Once again our heroes at Salesforce Ben have put together a great and definitive salesforce glossary of acronyms and it is way too good not to share. Bookmark it. Keep it handy. And at least once you won’t have to ask that embarrassing question or Google an acronym to know what everyone is talking about.
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| Acronym | Meaning | Definition |
| AKA | Also Known As | Due to name changes Salesforce has made to some products and also the slang/pet names the Salesforce community adorn certain functionality, these three letters have crept into our vocabulary. You will also often here a product referred to as XYZ formerly known as. |
| BA | Business Analyst | Business Analysts are the people in your organization who are asking ‘why’ (why a process happens the way it does) to understand what the business needs from its technology. As an organization grows, it typically demands larger and more complex software solutions. That’s where BAs come in. |
| BSS | Business Support System | “Solutions which streamline operations, reduce costs, and help businesses create more innovative products by centralizing customer data and automating processes.” (source) |
| DF | Dreamforce | Dreamforce is Salesforce’s flagship conference – but a conference like no other! Tickets to this annual event are highly sought-after because of the learning and networking opportunities available to the 170,000+ attendees (not to mention the legendary parties, too!) |
| FKA | Formerly Known As | Due to the name changes Salesforce has made to some products, these three letters have started to creep into our vocabulary to avoid confusion, bringing the person we’re speaking to along with us. READ MORE: Glossary of Salesforce Product Name Changes |
| EE | Enterprise Edition | You will commonly hear these Salesforce editions: Professional, Enterprise, and Unlimited. Enterprise Edition (EE) is where most organizations opt to start from, where you gain access to the features that most organizations need. |
| GA | General Availability | The release status where a feature has been formally released. This happens by its inclusion in a Salesforce release cycle (Spring, Summer, Winter). Support will be available as technical support teams have been briefed on the functionality. (It comes after the Pilot and Beta phases). |
| IaaS | Infrastructure as a Service | “Self-service models for accessing, monitoring, and managing remote datacenter infrastructures, such as compute (virtualized or bare metal), storage, networking, and networking services (e.g. firewalls). Salesforce does not offer Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) services. It is a customer of them, primarily Amazon Web Services.” (source) |
| KPI | Key Performance Indicator | “A Key Performance Indicator is a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives.” (source) Admins play a key role in KPI tracking, tasked to build Salesforce dashboards that demonstrate business trends. |
| LEX | Lightning Experience | Salesforce revamped the product interface around 2015 after having a relatively consistent look and feel for its 16 years in operation. Salesforce Lightning was designed to be a big improvement in user experience – to boost user productivity and make CRM a pleasure to use. Most organizations have now transitioned to Salesforce Lightning from Classic. |
| LOB | Line of Business | Line of Business could often come up when planning Salesforce projects. For example, Sales, Marketing, etc. When it comes to packaging, you can either split by project (let’s say Quote to Cash broadly) or by LOB. |
| PaaS | Platform as a Service | “A set of cloud-based services that enable business users and developers to build applications at speed…As it’s a cloud-based service there’s no need to worry about the set-up and maintenance of servers, patching, upgrades, authentication.” (source) Salesforce characteristics that make it PaaS include a Mobile Software Development Kit (SDK), managed cloud database, and point-and-click app building. |
| PE | Professional Edition | You will commonly hear these Salesforce editions: Professional, Enterprise, and Unlimited. |
| QA | Quality Assurance | QA is a stage of testing/test automation, which is essential to manage risk and deliver quality Salesforce releases on time. The quality of any Salesforce customizations is your responsibility – not Salesforce’s! QA teams will stress-test the system’s functionality and report any bugs that need to be resolved. |
| ROI | Return on Investment | As the name suggests, this is the return (the revenue) that an organization has gained as a direct result of an investment (budget spent). This is heard in the Salesforce ecosystem in multiple contexts – it could be an investment into a new Salesforce product, enhancement project, or AppExchange app. It could be RevOps teams performing ROI reporting across their marketing and sales data. |
| SaaS | Software as a Service | Salesforce set out to be SaaS through and through! A third-party provider, like Salesforce, hosts your CRM and related applications for your users to access over the internet. In the case of Salesforce, licenses to access the service are typically billed annually, with a contractual commitment of one to three years. That’s why SaaS was revolutionary in the beginning, as companies were no longer locked into one system, with the possibility to switch providers without investing in the IT infrastructure themselves! |
| SDLC | Software Development Lifecycle | “A process that produces software with the highest quality and lowest cost in the shortest time possible.” (source) As Salesforce is a platform that businesses extend according to their evolving needs, you may hear this term! |
| SFDC | Salesforce dot com | Salesforce pioneered cloud CRM, so it was always referred to as ‘Salesforce dot-com’ in the early days to emphasize its online accessibility and to distinguish itself from premise offerings. The acronym still sticks today, especially among serving community members. |
| SLACK | SearchableLog of All Communication and Knowledge | This might seem like a strange entry on this list, but Salesforce’s workplace instant messaging/collaboration platform is, in fact, an acronym, standing for “Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge”. Yes, Slack is a real word you’ll find in the dictionary, often used in slang – to “slack off” or “cut me some slack”. Don’t you think these associations drum up collaborative, highly responsive, productive, happy teams? You’re right – it all sounds dull. |
| SME | Subject Matter Expert | This is an individual with specialized knowledge in a specific area. In the Salesforce ecosystem, you will find individuals with a depth of knowledge in a niche area that makes them indispensable to a particular business model or project. |
| TBID | Trailblazer ID | Trailblazer ID is how someone authenticates (i.e. logs in to access) Salesforce digital experiences – think Trailhead, Salesforce Events, Salesforce Help (documentation), Trailblazer Community, Salesforce+, developer.salesforce.com, and the rest of the 25+ other experiences. Practically speaking, this is a single sign-up and sign-on experience that will enable you to keep your profile and settings with you, no matter which digital experience you’re using or wherever your career takes you (for example, if you change jobs). |
| /u/m | Per user, per month | There are multiple different types of Salesforce licenses, most of which Salesforce bill your organization for the number of users by month that take advantage of the services they provide. You may see this abbreviation on Salesforce’s website pricing pages, on contracts, etc. |
| UAT | User Acceptance Testing | Keeping your users productive is the aim of any development project. There are plenty of ways to customize Salesforce’s functionality, look and feel, but how do you ensure that what you deploy into production a) functions as it should and b) is what your users actually want? That’s where UAT comes in (also known as beta or end-user testing), for users to stress-test the system how they would use it day-to-day. Sometimes carried out using scripted use cases (eg. do this, do that, what was the result?) or let your users roam free to catch things you may have missed. UAT is covered in the Salesforce UX Designer certification. |
| UE | Unlimited Edition | You will commonly hear these Salesforce editions: Professional, Enterprise, and Unlimited. Unlimited edition (UE) gives you access to the best in the suite. |
| UI | User Interface | “User interface (UI) is the point of human-computer interaction and communication in a device. This can include display screens, keyboards, a mouse and the appearance of a desktop.” (source). |
| UX | User Experience | “User experience (UX) design is the process design teams use to create products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users. This involves the design of the entire process of acquiring and integrating the product, including aspects of branding, design, usability and function.” (source) The Salesforce UX Designer certification brings this to the forefront. |
Admin
| Acronym | Meaning | Definition |
| CMT | Custom Metadata Types | With custom metadata types, admins and developers have the ability to create their own configuration and application metadata, deploy it, and then update it as needed. |
| CRED | Create, Read, Edit, Delete | Profiles control what users can do in your Salesforce org. This can be referred to as CRED, which enables you to mix and match what a specific user can do with each object. For example, you may want some users in your org to read and edit Leads, but not delete them. |
| CRUD | Create, Read, Update, Delete | Four actions that a system can take with a record. You’ll hear this term used for data loading and when discussing integrations. |
| DLRS | Declarative Lookup Roll-up Summaries | The Declarative Lookup Roll-up Summaries (DLRS) managed package is a must-have for creating roll-up summaries between lookup relationships. Andy Fawcett’s open-source tool is a gift, enabling you to define roll-ups using standard UI declaratively, no coding required! |
| EAC | Einstein Activity Capture | Einstein Activity Capture enables you to capture the right data from Gmail and Outlook and add it to Salesforce, which is great for syncing data between these platforms. |
