Contact Types
Clients, Employees, Partners, Vendors and Other — what’s separate per type, how to rename them, and what changing a contact’s type breaks.
On this page
1Five kinds of record
Not everyone in your CRM is a customer. ClientTether separates contacts into types — by default Clients, Employees, Partners, Vendors and Other — and the type is more than a label: it decides which sales cycle, custom fields, log codes and lists a record belongs to.
2What’s separate per type
- Its own sales cycle, with its own steps.
- Its own custom fields (plus the common ones shared by every type).
- Its own log codes for reason and disposition.
- Its own entry under Contacts in the menu, and its own Pipeline board.
- Its own filters on the Dashboard, so reporting on customers isn’t polluted by suppliers.
3Renaming them
Settings → Contact Types lets you rename the five to match your business — “Clients” becomes “Homeowners”, “Partners” becomes “Referral Partners”. The numbers behind them don’t change, which matters for imports and the API, where the type is always 1 Client, 2 Employee, 3 Partner, 4 Vendor, 5 Other. An Enterprise can lock contact types so the whole network uses the same names; the tab shows when a type is locked.
4The All list
The All contact list mixes every type together and adds a Record Type column so you can tell them apart at a glance. It’s the list to use when you’re searching for someone and don’t remember what they were filed as.
Changing a contact’s type moves it out of its cycle
Sales cycles belong to a type. Change a contact’s type — individually or with bulk Change — and its current step no longer applies. Do it deliberately, and re-set the sales cycle afterwards.
5Troubleshooting
A custom field isn’t on a contact
It was defined for a different type. Either define it there too, or make it a common custom field.
I can’t rename a type
The Enterprise above you has locked contact types.