Understanding the CRM hierarchy

Companies, contacts and deals — what each one is for, how they connect, and which one to create first.

3 min readUpdated 5 Aug 2026By Mohab Salehv2basicscompaniescontactsdeals

Understanding the CRM hierarchy#

Every record in the CRM sits in one of three layers, and knowing which layer you are on explains most of the questions people ask in their first week.

The three layers#

Companies are organizations — the businesses you sell to. A company holds everything true about the organization itself: its industry, address, website, main phone number.

Contacts are people. A contact usually belongs to a company, but does not have to: a freelancer or a personal referral is a contact with no company at all.

Deals are opportunities — a specific piece of work with a value, a stage and an expected close date. A deal is always anchored to a contact, because work is agreed with a person, not with a logo.

How they connect#

Company  "Nile City Towers"
   └── Contact  "Layla Hassan"  (Marketing Director)
          └── Deal  "Retail campaign — Q3"   250,000 EGP

Read that chain from the bottom up and it says: this opportunity is being discussed with Layla, who works at Nile City Towers.

Which one is required#

Record	Requires	Optional
Company	Name	everything else
Contact	First name, last name	company, email, phone, job title
Deal	Title, primary contact	company, value, expected close date

Where the company on a deal comes from#

You do not normally set it. When you pick a primary contact, the deal inherits that contact's company automatically. If you set the company first instead, the contact picker narrows to people at that company.

The two must agree. If you pick a contact from one company and then force a different company onto the deal, Nazzam.ai rejects it rather than storing a contradiction.

The order to create things in#

Company — so contacts have somewhere to live.
Contact — so deals have someone to belong to.
Deal — last, because it depends on both.

This order matters most when importing data: an import of deals will fail on every row whose contact does not exist yet.

Common mistakes#

Creating a company for every individual. A one-person consultancy is a company; a person who happens to have no employer is not. If you would never send an invoice to it, it is a contact.

Duplicate companies from slightly different names. "Delta Foods", "Delta Foods Ltd" and "delta foods" become three companies. Search before you create — the company picker searches as you type.

Using deal titles as descriptions. "Follow up with Omar about maybe doing the packaging thing in Q4" is a note, not a title. Keep titles short enough to read on a Kanban card: "Packaging redesign".