| EPIM | Enhanced Personal Information Managements | Each external user (i.e. anyone using your Experience Cloud site) should only edit and view their own Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data. This setting will be enabled in all orgs in the Winter ‘23 release. |
| EPT | Experience Page Time | Salesforce uses a metric called Experienced Page Time, which measures the time it takes for a page to load entirely. |
| ERD | Entity Relationship Diagram | Used to map out business processes to communicate both development teams (“what we need to build”) and non-technical audiences (“what the technology is doing”). There are standards to ERDs in terms of which nodes (the shapes) and connectors (arrows) to use, and when. Salesforce released “Salesforce Diagrams” to promote design thinking and speed up the process of creating diagrams with pre-made diagrams. |
| FLS | Field-level security | Field-level security is set by Admins on the field’s definition in Salesforce Setup. It determines which fields are visible or editable to certain users. |
| HML | Handlebars Merge Language | HML is the way to add personalization to emails sent from the Salesforce platform (including Pardot). The most common example would be to add a Lead or Contact’s first name in the body of the email. |
| ISO | International Organization for Standardization code | The International Organization for Standardization country code represents each country by two letters. Admins will come across this when dealing with country fields, country codes in phone numbers and currencies. |
| OCR | Opportunity Contact Role | Contact Roles are a standard Salesforce object that define the role or level of influence that a contact has in relation to a sales opportunity. |
| OWD | Org-wide Default | The organizational wide default is the baseline visibility set for each object in your org (ie. the CRED). Profiles and permission sets are used to open up access beyond the OWD. |
| PB | Process Builder | Process Builder is a tool for Salesforce process automation, using clicks not code. Due for retirement, PB is being superseded by Salesforce Flow. |
| SML | Salesforce Merge Language | The strings that were used to personalize emails sent from Salesforce. SML has been in the process of being phased out since the HML release in Summer ‘18. SML is still being used with Classic email templates. |
| UPN | Universal Process Notation | Universal Process Notation (UPN) is a way to document business processes that can be understood by a wide range of different audiences – from business analysts and IT teams, through to end-users, management, regulators and more. Knowing Universal Process Notation is an essential competency for careers within (and beyond) the Salesforce ecosystem, such as Business Analysts, Consultants, Sales Ops, and more. |
| WFR | Workflow Rules | Workflow Rules are a tool for Salesforce process automation, using clicks not code. Due for retirement, WFRs is being superseded by Salesforce Flow. |
Sales
| Acronym | Meaning | Definition |
| BANT | Budget, Authority, Need, Time | A framework that helps sales reps judge how qualified a lead is/their propensity to purchase (how likely they are to purchase). From there, sales reps can focus their attention on the most promising prospects. |
| CQ | Calendar Quarter | A period of three months that is used by organizations in order to calculate their budgets, profits, losses, and sales quotas. The calendar quarters start in January/April/July/October, whereas the fiscal quarters can start at any month (according to the organization), for example, Salesforce themselves start their fiscal year in February, which means their second fiscal quarter starts in May. Salesforce Admins and users will come across this when filtering date fields in the Salesforce report builder. |
| CY | Calendar Year | A period of twelve months that is used by organizations in order to calculate their budgets, profits, losses, and sales quotas. The calendar year starts in January, whereas the fiscal year can start at any month (according to the organization), for example, Salesforce themselves start their fiscal year in February. Salesforce Admins and users will come across this when filtering date fields in the Salesforce report builder. |
| ECC | Einstein Call Coaching | Einstein Call Coaching gives users insights and trends from sales calls – taking the rich fabric of a conversation and splicing it into key moments. ECC is ‘product within a product’ of High Velocity Sales (HVS). |
| ECI | Einstein Conversation Insights | Gives users insights and trends from sales calls – taking the rich fabric of a conversation and splicing it into key moments. Never before have sales managers and reps been able to analyze their conversations like this – at scale and at speed – which would be impossible without the help of AI. (Formerly known as Einstein Call Coaching). |
| EEI | Einstein Email Insights | Einstein will surface contextual sales information while writing emails, so you ultimately send the best response, at the best time. Available with Sales Cloud Einstein, Inbox, High Velocity Sales, or Revenue Intelligence, which come at an additional cost. It’s available (at an extra cost) for Salesforce Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited editions. |
| FQ | Fiscal Quarter | A period of three months that is used by organizations in order to calculate their budgets, profits, losses, and sales quotas. Salesforce Admins and users will come across this when filtering date fields in the Salesforce report builder. |
| FY | Fiscal Year | “A period of twelve months, used by organizations in order to calculate their budgets, profits, and losses.” (and sales quotas) (source). Salesforce Admins and users will come across this when filtering date fields in the Salesforce report builder. |
| HVS | High-velocity Sales | High-velocity Sales was developed for inside sales/sales development teams that process a high-volume of activities, especially calls. Now called Sales Engagement, the product comprises of: Sales Cadences, Work Queue, Einstein Lead Score, Salesforce Inbox, Call Scripts and Einstein Call Coaching. |
| YOY | Year-on-year | Comparing the performance in one period of time with the same time period the previous year. For example, comparing January 2022 to January 2021 to see if trends have increased or decreased. |
Quote-to-Cash
| Acronym | Meaning | Defintion |
| ACV | Annual Contract Value | The annual revenue generated from each customer contract, each year. |
| ARR | Annual Recurring Revenue | The annual revenue generated from all customer contracts (ie. the company-level revenue), a metric used by subscription-based businesses (commonly SaaS). |
| CLM | Contract Lifecycle Management | CLM tools manage the complexities of the contract lifecycle: “the creation of the contract itself, which can range from a simple, single-page agreement to a massive list of specifications and amendments. Then you have the negotiation process and the approval process. And finally, you must carefully manage the post-approval period, which generally consists of administering the contract, enforcing terms, and data reporting”(source). There are CLM providers on the Salesforce AppExchange that can boost your legal team’s productivity. |
| CPQ | Configure Price Quote | CPQ tools enable sales teams to quickly and accurately generate quotes. Salesforce CPQ is an add-on product that sits on top of Sales Cloud. Read more about CPQ’s objects and data model, and its differences to standard Sales Cloud products. |
| MDQ | Multi-Dimensional Quoting | “Commonly used for quoting with multiple years/terms/segments where you may have a ramp-up in price over the course of the segments and/or a ramp-up in the quantity of the product being sold” (source). |
| SKU | Stock Keeping Unit | “A unique number assigned by a retailer to items in their inventory” (source). |
| TCV | Total Contract Value | The total revenue generated from each customer contract, for all years. For example, a 3-year contract with $1 mil ACV will be $3 mil in TCV. |
General Data Management & Security
| Acronym | Meaning | Definition |
| 2FA | Two-factor Authentication | Also an extra layer of security that proves a user trying to login to Salesforce is who they say they are. You will have seen this in action when creating/updating your password, and selecting a question (eg. “City you were born”) and a memorable answer. Note: 2FA has now been broadly replaced by MFA. |
| CASL | Canada Anti-Spam Law | “An anti-spam law that applies to all electronic messages (i.e. email, texts) organizations send in connection with a “commercial activity.” Its key feature requires Canadian and global organizations that send commercial electronic messages (CEMs) within, from or to Canada to receive consent from recipients before sending messages.” (source). |
| CCPA | California Consumer Privacy Act | Similar to GDPR, CCPA applies to businesses that collect or use personal information of California residents (even if the business is not in California). |
| CORS | Cross-Origin Resource Sharing | “Allows web browsers to request resources from other origins. For example, using CORS, the JavaScript for a web application at https://www.example.com can request a resource from https://www.salesforce.com.” (source). |
| CSP | Content Security Policy | The Lightning Component framework uses CSP to impose restrictions on content. The main objective is to help prevent cross-site scripting and other code injection attacks. READ MORE: Manage CSP Trusted Sites |
| GDPR | General Data Protection Regulation | “A legal framework that sets guidelines for the collection and processing of personal information from individuals who live in the European Union (EU).” (source). |
| HIPAA | Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act | “Ensures that individual health-care plans are accessible, portable and renewable, and it sets the standards and the methods for how medical data is shared across the U.S. health system in order to prevent fraud.” (source). |
