Create and organize spheres
Build the named groups your relationships live in, and set the cadence that keeps you actually staying in touch.
A sphere is where you decide who matters and how often you want to hear from them. Once someone is in one, everything else in Relatable — cadence, suggestions, split messages — knows what to do with them.
Why it matters
Without organizing your contacts, your network is just a pile of emails and phone numbers. Spheres let you say, in plain terms, who's a close friend, who's a client, who's an investor, and who needs less of your attention right now. That's the difference between a contact list and a network you can actually act on.
But a sphere isn't just a label. The point of putting someone in a sphere is setting how often you actually want to stay in touch with them, and letting Relatable hold you to it. A "Close Friends" sphere with a monthly cadence is doing real work: it's watching the calendar so you don't have to, and telling you the moment you've drifted past a month of silence. Sorting people into buckets is the easy part. Staying in touch with them is what the sphere is actually for.
A contact isn't stuck in one bucket, either. The same person can be in "Close Friends" and "Book Club" and "Former Colleagues" at once. You don't have to pick a single label for someone the way you would with an old-fashioned tag.
How it works
A sphere is a named group of contacts, built around how often you want to reach the people in it. Set a cadence, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and Relatable watches your last contact with everyone in that sphere; fall behind and a suggestion appears on your dashboard telling you it's time. A contact with no sphere at all sits in your uncategorized queue; add them to one sphere and they're organized. Remove them from their last sphere and they go back to uncategorized.
How to use it
- On the web: open Spheres and create a new one. Name it something you'll actually recognize later — "Close Friends," "Investors," "Past Clients."
- Set a cadence for it while you're there — how often you actually want to reach everyone in this sphere. This is what turns the sphere into a stay-in-touch system instead of just a folder. See Set how often you want to stay in touch.
- Add someone from their own profile: open the contact and add them to a sphere from there.4. Add people in bulk: from the Database page, select multiple contacts and add them all to a sphere at once.
- Add people by asking Whiz: say something like "add Patti to Close Friends" and Whiz finds the contact and files them.
- A contact can be in as many spheres as makes sense — being in "Close Friends" doesn't stop them from also being in "Q1 Clients."
- Rename or delete a sphere any time from its settings.
Good to know
- A regular sphere is different from a Pipeline (your own stages, a kanban board) and a Flow Sphere (an automated send, wait, remind sequence). See the related articles below for when to use which.
- Sphere names have to be unique in your account, so you can't have two spheres both called "Investors."
- Cadence is what makes a sphere a stay-in-touch system rather than just a grouping. You can leave it off for a sphere that's purely organizational, but most spheres are worth setting one for.
- Removing a contact from their last sphere doesn't delete them. It puts them back in your uncategorized contacts, ready to be re-filed.
Ask Whiz
- "Create a sphere called Investors"
- "Add Patti to my Close Friends sphere"
- "Which spheres is Milo in?"