History with your firm, in Stage 1

Every services firm has accounts with a past. A program you delivered five years ago, a client that let you go, a logo a partner still guards. Write to those accounts as if they were strangers and you either look careless or step on someone. Stage 1 lets you record the history, then acts on it.

What you can mark

Each account has a History with your firm section. Pick what happened from one list. Your firm served them. They fired your firm. They inherited your firm. Or there's history and nobody knows the details.

Add the work in one line, like the claims platform in 2022. Then two more things that matter. Whether someone else holds the relationship, by name. And whether this is work your firm can't deliver.

What Stage 1 detects first

Keep a past-client list under Settings, Workspace, one company per line. Clients named in your Brain count too. Any account on that list shows as a standing account with a Detected tag. People who used to work at one of those clients show as likely former buyers.

Tap Not right to clear a detection, or Change to set it yourself. What you set always wins.

How each history changes the door

Served. The account gets The Standing Account door. Your firm did the work, and this reader didn't sign it, so the logo earns nothing on its own. The reason on screen names the work.

Your firm built the claims platform in 2022. This reader never signed it.

Fired or inherited. Here it depends on the person. For anyone who was there when it happened, Stage 1 uses The history first. A firing gets named first, once. An inherited firm gets the honest line that they didn't pick you. The email subject is What went wrong. Stage 1 won't send it without your one line on what happened.

For anyone who wasn't there, the history drops out. They never hear about it, and the research doors take over. There's a box on each person for whether they were there.

Unknown. Nothing goes out. The reason tells you to talk to the Client Partner first.

Someone else holds it. Nothing goes out, and the reason names who does.

Can't deliver. Nothing goes out. A meeting you can't staff hurts more than no meeting.

A specific relationship beats the account's history. If you know a reader personally, that door wins over the standing account. The exception is a bad history with a reader who was there. That gets named before anything else.

Where you find it

Open any account on the Board. Next to Who to thread there's a History with your firm link. Once something is set or detected, the section sits above the people with what's on record and a Change link.

Why it matters for services

Services firms carry their history into every account. The CFO who watched your team miss a go-live will read your opener with that in mind whether you mention it or not. Naming it first, once, is the only version that has a chance.

And standing accounts are where internal politics live. A seller who emails a partner's client without asking creates a problem bigger than any deal. Expansion pipeline from existing clients and re-engaging closed-lost accounts go deeper on both sides.

This is part of how Stage 1 picks the way in. Tell it the history once, and every note to that account starts from the truth.