In Xero there aren't any categories. Nor really in Access or sage. Even in Pegasus where the categories are a thing, they may not be right for the sales team / pricing requirements.
It would be good if you could turn off/ override the account system product categories. Create you own, perhaps obsolete the ones from the accounts system, and then assign products to a category from with in the CRM.
This is now effectively available. Even though you cannot change the product categories that come from the Accounts/ERP/Inventory Management system, we have now added the Magic Matrix Categories alongside the basic product categories. These can either kept the same as the ERP categories or managed within the CRM.
For this we could use the Product Manager to set these categories and then be able to use special pricing based off these categories.
This would be especially useful if you have the scenario where you have a product in multiple categories, for example in the main category for that type of product as well as the accessories category, and you may want to give a blanket 10% discount off the main category so include that product also in the accessories category but not give 10% off all accessories