Understand contact stages

Understand organization-specific contact stages, protected system stages, and how stages organize your active contacts.

Every contact in SAMI OS carries a stage that tracks where they are in your process. Stages keep your Contacts list organized and let you filter to exactly the people you need to work next.

How your stage list works

A contact sits in one stage at a time. Each stage appears on the contact and as a filter above your list. The active stage names and order can be different for every organization because owners and admins can customize them.

New is a protected system stage. New contacts start here, and restoring an archived contact returns it here.
Archived is a protected system stage. It is the only stage that removes a contact from active views and runs the normal archive lifecycle behavior.
Every stage between New and Archived belongs to your organization's process. Owners and admins can add, rename, reorder, or remove these stages in Settings.

Stage display names can change, but each stage's hidden internal key stays stable. Renaming a stage therefore updates what people see without breaking contacts, filters, workflows, API calls, or Zaps that already reference its key.

Filter your list by stage

On Contacts, a row of stage pills sits just above the table. Click any pill to filter the list down to that stage.

All Active shows every active contact with a running count and excludes archived contacts.
Each stage pill shows its own live count, so you can see your pipeline at a glance.
Archived sits at the end, after a divider, because archived contacts are kept out of your active view.

On a phone, the same organization-specific stages appear in a compact picker at the top of the list.

Change a contact's stage

You can update one contact or a whole batch at once. The stage control always uses the current active stages for your organization.

Open the contact or select several
From Contacts, open a single contact, or tick the checkboxes next to several rows to act on them together.
Choose the new stage
Pick the active stage you want from the stage control. For a multi-select, use the bulk bar that appears at the bottom and choose "Change stage." Use the separate Archive action when you want to archive contacts.
Confirm
The contact moves immediately. The stage counts above your list update to match.

Pair your organization's stages with follow-up. A high-intent stage is a useful condition for enrolling contacts in a SAMI Bots sequence or a Workflow so the next touch happens automatically.

Manage or remove stages

Owners and admins manage stages only under Settings → Contact stages. New and Archived cannot be renamed, reordered, or deleted. All other stages can be added, renamed, and reordered without changing their stable keys.

Deleting another stage requires an active, non-archived replacement. SAMI OS remaps contacts, workflow references, Smart Lists, and shared views to that replacement. This administrative remap does not run the normal workflow or Zapier stage-change triggers for the affected contacts.

Stage colors are not configurable in this release. Existing default stages keep their current colors, while newly added stages use the product's neutral stage style.

Any regular stage remains part of All Active, even if your team gives it a name such as "Lost" or "Past Client." Archived is operationally different: it removes the contact from day-to-day active views without deleting the record, and the contact can be restored later.

Last updated 2026-07-10

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