How to Use Tags in Your CRM

When I expe­ri­enced my first Cus­tomer Rela­tion­ship Man­age­ment (CRM) pro­gram around 2000, I don’t remem­ber ever see­ing or using ​“Tags.” Instead the CRM I start­ed with (ACT!) used Cat­e­gories. Then you were able to ​“mul­ti-cat­e­gories” con­tacts. Fast for­ward a few years, when CRMs went cloud based, com­pa­nies start­ed some­thing new: TAGS. The con­fus­ing part is that many CRMs have sev­er­al things that are relat­ed: Tags, Cat­e­gories and Type. In this post, I’ll focus on Tags, because this is a ques­tion I get asked often.

What is a Tag?

Nut­shell CRM’s web­site does the best job of describ­ing what a tag in a CRM pro­gram is and what it does.

Tags are a way to orga­nize your data in ways that are more cus­tomized to your com­pa­ny. You can gen­er­ate lists of con­tacts, accounts, and leads based on their tags.

A few exam­ples of how I’ve seen tags being used for con­tacts: Design­ers, Archi­tects, Design-Build Firm, Web­site, Google, Do Not Con­tact Again, A+ Client and so forth. 

Avoid the Bad Habit of Using Tags Too Much

It is easy to have fun tag­ging con­tacts. Yet don’t for­get, the search func­tions in many CRM pro­grams today are very pow­er­ful. I find it much more quick to use the search func­tion and a keyword/​phrase and find what I need. My CRM Base and Google Apps, for exam­ple, have key­word rich search­es now. There­fore I’ve avoid­ed spend­ing too much time tag­ging con­tacts. I like the gen­er­al rule for tags, ​“Less is Bet­ter.” So avoid too much tag­ging or you’ll then be hunt­ing through tags to find what you need. I’ve seen this mis­take made in a pro­gram I use called Ever­note. A user will save an arti­cle, a note, a file etc. and then cre­ate a new tag. Pret­ty soon, a user has 100 tags with only a cou­ple items in each tag (which is basi­cal­ly a cat­e­go­ry).

My Favorite Way of Using Tags Today

Keep­ing with my ​“less is bet­ter approach,” here are a few recommendations: 

1. Cre­ate a short list of tags for your com­pa­ny to use and stick to this plan. Don’t keep mak­ing up new tags, or it will get out of hand. I did this last week for a client using Pipeline Deals. They got into the bad habit of hav­ing lots of tags that they did not need. Each per­son in the com­pa­ny had their idea of what they called a tag! We cre­at­ed a Google Doc­u­ment and shared it with their team of the Mas­ter Tags and Sec­ondary Tags. Now every­one is on the same page and are not allowed to add to the list!
2. Use tags for very spe­cif­ic pur­pos­es: This might include a mail­ing cam­paign or email list. If you want to send a mail­er to your com­mer­cial clients, have a tag called ​“Com­mer­cial Clients.” If you want to send an email blast to your res­i­den­tial clients only, cre­ate a tag called ​“Res­i­den­tial Clients.” If you don’t want to keep things even more sim­ple, I have a few clients who have a gen­er­al tag ​“Com­mer­cial” and ​“Res­i­den­tial.” Why? Because they don’t want to sep­a­rate out leads and cus­tomers. They want every­one to be includ­ed in a mail­ing or email. It is up to you. 
3. Small or Tem­po­rary Projects: A man­ag­er of his sales team can use tags and assign them to an office or sales­per­son to fol­low up. So he can have a tag called, ​“Mon­day Fol­low Up List.” He can have a per­son click on that tag each mon­day morn­ing and know which con­tacts to fol­low up on that day. When he or she is fin­ished call­ing, he sim­ply removes the tag from that con­tact. You get the idea.

Tag­ging, if used cor­rect­ly, can be a very help­ful tool to man­age your orga­ni­za­tion. Do You Find Tags Help­ful or a Roy­al Pain? Let me know in the com­ments below how you use, avoid or plan on using tags mov­ing forward.