ready for a direct sales approach. They have expressed a clear need, have the budget and authority, and are actively seeking a solution. In recruiting, an SQL is a candidate who has not only expressed interest but has also been pre-screened, perhaps through an initial interview or skills assessment, and is deemed a strong fit for an open position. Keap automation can facilitate the transition of MQLs to SQLs by triggering assessment requests or pre-interview questionnaires, ensuring recruiters spend their time on the most promising and prepared candidates ready for deeper engagement.
Referral Program
A referral program is a system that encourages existing customers to refer new customers to a business, often in exchange for an incentive. It leverages trusted relationships to generate new leads. For HR and recruiting, employee referral programs are one of the most effective and cost-efficient ways to source high-quality talent. Employees refer candidates from their professional networks who often come pre-vetted and culturally aligned. Keap can be used to manage and automate the entire referral program process, from collecting referrals and tracking their progress through the hiring funnel, to automating incentive payouts, ensuring a smooth and transparent experience for referrers and referred candidates alike.
Onboarding (Client/Customer)
Client or customer onboarding is the process of integrating new clients into a company’s ecosystem, ensuring they have a positive initial experience and are set up for success with the product or service. This often involves training, setting expectations, and providing initial support. While distinct from employee onboarding, the principles are highly relevant to HR. Recruiters can learn from sales’ structured onboarding processes to refine the post-offer, pre-start experience for new hires, ensuring they feel welcomed, informed, and prepared. Keap can automate elements of this process, sending welcome kits, key information, and pre-start tasks, ensuring new employees are effectively integrated and engaged from day one, leading to higher retention rates.
If you would like to read more, we recommend this article: Keap CRM Data Protection: The HR & Recruiting Implementation Checklist