| HMS | Hardware Security Module | “Used to provide cryptography processing and key management for authentication. Shield Platform Encryption uses HSMs to generate and store secret material, and run the function that derives data encryption keys used by the encryption service to encrypt and decrypt data.” (source). |
| KMS | Shield Key Management Service | “Shield Platform Encryption uses data encryption keys to encrypt and decrypt data. Data encryption keys are derived on the Shield Key Management Service (KMS) using keying material split between a per-release master secret and an org-specific tenant secret stored encrypted in the database.” (source). |
| MFA | Multi-factor Authentication | An extra layer of security that proves a user trying to login to Salesforce is who they say they are. MFA combines something you know (ie. password) with something you own (ie. mobile phone). There are Salesforce approved MFA methods (Salesforce Authenticator app, built-in authenticators, security keys). MFA was formerly two-factor authentication or 2FA. |
| PII | Personally Identifiable Information | “Any data that can be used to identify a specific individual: social security numbers, mailing or email address, and phone numbers have most commonly been considered PII” (source). For auditing purposes, in Salesforce, Admins can indicate that a field contains PII in the field definition in Salesforce Setup. |
| SCV | Single Customer View | The concept of collating every data point and interaction that an individual (customer, prospect, or partner) has with an organization, accessible from one record. Also referred to as a “360-degree View”, Salesforce launched the “Customer 360” messaging to communicate that the tightly connected Salesforce platform can enable organizations to achieve this rich profile of each individual. |
| SSL | Secure Sockets Layer | “Salesforce certificates and key pairs are used for signatures that verify a request is coming from your organization. They are used for authenticated SSL communications with an external web site, or when using your organization as an Identity Provider.” (source). |
| SSO | Single Sign-on | Sign in to one system, and then be automatically signed into all the rest of the applications you need. Fewer passwords, fewer headaches, less tedium and it should enable you to get on with what you actually intended to do, rather than get bogged with admin stuff such as hunting around for where you put your password hint. |
Service
| Acronym | Meaning | Definition |
| ACW | After Call Work | Tasks that the agent needs to complete after the customer call has ended. Your job as a Salesforce Admin/Service Cloud Consultant is to make completing these tasks (eg. entering data, call outcome notes), as efficient as possible for the user. You will need to be aware of this service concept when studying for the Service Cloud Consultant certification. |
| AHT | Average Handle Time | The average amount of time it takes for an agent to resolve a customer call/case. You will need to be aware of this service KPI when studying for the Service Cloud Consultant certification. |
| CTI | Computer Telephony Integration | Telephony (phone communication) can be directly integrated into Salesforce. This is a great win for Service (and Sales) departments who rely heavily on their phone, with features such as click to dial, call recording and screen pop available from 3rd party vendors. |
| FCR | First Contact Resolution | Measures the % of cases that are solved on the first touchpoint with customer service. READ MORE: Create a Service Metrics Strategy. |
| FSL | Field Service (Lightning) | An extension (add-on product) of Service Cloud that provides a comprehensive view of workforce management. Field Service involves providing services to customers beyond your office or site – which is referred to as in the “field”. Think about mobile employees, like service technicians, who carry out the service in-person; other people involved are service agents, dispatchers, and service managers. Salesforce dropped the “Lightning” from the product name, but the acronym is still widely used. |
| IVR | Interactive Voice Response | An automated telephony system that interacts with callers, gathers information and routes calls to the appropriate recipients (source). People often refer to this as speaking to a bot before they get through to a human agent. |
| KCS | Knowledge-Centered Support | A knowledge base that documents service agents’ experiences when solving cases, curated and made accessible to customers for self-service support should they encounter the same question or problem. Salesforce Experience Cloud is praised for encouraging collaboration and improvement between customers and agents in this way. |
| PBX | Private Branch Exchange | System that routes calls to different agents. |
| SLA | Service-level Agreement | A formal or informal contract between an organization and its customers which outlines what service they will receive and how long they will need to wait to receive that service each time. SLAs can be configured into Salesforce to prioritize cases and work orders. |
Developer & DevOps
| Acronym | Meaning | Definition |
| ALM | Application Lifestyle Management | “How changes and enhancements are rolled out to Salesforce instances. Having a solid ALM process ensures the org continues to work properly and delivers the most value to end-users. Within the ALM process there are three separate development models: change set development, org development, and package development.” (source) |
| API | Application-Programming Interface | An intermediary that allows two systems to be integrated together. APIs enable us to make two systems “talk” to each other, to successfully exchange data when and how we expect. Salesforce has multiple types of APIs, depending on what your integration requirements are. |
| BYOK | Bring Your Own Key | When setting up Salesforce Shield, you can use Salesforce’s encryption keys, or bring you own if you already have a key management infrastructure in place. |
| CI/CD | Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment/Continuous Delivery | A software development practice that refers to different automated processes. Continuous integration (or “CI”) is about automatically moving work items along a release pipeline, through environments for combining and testing packages, before promoting them to production. Continuous deployment is about immediately deploying changes to a downstream environment in your release pipeline as soon as a change or work item has been approved and merged into version control. Continuous delivery is the ultimate goal of CI/CD. It’s a culture or way of working (rather than a type of workflow), which is about releasing added value and new functionality to your end-users as soon after the completion of the development or customization work as possible. |
| CLI | Command Line Interface | A text-based user interface (UI) used to view and manage files. The Salesforce CLI simplifies development and building automation by: Aggregating all the tools you need to perform commands against your Salesforce org. Synchronizing source to and from scratch org. Creating and manage orgs. Creating and executing tests. Creating and installing packages. READ MORE: Salesforce CLI |
| COOP | Cross-Origin Opener Policy | “Shield your custom Visualforce pages from external attacks. When you enable COOP, each top-level custom Visualforce page opens in a new browsing context group. This process prevents direct access between other browser tabs and your Visualforce page and the page’s content.” (source) |
| CPU | Central Processing Unit | A common computing term that refers to the component that processes instructions based on software and user input. In Salesforce terms, you’ll hear “Apex CPU”. The Salesforce platform imposes a CPU usage governor limit to any given execution context, which is approximately 10 seconds. It means that Apex Code, declarative tools, or a combination in a transaction, must not exceed a ~10-second limit. |
| DML | Data Manipulation Language | “Provides a straightforward way to manage records by providing simple statements to insert, update, merge, delete, and restore records.” (source) |
| DOC | DevOps Center | Salesforce DevOps Center is the place to manage releases and to give low-code and pro-code development team members a single set of configuration and code to work with bringing closer collaboration. |
| DORA | DevOps Research and Assessment | “Research program…that seeks to understand the capabilities that drive software delivery and operations performance. DORA helps teams apply those capabilities, leading to better organizational performance.” – (source) DORA is centered around four metrics, of which testing software is the main component to reducing your change-failure rate. |
| E2E | Ecosystem to Ecosystem | A test automation concept, E2E testing involves your entire IT stack, no longer testing in silos (one vendor at a time) as was traditionally the case. The complexities of modern-day hybrid cloud architecture can touch hundreds even thousands of upstream and downstream endpoints. |
| ETL | Extract, Transform, and Load | A category of tools that extract data from one platform, transform the data’s format, and load it into another platform. They have a widely varying set of capabilities, and which you choose will depend on your integration or data migration challenges. |
| GTL | Guide Template Language | GTL is a Marketing Cloud script language that “provides a declarative syntax used for creating personalized, dynamic, data-driven messages, as well as constructing cross-channel templates and layouts.” (source) |
| GUI | Graphical User Interface | “A form of user interface that allows users to interact with electronic devices through graphical icons and audio indicator such as primary notation, instead of text-based user interfaces, typed command labels or text navigation.” (source) |
| IDE | Integrated Development Environment | “For heavy development work, you need a professional IDE that offers features like integration with source control, syntax highlighting, auto-completion, debugger, offline editing, etc.” (source) Popular examples include Visual Studio Code and the Developer Console. |
| ISTQB® | International Software Testing Qualifications Board | “Global certification scheme in the field of software testing.” (source) There are multiple certifications to progress through, from the foundation, to agile, core, or specialist pathways. |
