Lifecycle stages

Lifecycle stages let you place each contact at a point in a funnel, and a track is a whole parallel funnel a contact moves through. You manage tracks and their stages from Lifecycle in Settings. Every account starts with one default track, so you can rename and reorder its stages from the start, then add more tracks when one funnel is not enough.

The default track and its starter stages

The first time you open Lifecycle settings, Reach creates a default track named Lifecycle (key default) and marks it with a Default badge. It also seeds seven starter stages so the funnel works out of the box.

The seeded stages are, in order: Subscriber, Lead, MQL, SQL, Opportunity, Customer, and Evangelist. These are starting points only; rename, recolour, reorder, or archive any of them. The default track is the one whose stages feed each contact's primary lifecycle, shown as a coloured chip in the contacts list.

Adding and editing stages

Under each track is an Add a stage card. It asks for two fields and a colour:

• Label: the display name operators see. Required, and editable at any time.
• Key: a stable identifier that must start with a letter and contain only lowercase letters, digits, and underscores (for example power_user), up to 64 characters. Required and unique within the account. If a key is taken, the form returns “A lifecycle stage with key "…" already exists for this account.”
• Colour: a swatch picker with thirteen named colours: Slate, Taupe, Blue, Violet, Pink, Green, Amber, Orange, Brand Orange, Rust, Olive, Denim, and Mustard. The colour tints the stage chip wherever the stage appears.

Reordering and archiving stages

Live stages appear in a Live stages table with Order, Label, Key, and Colour columns. Use the up and down arrows in the Order column to change a stage's position within its track.

The trash icon at the end of each row archives a stage. Reach first confirms with “Archive stage "…"? Contacts already in this stage keep their assignment, but the stage stops appearing in pickers.” Archived stages move into an Archived stages table for that track, where an Unarchive button brings them back. Archiving is a soft delete: the stage and its history stay in your data, hidden from operators and from stage pickers.

Running parallel funnels with multiple tracks

A track is a parallel lifecycle funnel with its own stages. A contact can sit at a different stage in each track at the same time: a donor pipeline and a volunteer pipeline, for example. Use the Add a track card to create one. It asks for a Name (for example Volunteer Pipeline), a Key (same lowercase-and-underscores rule as stage keys), and an optional Description. Track names are capped at 120 characters. Each new track starts empty, so add its stages with the same Add-a-stage card.

Because keys are scoped to a track, two tracks can have stages that share a label but resolve to different keys. To archive a non-default track, use the Archive track button in its header; archived tracks collect in an Archived tracks card with their stages intact and can be unarchived. The default track cannot be archived; attempting it returns “Can't archive the default lifecycle track.”

Moving a contact and firing workflows

You move a contact between stages from the contact's detail panel. Its Lifecycle group shows one row per track, each with the contact's current stage (or “Not set”); pick a stage from the track's menu to move the contact within that track. There is no separate stage-history tab: each move records with its from-stage, to-stage, track, and time, and those entries render inline in the contact's Activity timeline alongside its other events.

Each move fires the stage_transitioned workflow trigger, so you can drive automations off a stage change. A workflow failure never undoes the move: the stage change is committed first, then workflows run on a best-effort basis. Only the default track feeds the lifecycle chip shown in the contacts list; moves on other tracks are tracked per contact but do not change that chip. Editing stages or tracks never reshuffles contacts already placed; changes apply going forward and through the moves you make.