CRM Setup
Setting up contact categories
Creating the categories your contacts are grouped into, and keeping the list short enough to be useful.
Last updated September 2, 2026
Categories are the fixed groups your contacts are filed into — Customers, Suppliers, Prospects, Members. They are set up once for the organisation, so every tribe groups people the same way.
What makes a good category
- You would filter a list by it most weeks.
- It describes what kind of contact someone is, not what is happening to them.
- Everyone in the business would put the same person in the same one.
Anything that fails those tests is a tag. Tags are free to create, cost nothing to abandon, and do not appear in every dropdown forever.
Applying them
On the contact, in bulk from the contacts list, or from a column during an import — where names are matched loosely, so "vip customers" in a spreadsheet finds your "VIP Customer".
WATCH THE IMPORT SWITCH THAT CREATES THEM
An import can create categories it does not recognise. On a messy file that produces "Customer", "customers" and "Custmer" as three separate categories. Create the ones you want first and leave that switch off.