| LWC | Lightning Web Component | An updated web standards-based framework method for creating components on the Salesforce Platform. They are simpler to define and develop because they are in line with updated web standards (like CSS, HTML, and updated JavaScript without requiring a set framework). |
| LWR | Lightning Web Runtime | Experience Cloud sites built using LWR templates “deliver unparalleled site performance and improve developer productivity…using the Lightning Web Components programming model.” (source) |
| MEL | Mule Expression Language | “A lightweight, Mule-specific expression language that you can use to access and evaluate the data in the payload, properties, and variables of a Mule message.” (source) |
| MVC | Model–view–controller | An application design model made up of three parts: Model = an entity representing data or activity. View = visualization of the state of the model. Controller = a facility for changing the state of the model. |
| NACL | Not Another Configuration Language | NACL is the language Salto has developed especially for readability. Anyone who is familiar with Salesforce will be able to understand the logical display of the XML content in order to understand the purpose of a component, what changes are planned, and even dependencies. |
| OData | Open Data Protocol | A set of best practices for building and consuming RESTful APIs. (source) Salesforce Connect calls out to external OData endpoints to surface data that’s stored in external objects. |
| PD1 | Platform Developer 1 | The Platform Developer 1 certification is a foundational exam for anyone on the path to become a Salesforce Developer, and covers a broad range of platform, declarative and programmatic topics. |
| PMD | Programming Mistake Detector | “An extensible cross-language static code analyzer.” The site hosts documentation, and suggested code quality improvements can be surfaced within DevOps platforms. |
| QL | Query Language | You will see this abbreviation appended to a number of terms, e.g. SQL, SOQL, GraphQL. |
| RAML | RESTful API Modeling Language | “Makes it easy to manage the whole API lifecycle from design to sharing. It’s concise – you only write what you need to define – and reusable. It is machine readable API design that is actually human friendly.” (source) |
| REST API | Representational State Transfer Application Programming Interface | A type of web service that exposes access to different resources in which a client can interact through the use of unique URLs and HTTP methods to indicate the requested action. Looking at it from a Salesforce perspective, this could be having endpoints to perform actions such as retrieving record details, updating a record, or creating a new record. |
| SDK | Software Development Kit | A ‘kit’ is a great way to think about it like “putting together a model car or plane. When constructing this model, a whole kit of items is needed, including the kit pieces themselves, the tools needed to put them together, assembly instructions, and so forth.” (source) On the Salesforce platform, you’ll find Mobile SDK, Mule SDK, and other platform SDKs. |
| SFDX | Salesforce Developer Experience | The user experience for Salesforce developers. In the past, pro-code developers were stretching the limits of a platform that hadn’t been designed with their workflows in mind. Salesforce DX was their answer to that problem. Salesforce’s overarching aim for DX was to support source-driven development, and this benefits everyone building on Salesforce. |
| SFXD | Salesforce Discord Community | sfxd.github.io/ is a community for Salesforce Developers, curated by Salesforce Developers. Connected by a Discord community, there is also a wiki (a “glorified collection of HTML files”) and searchable implementation files. |
| SIT | System Integration Test | |
| SLDS | Salesforce Lightning Design System | “Helps you build applications with the look and feel of Lightning Experience without writing a single line of CSS. SLDS is a CSS framework that gives you access to the icons, color palettes, and font that our developers use to create Lightning Experience.” (source) |
| SOAP API | Simple Object Access Protocol Application Programming Interface | Best for system-to-system integrations, back-end system communication, and for applications that require formal hand-off (contracts) between the API and the consumer. While it’s reliable and well-established, it tends to be slower and use more bandwidth than REST. |
| SOSL | Salesforce Object Search Language | “Used to perform text searches in records. Use SOSL to search fields across multiple standard and custom object records in Salesforce” (source) |
| SOQL | Salesforce Object Query Language | Used to search your organization’s data for specific information. SOQL can be embedded in Apex code and various other places in your Org to grab specific information in a programmatic way. READ MORE: SOQL Cheat Sheet |
| SSJS | Server-Side JavaScript | “The Marketing Cloud uses JavaScript code processed by Marketing Cloud servers. Instead of using the browser to render the JavaScript on the client-side computer, Marketing Cloud executes the JavaScript on the server when rendering.” (source) |
| UTAM | UI Test Automation Model | “Enables a more robust approach when implementing automated UI Tests. In the past, these types of tests have been very hard to write and maintain, resulting in the need to often bring in third-party tooling and solutions…UTAM’s Page Objects are written in JSON, and the idea is to move away from using XPath locators to target DOM nodes, and instead use CSS.” |
| VC | Version Control | Version control tracks changes to files over time, which can be anything from text files to the Salesforce metadata that makes up the structure of your org. It gives you a complete history of every change that was made to any file, at any time, by anyone. |
Architects
| Acronym | Meaning | Definition |
| CTA | Certified Technical Architect | Nope, not “call to action” as you may have guessed! CTAs are the ‘elite’ among Salesforce professionals. CTAs have proven they have the knowledge, skills, and capabilities to design and build high-performance technical solutions on the Salesforce platform. The grueling exam is the highest certification and ultimate test; even though it’s been around since 2012, only a few hundred professionals have earned their CTA creds. |
| EA | Enterprise Architect/Architecture | |
| SA | Solution Architect/Architecture | |
| SOGAF | Salesforce Operating, Governance & Architecture | A framework that “addresses the components of governance at scale through seven distinct capabilities and their end-to-end alignment”. READ MORE: An Operating, Governance and Architecture Framework for Salesforce |
| TA | Techinal Architect/Architecture | |
| TOGAF | The Open Group Architecture Framework |
CDP (Customer Data Platforms)
| Acronym | Meaning | Definition |
| BYOL | Bring Your Own Lake | Data lakes house different data sets – of both structured and unstructured data – and make them accessible to different platforms. Snowflake is a highly popular data lake provider that Salesforce have partnered with to deliver a zero-copy architecture and Bring Your Own Lake technology. |
| CDC | Change Data Capture | Used for a simple, one-way, outbound, data broadcast from Salesforce. For example, say that an external system wants to receive a broadcast every time a Salesforce account record is created, updated, deleted, or un-deleted. |
| CDP | Customer Data Platform | Aggregates every data point about an individual customer across multiple platforms, represented by a unique identifier. Salesforce CDP is a Marketing Cloud product. |
| CIO | Calculated Insight Object | In Salesforce Data Cloud, these allow you to create a new data point, to give further insight into data patterns. Like a Salesforce roll-up field, you can combine multiple data points to gain a new data point that can be used when activating segments. |
| DBOR | Database of Record | Centralized repository of record data, so that organizations can work towards the ‘golden record’ for each individual that may be represented in different ways across systems in your tech stack. |
| DLO | Data Lake Object | The Data Cloud architecture is made up of a set of data objects, that work in this order: Data Source → Data Stream → Data Source Object → Data Lake Object → Data Model Object. “The DLO is the first object that is available for inspection and enables users to prepare their data by mapping fields and applying additional transformations.” |
| DMO | Data Model Object | The Data Cloud architecture is made up of a set of data objects, that work in this order: Data Source → Data Stream → Data Source Object → Data Lake Object → Data Model Object. “[DMOs] are similar to Salesforce objects [that] provide a canonical data model with pre-defined attributes.” |
| DSO | Data Source Object | The Data Cloud architecture is made up of a set of data objects, that work in this order: Data Source → Data Stream → Data Source Object → Data Lake Object → Data Model Object. “A Data Stream is ingested to a Data Source Object or ‘DSO’. This object provides a physical, temporary staging data store that contains the data in its raw, native file format of the Data Stream.” |
| EDW | Enterprise Data Warehouse | “A relational data warehouse containing a company’s business data…enables data analytics, which can inform actionable insights. Like all data warehouses, EDWs collect and aggregate data from multiple sources, acting as a repository…to facilitate broad access and analysis.” (source) |
| MDM | Master Data Management | “Are enterprise software products that create and manage a central, persistent system of record for master data…while Salesforce Data Cloud provides data normalization, it creates a unified customer profiles that changes and adapts.” |
Marketing
| Acronym | Meaning | Definition |
| ABM | Account-Based Marketing | A marketing strategy popular in B2B Marketing, where there are typically long sales cycles with multiple stakeholders influencing a purchasing decision. ABM focuses on prospects at an organization level, meaning that marketers set out to target specific personas in the organization, for example, the Sales Director will receive something different compared to the CFO because they don’t share the same motivations, and experience different pain points. ABM may seem simple enough in definition but the reality becomes increasingly complex once you begin mapping out your strategy. |
