Finding & managing your contacts

Your contacts are the people Steeren keeps track of for you: the leads that come in through your website forms, plus anyone you add yourself or bring over from another tool. This guide walks through how to find a contact, move them through their journey, assign an owner, tag them, and keep notes - all without leaving Steeren.

Every contact has a few useful things attached: where they are in their journey (their stage and status), an owner, tags, where they came from (the source and campaign that brought them in), and a running timeline of everything that's happened. You can do all of this by hand, or you can simply ask the Steeren assistant to do it for you - more on that at the end.

Finding the right contacts

Most of the time you're looking for a specific group of people: hot leads from this week, everyone tagged for a webinar, the contacts nobody owns yet. Steeren lets you filter your list by the things you actually care about.

You can narrow your contacts by:

• Name or email - type part of someone's name or email to jump straight to them.
• Stage - where they are in the journey (lead, MQL, SQL, customer, or disqualified).
• Status - how the work is going right now (new, working, contacted, qualified, unqualified, in nurture, or converted).
• Owner - who's responsible. Filter to "no owner" to surface leads waiting to be picked up.
• Tags - your own labels, like webinar or inbound.
• Source & campaign - how they found you, including the marketing campaign that brought them in.
• Fit and intent - Steeren scores each contact on how well they match your ideal customer and how interested they seem (more on this below), so you can sort the strong matches to the top.
• When things happened - created recently, last active in the past week, and so on.

You can stack several of these together. For example, "leads, from this month, tagged inbound, with a strong fit score, best matches first" is a perfectly normal thing to ask for - and it's exactly the kind of view you'll come back to again and again.

[!TIP] The fastest way to build a view like that is to ask the assistant in plain language - "show me the hottest inbound leads from the last two weeks" - and let it assemble the filters for you. You don't have to remember which filters to combine.

Adding and importing contacts

Adding one by hand. Create a contact whenever you meet someone you want to follow up with. The only thing Steeren needs is a valid email address - everything else (name, company, tags, source) is optional and you can fill it in later. If you mistype the email, Steeren tells you right away instead of saving a broken contact.

Bringing over a list. If you're importing from a spreadsheet or syncing from another CRM, Steeren matches people up for you so you don't end up with duplicates. When an incoming contact matches someone you already have - by email, or by an ID carried over from your other system - Steeren updates that person instead of creating a second copy. New people get added; existing people get refreshed.

[!NOTE] Adding a single contact by hand always creates a new entry - it doesn't check for duplicates. So if you add the same person twice, you'll get two entries. For bringing over lists, use the import flow, which is built to reconcile and de-duplicate as it goes.

When a website form fills in a new lead, Steeren leaves it unassigned on purpose, so it lands in the queue of leads waiting for someone on your team to pick up. You can assign an owner at any time.

Moving a contact through their journey

As you work a contact, you'll move them along. Steeren keeps these as distinct, deliberate actions - and each one is recorded on the contact's timeline, so you always have the story of what happened and why.

Set their stage. The stage is where someone sits in the overall journey: lead -> MQL -> SQL -> customer, plus disqualified for people who aren't a fit. You can add a short reason when you change it. Moving someone to customer or disqualified also gently stops any automated nurture emails they were receiving, so you're not still drip-marketing to a closed deal.

Set their status. The status is how the work is going right now - new, working, contacted, qualified, unqualified, nurture, or converted. Stage and status are independent: someone can be a lead in stage while their status moves from new to working. When you mark someone unqualified, you can record why, and Steeren keeps that reason on file.

Assign an owner. Hand a contact to a teammate (or to yourself) so it's clear who's responsible. You can also clear the owner to send a lead back to the unassigned queue.

Add or remove tags. Tags are your own free-form labels - webinar, vip, enterprise, whatever's useful. Add and remove them as a contact's situation changes; Steeren records each change on the timeline.

Write a note. Drop a note after a call or a meeting - a quick summary, context, next steps. Notes support basic formatting, stay on the timeline permanently, and are visible to everyone on your team. The timeline is append-only: notes and activity stick around as a permanent record, so the history is always trustworthy.

Edit the basics. For everything else - name, phone, company, source, and similar details - just edit the contact directly and save what changed.

[!NOTE] Stage, status, owner, and tags each have their own action precisely so that every change leaves a mark on the timeline. That's what gives you a clean, auditable history of how each relationship developed.

Reading the timeline

Every change above - a stage move, a new owner, a tag, a note - lands on the contact's timeline, newest first. It's the single place to catch up on a relationship: who did what, when, and why.

The timeline also tells you who was behind each entry: a person on your team, Steeren acting automatically (like a form capturing a new lead), or the Steeren assistant. That makes it easy to separate the work your team did by hand from what Steeren handled for you.

Fit and intent scores

Steeren can score each contact on two things: how well they match your ideal customer (fit) and how interested they look (intent). These scores are produced for you automatically - you don't set them yourself - and they're a great way to sort a long list so the strongest opportunities rise to the top.

Scoring is smarter when Steeren knows your business, so the more you've filled in about who you sell to and what you offer, the more accurate the fit score will be. If Steeren doesn't have enough context to judge fit yet, it leaves that score blank rather than guessing - and tells you why. You can re-run scoring on a contact whenever you want a fresh read, for example after a meeting that changed your impression of them.

Companies and deals

Alongside contacts, Steeren keeps lightweight records for companies and deals.

Companies group contacts who work at the same organization. You can record a name, website domain, industry, and size, and link contacts to it. If you mention a company name while adding or editing a contact, Steeren will create or connect that company for you automatically.

Deals are a simple place to record an opportunity - a name, an amount and currency, a stage label, an expected close date, and the contact or company it's tied to. They're handy for jotting down what's in play. Full pipeline management is still on the way, so for now think of deals as a notepad for opportunities rather than a managed sales pipeline.

Let the assistant do it for you

Everything in this guide - finding contacts, moving them through their journey, assigning owners, tagging, taking notes, scoring - the Steeren assistant can do for you, just by asking.

Try things like:

• "Who came in from the LinkedIn post this week?"
• "Tag everyone from the webinar and assign them to me."
• "Move Ada to customer and add a note that the contract is signed."
• "Show me the unowned leads with the best fit, and score the top five."

The assistant works the same controls you do, so anything it changes shows up on the timeline just like your own actions - clearly marked as the assistant's work. It's the fastest way to manage your contacts when you'd rather describe what you want than click through it yourself.

Frequently asked questions

What's the difference between stage and status? Stage is where someone is in the overall journey - lead, MQL, SQL, customer, or disqualified. Status is how the work is going right now - new, working, contacted, qualified, unqualified, nurture, or converted. They're independent, so you can change one without touching the other.

How do I move a contact's stage, status, owner, or tags? Each has its own action. They're kept separate from ordinary field edits on purpose, so that every change is recorded on the contact's timeline.

I added a contact twice - why do I have two? Adding a contact by hand always creates a new entry and doesn't check for duplicates. To bring over a list without duplicates, use the import flow, which matches people up by email (or by an ID from your other system) and updates instead of duplicating.

Why did a new lead come in without an owner? Leads captured from your website forms are left unassigned on purpose, so they land in the queue waiting to be picked up. Assign an owner whenever you're ready.

Why is a contact's fit score blank? Steeren leaves the fit score blank when it doesn't have enough context about your business to judge the match - it won't guess. Fill in more about who you sell to and what you offer, then re-run scoring for a result.