Lifecycle stage
A lifecycle stage is where one relationship has got to, chosen from six: prospect, qualified, opportunity, client, onboarding, active. It sits on the person, not on a deal, and every move is written down separately with who made it and why — so the stage answers *what are they to us now* and the history answers *since when, and on whose say-so*.
Six stages, and why not more#
- prospect — a name, from research or an unqualified enquiry
- qualified — enough is known to say they fit
- opportunity — there is a deal on the table
- client — they have bought; a person confirmed it
- onboarding — being set up
- active — a customer who occasionally needs something
That is the shortest sequence that still separates the things a business treats differently. There are no custom stages, no probabilities and no forecast, because Connect's reason for holding a stage is behavioural: it needs to know which of the six somebody is in so it answers, chases and escalates correctly. A business that needs weighted stage modelling has a CRM, and this is not trying to be one.
Two rules hold everywhere. History is never lost — the stage lives on the record and each transition is also written as its own event with the actor and the reason, because a column on its own cannot answer a disputed invoice. Every transition is idempotent — the same evidence arrives more than once, and a repeat returns the original event rather than moving the relationship twice.
The one move Connect may not make#
Becoming a client is a commercial commitment, and a stage change implying a sale is exactly the kind of thing a workspace running in ask-before-send autonomy has said it wants to see. Connect can propose the move and will; a person confirms it. Every other transition may be made automatically where the evidence supports it.
This is worth knowing before you go looking for a bug. A workspace where deals are being won and nobody has become a client does not have a broken pipeline — it has a confirmation nobody has given, and the proposal is waiting where proposals wait.
Stage, pipeline stage, and the word the old column used#
| Term | Belongs to | Values |
|---|---|---|
| Lifecycle stage | One person | prospect, qualified, opportunity, client, onboarding, active |
| Opportunity stage | One deal | open, proposal, negotiation, won, lost |
| The stage on a lead row | One contact row | Historical wording, translated on read |
The third is the awkward one. The contact column has carried more than one vocabulary over the product's life, so its words are normalised on the way out rather than trusted — and a word the sequence does not recognise ranks *before everything* rather than being guessed at, which is the safe answer: an unknown stage should never make somebody look further along than they are.
A person and their deals can also disagree legitimately. One lost deal does not send a client backwards, and somebody at *active* with a new opportunity open is an existing customer buying again rather than a relationship that has restarted.
Questions#
Can I move somebody back a stage?
Yes, and the move is recorded like any other, with who made it. Nothing is silently rewritten — a correction and a progression look the same to the record and are told apart by the reason attached to them.
Does winning a deal always move the person?
It proposes the move to client. Open, proposal and negotiation place them at the opportunity stage automatically; only the last step waits for a person.
What stage is somebody who has never bought and never been researched?
Prospect, which is the start of the sequence rather than a statement that research found them. That is why the prospect record and the prospect stage are separate things and their counts differ.