| AMPSEA | Allow Multiple Prospects with Same Email Address | An Account Engagement (Pardot) feature. Marketing automation platforms typically use email address as the unique identifier in the marketing database – AMPSEA in Pardot changed that! Now that AMPSEA is the norm, the unique identifier for prospects is CRM ID. This gave marketers the ability to add multiple prospects that use the same email address to Pardot, ultimately able to market to them as if they were separate individuals. |
| B2B MA | B2B Marketing Analytics | An Account Engagement (Pardot) add-on product. The one-line pitch is: “the analytics app built for the B2B marketer”. In short, Pardot data (such as email engagement, visitor data), is packaged up and sent into the Tableau CRM platform for visualization and exploration. B2BMA is designed to ‘plug-in-and-play’ and comes with Dashboards, Lenses, and Datasets out-of-the-box to empower the non-technical marketer. |
| BU | Pardot/Marketing Cloud Business Unit | Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Account Engagement (Pardot) have their own own features that share the same name. Account Engagement Business Units are separate databases within a single Pardot account that allow you to partition prospects, campaigns, and assets. A common example is an enterprise organization that serves multiple geographies. |
| CA360 | Customer Audiences 360 | The retired name of Salesforce’s CDP offering, now Data Cloud. |
| CCA | Conditional Completion Actions | Completion actions are one type of Account Engagement (Pardot) automation. Conditional completion actions fire only when the prospect making the activity meets certain criteria. When the rule criteria matches (“is true”, “equals value X” etc.) then the completion action will fire. |
| CLV | Customer Lifetime Value | The metric that measures the revenue gained from a specific company once they became a customer – in other words, the total monetary amount from all ‘closed won’ sales opportunities in Salesforce, related to the account. (Related to LTV, lifetime customer value.) |
| CSAT | Customer Satisfaction | Use customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys to gauge customer experience. In a CSAT survey, the customer is asked something along the lines of: How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the service you received? Answer choices are graded on a scale, usually from 1-5, where 1 represents very dissatisfied and 5 represents completely satisfied. The responses of your customers are then averaged and the result becomes your overall CSAT score. |
| CTA | Call To Action | The action you are encouraging your users to take when interacting with your marketing assets, such as emails, website pages, landing pages, or files. The idea is to tempt them with an eye-catching, irresistible button or hyperlinked text, so that they “convert” by sharing their information/indicating their interest. |
| CTR | Click-Through Rate | Click-through rate is the % of prospects that clicked within your email, out of the whole send list. This is a popular metrics it (mostly) proves that prospects are taking the account you intended, whether that be downloading a file, or visiting a landing page. |
| DE | Data Extension | Data extensions exist in Marketing Cloud to “satisfy the need for flexible data storage”, enabling you to essentially build a table within the app database that contains your data, exactly how you need to structure it. There are different types of data extensions, including: standard, filtered, random, sendable/non-senable, shared. Note: A data extension can possess more than one of these characteristics. |
| DMP | Data Management Platform | Captures data from any source and device. Analyze billions of profiles and trillions of events to find new high-value segments in order to do 1-to-1 ad targeting across any device the individual uses. |
| DNE | Do not email | Do not email is a field in Account Enagement (formerly Pardot). This is for marketing suppression, to prevent specific prospects from receiving emails globally (i.e. stopping prospect from receiving any emails being sent from the org). This is intended for admins/marketers to use (versus the prospects themselves). |
| DNT | Do Not Track | A feature of Account Enagement (Pardot) that when enabled, prevents activities from being captured (page, form and landing page views, file downloads, custom redirect clicks) and recording them in another system, i.e. Account Engagement. When a user chooses to use Do Not Track (DNT), to opt-out of tracking by websites, it’s a preference that’s applied to all websites. |
| DSP | Demand-Side Platform | |
| DTR | Datorama | Now known officially as “Marketing Cloud Intelligence“, Datorama is the marketing intelligence platform that provides its users with the capability of connecting their entire MarTech stack (standalone from the main SFMC platform). Datorama Reports are powerful and flexible, giving you detailed analysis of emails, push notifications, and journey data at a campaign level. |
| ECS | Einstein Content Selection | ECS is an email experimentation tool that selects the most engaging content (images) for each subscriber based on the rules you define, subscriber attributes, and what’s been popular in the past. Einstein Content Selection in Marketing Cloud is part of Content Builder – let Einstein take care of the selection! |
| EEF | Einstein Engagement Frequency | Einstein Engagement Frequency evaluates your contacts and subscribers, and identifies the optimal number of email messages to send. |
| EFTP | Enhanced File Transfer Protocol | “All Marketing Cloud editions include an SFTP account, or ‘Enhanced FTP’ where data files can be imported to, or exported from. And SFTP is widely regarded today as the de facto protocol for secure file transfer.” |
| EID | Enterprise ID | The ID of the topmost parent business unit in a Marketing Cloud instance. |
| ENS | Event Notification Service | Sends you notifications when certain events related to you occur in Marketing Cloud such as when a Transactional Email is sent or when an email gets open (regardless of its classification). |
| EPC | Email Preference Centre | A page prospects/customers use to select which topics they want to be emailed about – a preferences pick n’ mix! Prospects land on when they click “update email preferences” (or similar) from an email. |
| ES | Engagement Studio | An Account Engagement (Pardot) feature. Offers advanced segmentation and automation tools that mean you can produce email nurture campaigns that can be effective at all stages of the customer journey. Why it’s so attractive, is its visual, intuitive user interface – essentially, you map out the campaign steps on to a blank canvas. |
| ESP | Email Service Provider | The software that organizations purchase to create, send, and report on email marketing. Marketing automation platforms are ESPs with much more additional functionality. |
| FTP | File Transfer Protocol | This is essentially the way that files can be transferred from one location, to a destination. This term appears in the content of Marketing Cloud, with Marketing Cloud being either the location or the destination. See also: EFTP, and SFTP (which are interchangable). |
| GPC | Global Privacy Controlled | “The tracking and consent API provides functions for each step in the page view tracking process, giving you control over how Account Engagement tracks page views.” (source) The API records the global privacy controlled (GPC) browser signals for prospects/visitors that have opted out of the sale of their personal info. |
| IDV | Identity Verification | “A Salesforce Marketing Cloud security setting that authenticates the browser or app used to access the application… Marketing Cloud plans to retire IDV for existing users in the future. [They] recommend enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA) for your account.” (source) |
| IERs | Individual Email Results | IERs store Marketing Cloud email analytics in Salesforce. Marketers can send emails from SFMC, and the email analytics are captured in IERs, visible from the Salesforce UI. |
| IPR | Inbox Placement Rule | The preferred metric when measuring deliverability, which is the % of emails that ended up in inboxes where they are actually going to be seen, compared to spam rate, which indicates emails ending up in the spam or junk folders. |
| LTV | Lifetime Value | The metric that the predicted revenue from the lifespan of one customer, i.e. the average total monetary amount from all ‘closed won’ sales opportunities in Salesforce, related to accounts. You could have a single benchmark LTV, or have multiple benchmarks for different types of customers. (Related to CLV, customer lifetime value.) |
| MCAE | Marketing Cloud Account Engagement | While Salesforce have advised against using this abbreviation, you’ll find mentions of this acronym around. Pardot, a Salesforce marketing automation tool, was renamed Marketing Cloud Account Engagement in 2022 in a move to make products more easy for laymen to understand. |
| MC Connect | Marketing Cloud Connect | The connector between Salesforce Marketing Cloud and the core platform (ie. Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, etc). Gives marketers the ability to utilize the data from their Salesforce standard and custom objects, right within Marketing Cloud. Some of the best use cases for using Salesforce data within Marketing Cloud use Journey Builder, which allows for amazing customization and automation of guided messaging and updates for your target audiences. |
| MCP | Marketing Cloud Personalization | MCP (formerly Interaction Studio) is Salesforce’s real-time personalization and interaction management solution. This means giving organizations (especially marketers) the ability to promote relevant products and services to their customers and prospects across channels like web, email, and mobile in real-time with offers specifically and uniquely for them. |
| MCE | Marketing Cloud Engage | |
