The lifecycle stage says how far through the journey an account is: from a name you have just heard of to a customer who buys regularly. It is the backbone of CRM reporting, because it is the one field every account has and every report can group by.

Moving a company along

Change the stage from the Key Information card on the company, or in bulk from the companies list. It saves immediately and the change is recorded, so the history of how an account progressed is kept.

Contacts and companies move together

A contact has a stage too, and when a contact advances, their company can be pulled forward with them — the person who becomes a customer takes the account with them. That link is part of how the stage is set up, so if it is not happening, it is the stage configuration to look at rather than the record.

Letting it happen automatically

A stage can carry auto-advance triggers, so an account moves when something real happens — a deal is won, a first sale lands. It saves a great deal of manual updating, and it is worth setting up only after you have watched real accounts move by hand for a few weeks.