| MID | Marketing Cloud ID | The ID of a Marketing Cloud instance. “Use this information to properly configure a Web Collect URL or obtain the appropriate URL endpoint for use with SOAP Web Services API, FTP, and other functionality”. (source) |
| MQA | Marketing Qualified Account | ABM (above) is a marketing strategy popular in B2B Marketing, where there are typically long sales cycles with multiple stakeholders influencing a purchasing decision. While MQL is related to the extent that an individual is likely to purchase, MQA applies this at the account level. This can be calculated in a number of different ways – from rolling up field data (such as engagement scores) to sophisticated behavior and demographic measurements. |
| MQL | Marketing Qualified Lead | Any prospect who has actively interacted with your company and expressed interest in your marketing materials. Traditionally, MQLs are viewed positively by sales and marketing teams because they represent the potential, the ones who’ve ‘taken the bait’. They’re interested, hot, and ready…but are they? |
| PLA | Pardot Lightning App | The Pardot Lightning App brings Pardot (now Account Engagement) into the Salesforce Lightning Experience (LEX). Over time, Pardot Lightning has not only applied to just the user experience (UX), but also to Pardot’s infrastructure (the data model – technically, under the hood). Although the product name ‘Pardot’ has been retired, you may still come across reference to PLA. |
| PURLS | Personalized URLs | |
| OSP | Object Sync for Pardot | An Account Engagement (Pardot) feature. Pardot have made big moves to transform the marketing assets we manage in Pardot (forms, emails, landing pages, campaigns) into Salesforce records. What this has meant, is that marketing assets have to sync from Pardot to Salesforce (and vice versa) through the Salesforce Connector, just like Prospect records do. |
| ROAS | Return on Advertising Spend | A term used beyond Marketing Cloud. See this metric featured in the Segment Intelligence for Data Clouddashboard. |
| ROX | Return on Experience | |
| RTIM | Real-Time Interaction Management | With more data streams available to marketers, and more powerful tools to process the data, RTIM is a sector of the market that’s heating up. This gives organizations (especially marketers) the ability to promote relevant products and services to their customers and prospects across channels like web, email, and mobile in real-time with offers specifically and uniquely for them. Marketing Cloud Personalization (formerly Interaction Studio), is Salesforce’s RTIM solution. |
| SAL | Sales Accepted Lead | Any prospect who has been deemed qualified by the marketing team before they are sales qualified. It’s therefore the stage in between MQL and SQL, where the sales team is saying “yes, we will work on this lead”. |
| SDE | Shared Data Extension | Share data extensions with other business units in your Marketing Cloud instance. To do so, move data extensions into the main Shared Data Extensions folder or a subfolder under Subscribers. |
| SFMC | Salesforce Marketing Cloud | Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a mouthful to say! With other vendors also having a ‘marketing cloud’ in their offering (Oracle), it’s beneficial for us to always specify we are referring to Salesforce’s. SFMC it is! |
| SFTP | Secure File Transfer Protocol | “All Marketing Cloud editions include an SFTP account, or ‘Enhanced FTP’ where data files can be imported to, or exported from. And SFTP is widely regarded today as the de facto protocol for secure file transfer.” |
| SQL | Sales Qualified Lead | Any prospect who has been deemed qualified by the sales team. Not only has the prospect expressed interest, they are a good fit to use your product/service, are ready to buy, and/or have the budget (see: BANT). |
| SSOT | Single Source of Truth | The ‘holy grail of data strategy, single source of truth gives you one view of each person, unifying their data across all of your databases. |
| STO | Send Time Optimization | Send Time Optimization taps into AI to determine when Marketing Cloud/Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) emails should be sent based on past engagement data from your database. The idea behind it is that by optimizing the time the email is sent, your audience is most likely to open and click. |
| VAC | Visitor Association Change | Pardot feature. “In prospect audits, you may occasionally notice entries with Type = Visitor Association Change, followed by a link with the name of another prospect…a VAC happens when one prospect’s visitor record and activities become associated with a different prospect.” (source) |
| WAC | Web Analytics Connector | “Use the Web Analytics Connector to extend your web analytics service to track and analyze data from your Marketing Cloud sends.” (source) You can record link activity (i.e. clicks) at different levels: Account, Email (activity from that particular email send), Subscriber, or Link (the individual link itself, if you want to get granular!). |
Commerce
| Acronym | Meaning | Definition |
| AOV | Average Order Value | You may come across this term in the context of Commerce Cloud. For example, Goals-Based Commerce is designed to improve margins or to increase average order value (AOV). |
| BNPL | Buy Now Pay Later | How customers can buy products on credit and pay for them later. Commerce Cloud has partnerships with PayPal and Klarna. |
| CDN | Content Delivery Network | A highly-distributed platform of servers that helps minimize delays in loading web page content by reducing the physical distance between the server and the user. (source) |
| CMS | Content Management System | A content management system (CMS) is an application that is used to manage web content, allowing multiple contributors to create, edit and publish. Content in a CMS is typically stored in a database and displayed in a presentation layer based on a set of templates. (source) |
| eCDN | Embedded Content Delivery Network | Salesforce Commerce Cloud provides digital customers an embedded content delivery network (eCDN) designed to accelerate site speed access and content delivery. The end result is a more secure, reliable online shopping experience for the consumer.(source) |
| ERP | Enterprise Resource Planning | These enterprise-level systems take care of manufacturing, finance, master data, and accounting aspects (versus CRM applications that typically handle sales, marketing and support functions). |
| GMV | Gross Merchandise Value | The total value sold through an eCommerce site over a defined period of time. Commerce Cloud is a leading commerce solution that aims to “make every transaction more profitable”, and therefore, increase your GMV. |
| OCI | Omnichannel Inventory | “Delivers near real-time inventory availability at the location level across all your fulfillment channels.” (source) There is also the Omnichannel Inventory service, a collection of APIs to retrieve inventory updates from your back-office systems. |
| OMS | Order Management System | Any tool or platform that tracks sales, orders, inventory, and fulfillment as well as enables the people, processes, and partnerships necessary for products to find their way to the customers who bought them. (source) |
| PIM | Product Information Management | A set of processes used to evaluate, identify, store, manage and distribute product data or information. (source) |
| PRM | Partner Relationship Management | “Simplify every step of your channel sales process, from onboarding to selling. Give your partners the same tools that make your internal team successful. Give channel managers step-by-step directions to quickly configure lead distribution, deal registration (and more…).” (source) |
| PWA | Progressive Web App | Apps that “are built and enhanced with modern APIs to deliver enhanced capabilities, reliability, and installability while reaching anyone, anywhere, on any device with a single codebase.” (source) Salesforce’s Progressive Web App (PWA) Kit integrates with Salesforce B2C Commerce APIs, which are fast “with enhanced developer efficiency. While B2C Commerce provides the critical commerce services (like pricing, promotions, search, and Einstein), PWA Kit and Managed Runtime render the web experience, and provide the operations infrastructure.” (source) |
| SFCC | Salesforce Commerce Cloud | Commerce Cloud is a cloud-based platform that provides brands with features and tools to help grow their online business. These tools and features support all stages of digital commerce – or as Salesforce puts it, everything “from discovery to delivery”. |
| SFRA | Storefront Reference Architecture | A reference architecture (a blueprint) that combines industry best practices and expected out-of-the-box commerce functionality in a web storefront that can serve as the foundation of your new Salesforce Commerce B2C site. (source) |
Analytics
| Acronym | Meaning | Definition |
| AWS | Amazon Web Services | AWS offers “reliable, scalable, and inexpensive cloud computing services…the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud, offering over 200 fully featured services from data centers globally.” (source) Multiple Salesforce products use AWS; however, it’s prominent in the analytics arena, where organizations rely on AWS to:”Extract, prepare, and analyze Salesforce.com data using Amazon AppFlow, AWS Glue DataBrew, and Amazon Athena.” (source) |
| BYOAI | Bring Your Own AI | ‘Bring your own AI (model)’ is Salesforce’s way to meet their customers where they’re at. With Data Cloud, Salesforce not only supports Einstein (their own LLM), but also other ones like Sagemaker, Vertex AI, etc. |
| BYOM | Bring Your Own Model | ‘Bring your own AI (model)’ is Salesforce’s way to meet their customers where they’re at. With Data Cloud, Salesforce not only supports Einstein (their own LLM), but also other ones like Sagemaker, Vertex AI, etc. |
| CRMA | CRM Analytics | This is the analytics/business intelligence (BI) solution on the Salesforce platform, integrating Salesforce data with external data and provides the ability to analyze large datasets while performing predictive analytics. (Previously known as Wave/Einstein Analytics/Tableau CRM). |
| EA | Einstein Analytics | The former name for CRM Analytics (also formerly Tableau CRM). You may still come across EA in outdated documentation. |
| GPT | Generative Pre-trained Transformer | GPT is a technology concept, although it’s often mistaken for a product name (with the rise of the wildly popular ChatGPT). |
| LLM | Large Language Model | An AI model that has been trained using lots of data. Salesforce has their own LLM, that outperformed expectations during testing. Salesforce’s LLM leverages Data Cloud, or can be plugged into a different data lake. Organizations can also opt to their own LLM alongside their Salesforce data. |
| NBA | Einstein Next Best Action | An AI-driven Salesforce product that makes recommendations to users when they are working with records in Salesforce. It appears within a Lightning component that’s typically placed on the record page sidebar. The user can choose to Accept or Reject the recommendation. |
| NLP | Natural Language Processing | “Artificial intelligence that focuses on how computers can understand, interpret, and generate human language. NLP allows customers to interact with systems using normal human language rather than complex commands.” (source) |
| SAQL | Structured Query Language | “Use SAQL to access data in Tableau CRM dataset. Tableau CRM uses SAQL behind the scenes in lenses, dashboards, and explorer to gather data for visualizations.” (source) |
| TCRM | Tableau CRM | Tableau CRM is a self-service data visualization and business intelligence (BI) platform that integrates Salesforce data with external data. Formerly known as Einstein Analytics, and now CRM Analytics, this product boasts some of the most powerful data analysis capabilities in the market. |
| XMD | Extended Metadata | “Enables you to customize the formatting of dataset fields and their values in Analytics dashboards and lenses.” (source) |
Salesforce Industries
| Acronym | Meaning | Industry Cloud | Definition |
| AAR | Account-Account Relationships | Financial Services Cloud | A feature to relate households with businesses and organizations. For example, it can be a relationship between a household and their trust. |
| ACR | Account-Contact Relationships | Financial Services Cloud | A feature to build Account-Contact Relationships between their clients and households. For example, it can be a relationship between a household and a member of the household. |
| AUM | Assets Under Management | Financial Services Cloud | “The total market value of the investments that a person or entity manages on behalf of clients.” (source) AUM is featured in the pre-defined reports and dashboards within Salesforce Financial Services Cloud. |
| CCR | Contact-Contact Relationships | Financial Services Cloud | A feature to relate members of the household with other contacts. For example, it can be a member of the household related to their attorney or accountant. |
| CSRD | Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive | Net Zero Cloud | A prominent regulation mandated by the EU to encourage Net Zero practices. Net Zero Cloud’s CSRD report builder supports companies to comply. |
| DPE | Data Processing Engine | Financial Services Cloud | “The Data Processing Engine is an “Enhanced Rollup-by-Lookup (RBL) framework that uses [the] superior processing power of Tableau CRM for faster calculation of RBL rules.” – an optimized way to transform and update records in Salesforce that is also being utilized as a framework for the RBLs. |
| E&U | Energy & Utilities Cloud | Energy & Utilities Cloud | A solution designed for power and utilities, oil and gas, and even further to green energy options. |
| EDA | Education Cloud Architecture | Education Cloud | Education Cloud is built on the EDA (Education Data Architecture) a pre-built data model, designed for the education sector. This supports institutes to connect each student account to an administrative account, and shows a clear record of any student addresses, relationships, and affiliations. This superseded the Higher Education Pack (HEDA). |
| EPC | Enterprise Product Catalog | Energy & Utilities Cloud | “Introduce and effectively manage a portfolio of products that are relevant to customers, released at the most opportune time, and at a low cost.” READ MORE: Salesforce Help |
| ERM | Emergency Response Management | Work.com | One of the four pillars of Work.com, this app is designed to allocate health, public and private sector resources (program management and incident resolution) aimed towards the public sector and health industries. Perhaps less relevant now than in Covid times, this app still can empower certain sectors (i.e. Public Sector and Nonprofits) for crisis management. |
| ESG | Environmental Social Governance | Net Zero Cloud | Salesforce have developed Net Zero Cloud to be an ESG platform. ESG reporting is typically complex and time-consuming to collate and disclose reports. With this solution, Einstein suggests report content, which alleviates the burden from ESG professionals and is suitable for companies of all sizes and industries. |
| FSC | Financial Services Cloud | Financial Services Cloud | Salesforce developed a set of industry products to enhance and extend the functionality of its core products – the Financial Services Cloud is one example. This Salesforce managed package enhances and extends the functionality of Sales Cloud and Service Cloud combined to meet the needs of wealth management firms, insurance companies, and banks. |
| HEDA | Higher Education Data Architecture | Education Cloud | Education Cloud is built on the EDA (Education Data Architecture). This superseded the Higher Education Pack (HEDA). |
| ITSC | IT Service Center | Work.com | Part of Work.com, this tool helps IT teams better support employees from anywhere – a cross-team, cross-company initiative leveraging Tanium’s real-time asset management capabilities, Service Cloud’s case management technology, and the power of the Salesforce Platform for automation, integration, and personalization. |
| NPSP | Nonprofit Success Pack | Nonprofit Cloud | The Nonprofit Success Pack was specifically designed to meet the “unique” needs of Nonprofits, aka NGOs or charities, to aid them in being successful with their mission. There is a lot to unpack just in the name itself! It’s a “Pack” because it consists of several puzzle pieces to meet those needs, sitting on top of Sales Cloud. |
| NZC | Net Zero Cloud | Net Zero Cloud | A solution for carbon accounting, emissions tracking, calculating building energy intensity, and more. |
| PSS | Public Sector Solutions | Government Cloud | The group of applications built on an Experience Cloud infrastructure to enable citizens and institutions log in to a portal and manage their data. READ MORE: Public Sector Solutions from Salesforce |
| RBL | Rollup by lookup | Financial Services Cloud | “Rollup-by-Lookup (RBL) is a feature of Salesforce Financial Services Cloud (FSC) that allows you to aggregate client financial data and rollup to the individual or group level using configuration rules.” Salesforce are moving away from RBL to the Data Processing Engine (DPE). |
| SFI | Salesforce Industries | – | The umbrella term for all industry-specific solutions that Salesforce has released. There are approximately 12 Industry Clouds, which are pre-built data models that enable Salesforce customers operating in these industries to get up and running faster. |
| SID | Shared Information Data | Communications Cloud | “Provides an information/data reference model along with a common vocabulary for implementing business processes. This business model is independent of platform, language or protocol and can help identify business entities that are important to the Communications Service Provider.”(source) |
| VPL | Vlocity Process Library | – | A library of pre‐built business processes that can be used with Vlocity (Salesforce Industry) OmniStudio. (source) |
Business Analysis and Project Management
| Acronym | Meaning | Definition |
| BPMN | Business Process Management Notation | “A flow chart method that models the steps of a planned business process from end to end. Its purpose is to model ways to improve efficiency, account for new circumstances or gain competitive advantage.” (source) |
| CCMP | Certified Change Management Professional | CCMP (Certified Change Management Professional) is aimed at change management professionals, which includes Salesforce Consultants, Business Analysts, Project Managers, Salesforce Admins, and other similar roles. |
| CIO | Chief Information Officer | The member of the C-suite who takes responsibility for IT systems, especially an organization’s data. |
| DoD | Definition of Done | “Definition of done” relates to one of the requirements that the user story must adhere to for the Development Team to call it complete. This is following the acceptance criteria being met. Trailhead |
| FRS | Functional Requirements Specification | The project documentation where the business requirements are defined from an end user or business perspective. It will specify the expected outcomes. Trailhead |
| INVEST | Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, Testable | Use the INVEST checklist to assess the quality of a user story. Trailhead |
| JTBD | Jobs To Be Done | JTBD is a methodology for determining what problems users are trying to solve, focused on understanding users in terms of functional, emotional and social needs. JTBD is a core concept in the Strategy Designer Certification. |
| PM | Project Manager | Project Managers oversee Salesforce projects end-to-end on a variety of Salesforce ‘clouds’ and levels of complexity. Their priority is to ensure the project is successful – delivered on time, and within budget. The responsibilities of a Salesforce Project Manager range from typical organizational tasks and technical acumen, through to work that requires emotional intelligence, tact, solid communication, and many other ‘soft’ skills. |
| PMO | Project Management Officers | Project Management Officers work with the organization’s leaders to fulfill the same responsibilities as project managers. In addition, PMOs will carry out pre-project planning, such as risk analysis and opportunity analysis. |
| PMP | Project Management Professional | Project Management Professional (PMP) equips project managers with up-to-date trends and practices with project management tools, processes, and methods. |
| PPM | Portfolio Project Management | A category of technology that enables project managers to outline, track, and collaborate on a set of ongoing projects. |
| PSA | Professional Services Automation | A category of technology that combines project management, time tracking, invoicing, resource planning, and more. |
| PSM | Professional Scrum Master | Scrum helps people and teams deliver value incrementally in a collaborative manner. The entry level PSM-1 is aimed at understanding Scrum best practice when working on Agile projects. You will find this very useful on Salesforce projects. |
| RACI | Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed | A matrix that delineates who is responsible for what in the context of the business analysis effort. Responsible (person who performs an activity or does the work), Accountable (person who is ultimately accountable for the outcome), Consulted (person who needs to provide feedback or contribute to the activity), Informed (person who needs to know of a decision or action). |
| RFI | Request for Information | Requests For Information (RFIs) and Requests for Proposal (RFPs) are a useful approach for teams evaluating Salesforce tooling – they allow you to quickly source information on features, workflows, and pricing from a range of vendors. |
| RFP | Request for Purchase | Requests For Information (RFIs) and Requests for Proposal (RFPs) are a useful approach for teams evaluating Salesforce tooling – they allow you to quickly source information on features, workflows, and pricing from a range of vendors. |
| SIPOC | Supplier, Inputs, Process, Outputs, and Customers | SIPOC is a type of process map that shows the key elements of a process such as Suppliers, Inputs, Process, Outputs, and Customers. |
| SoW | Statement of Work | The SoW is a legal document, that outlines the work to be carried out (the scope), what’s excluded (out of scope), the client-side responsibilities, and the project schedule and fees. |
| SRS | System Requirements Specification | The project documentation that details how the complete system should function and enumerates hardware, software, and functional and behavioral requirements of the system. |
| UML | Unified Modeling Language | Diagramming that uses “a common visual language in the complex world of software development that would also be understandable for business users and anyone who wants to understand a system”. (source) |
| UPN | Universal Process Notation | A simpler and more engaging diagramming notation that has been designed to be easily understood by all the stakeholders and viewed online. As a hierarchical diagram, you are able to drill down to give more detail (with no limit to the number of levels you can go down). |
Trailblazer Community
| Acronym | Meaning | Definition |
| BAM | Be a Multiplier | An initiative run through Trailhead, BAM encourages members of the Salesforce community to “start a movement. Empower anyone to skill up for the jobs of the future”. |
| CFP | Call For Presenters | There are multiple Salesforce events occuring every year — from Salesforce’s large conferences, to community-led events (typically the Dreamin’ events) — these organizers are looking for experts to take the stage and share their expertise, in the name of educating others. The submission process usually involves submitting your session title and abstract (around 200 words). |
| CGL | Community Group Leader | CGLs give their time (i.e. they’re not paid) to organize Trailblazer Community Groups. This is a form of giving back to the Salesforce community that they’re part of and have benefitted from. |
| MVP | Most Valuable Professional | MVPs are individuals who show exceptional leadership qualities, are lifetime learners, and who go above and beyond to share expertise and help the Trailblazer Community. There is a multi-round selection process each year. There are around 200+ MVPs. |
| SOSF | State of Salesforce Report | The annual report, produced by IBM, contains carefully curated research into the Salesforce ecosystem’s key trends. |
| TTTC | True To The Core | True To The Core sessions could be described as an “ask me anything” to Salesforce executives and product managers. The audience can ask even the thorniest questions and get a transparent response, including why Salesforce are taking longer to deliver a feature (dependencies) and the tradeoffs they are making internally. These take place at Dreamforce. Follow the hashtag #TTTC to keep up with the conversation on Twitter. |
| WiT | Women in Tech | Comparable to other technology industries, Salesforce has a relatively balanced gender split. The Founder of Salesforce, Benioff, has advocated for equality, including gender equality in compensation within Salesforce. The WiT movement “exist to highlight women within the Salesforce ecosystem” in case where workplaces not within the Salesforce ecosystem are not as supportive of women. |
Salesforce Inc.
| Acronym | Meaning | Definition |
| AE | Account Executive | The representative at Salesforce who sells you licenses and often supports in matching you with a consulting partners to ensure you get the most out of Salesforce. Post-sales, you are supported by a representative from the Customer Success Group (CSG). |
| APAC | Asia Pacific | Salesforce splits their customer base geographically to localize their messaging and services. |
| CBU | Commercial Business Unit | Salesforce splits their customer base by size in order to cater to organizations of all sizes. The smaller customers (in terms of employees/Salesforce licenses) are categorized as “commercial”; Account Executives will have multiple accounts. |
| CSG | Customer Success Group | The representative/s at Salesforce who supports you post-sales. This team also creates onboarding content and developing practice guidance for the services teams. |
| EBU | Enterprise Business Unit | Salesforce splits their customer base by size in order to cater to organizations of all sizes. The largest customers (most employees/Salesforce licenses) are categorized as “enterprise”; Account Executives will have fewer accounts (even dedicated to one account). |
| EMEA | Europe, Middle East, and Africa | Salesforce splits their customer base geographically to localize their messaging and services. |
| ESMB | Emerging Small Business | Salesforce splits their customer base by size in order to cater to organizations of all sizes. Part of the “commercial” business unit, these customers are the smallest in terms of employees/Salesforce licenses (approx. <10). |
| GB | General Business | Salesforce splits their customer base by size in order to cater to organizations of all sizes. Part of the “commercial” business unit, these customers are one step up from MM but smaller than Enterprise (in terms of employees/Salesforce licenses). |
| LATAM | Latin America | Salesforce splits their customer base geographically to localize their messaging and services. |
| MM | Mid-Market | Salesforce splits their customer base by size in order to cater to organizations of all sizes. Part of the “commercial” business unit, these customers are one step up from SMB but smaller than GB (in terms of employees/Salesforce licenses). |
| SE | Sales Engineer/Solution Engineer | SEs create tailored demos that speak to your use cases, and are on hand to answer technical questions during the sales process. This role is not exclusive to Salesforce, with many partners also using the term (sales/solution is interchangeable in most cases). |
| SMB | Small-Medium Business | Salesforce splits their customer base by size in order to cater to organizations of all sizes. Part of the “commercial” business unit, these customers are one step up from ESMB but smaller than MM (in terms of employees/Salesforce licenses). |
ISVs
| Acronym | Meaning | Definition |
| AMP | AppExchange Marketing Program | A paid co-marketing program that focuses on helping ISV (app partner) businesses grow. Salesforce offers turn-key, paid co-marketing opportunities to help partners reach a Salesforce audience, including Salesforce customers and employees. |
| COA | Channel Order Application | Channel Order Application (COA) is what you submit to Salesforce in order for them to provision the license/s, so that the customer can access their org. Salesforce assigns an order status to help the partner track the progress of the order. You have the option to convert the trial to an active org at the end of the trial period. |
| LMA | License Management App | Supports developers and app vendors apply licensing to their uploaded and registered AppExchange apps. |
| MSP | Managed Service Provider | Partner with Salesforce via the Managed Service Provider (MSP) Program, available to existing Consulting Partners and aims to provide insight and support with the MSP business model. |
| OEM | Original Equipment Manufacturer | While you may have heard of this term, and think that it sound strange in the context of cloud-based technology, however, this general term, in this context, describes that the app is associated with a license supplied by the company that runs the infrastructure (i.e. the Salesforce platform – the ‘original equipment’). Salesforce do OEM provisioning by providing your customers with trial orgs, and more. |
| PDO | Product Development Outsourcers | A type of consulting partner and vendor who possesses in-depth knowledge in building commercial applications for the AppExchange. They help design the product and can also work in isolated key areas of your Application. Salesforce PDOs exist to handle all tech-related issues such as third-party integrations, technical configuration, implementation, and customized development. |
| PLC | Partner Learning Camp | The Partner Learning Camp is for Salesforce partners as “the primary learning destination to expand capabilities to meet customer needs now and in the future…[with] a growing list of on-demand training and engaging events.” |
| SR | Security Review | The Security Review process is in place for all apps listed on AppExchange. |
| SSPA | Salesforce Partner Program Agreement | “The agreement that governs a partner’s participation in various Salesforce Partner Programs and utilization of our Partner Community.” (source) |
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