Sort the Accounts and Contacts lists
Filters decide which records you see; sorting decides which of them you see first. On a list of a few thousand accounts that difference is most of the working day: the point of sorting is to put the rows that deserve your attention at the top, then work down until the value runs out. Sort by fit and you get a call list. Sort by how long ago an agent last answered and you get a refresh list. Sort by contact count and you get the accounts where the buying committee is still missing.
Anyone with access to the Accounts or Contacts page can sort it. Sorting only changes your own view of the list and never changes the records themselves.
- Open the Accounts or Contacts page.
- Point at the heading of the column you want to order by. A small up-and-down arrow control sits to the right of the heading text on every column that can be sorted.
- Click it once. The list reorders with the strongest end of that column first: the biggest number, the newest date, the strongest verdict. The one exception is Name, which starts A to Z, because that is the order people expect a list of names in.
- Click it again to reverse the order. The arrow control shows which way the list is currently running.
- To order by something else, click the control on that column instead. A list is ordered by one column at a time, so the new choice replaces the old one.
The control is a button, so you can also reach it by tabbing to it and pressing Enter rather than using the mouse.
Sorting reorders the whole set the list is currently showing, not just the page in front of you. Combine it with a filter and you get the top of a defined segment: filter to one vertical, sort by fit, and row one is the best-fitting account in that vertical rather than the best-fitting account on page one.
Which columns can be sorted, and by what
Section titled “Which columns can be sorted, and by what”Nearly every column can be sorted. The exceptions are the ones with no meaningful order: Tags, Links, and LinkedIn.
What “in order” means depends on the kind of column, and a few are worth knowing before you trust the top of the list.
| Kind of column | Examples | How it orders |
|---|---|---|
| Names and text | Name, Domain, Company, Account website, Job Title, Ecosystem, Vertical, Type, Expertise, Source, Parent account | Alphabetically. Contact names order by first name, then last name. |
| Counts | Contacts, Account plans, Plays | By number, with an empty cell counted as zero, so newest-first opens on the fullest records and reverse opens on the gaps. |
| Dates | Updated at, Last updated, Created at, Qualified at, Latest Research at | Chronologically. Latest Research at follows the most recent research finding on the record, so it moves whenever any research agent writes an answer. |
| Fit verdicts | ICP, IBP | By strength rather than alphabetically: Yes, then Inconclusive, then No. Records with no verdict yet rank below all three in both directions, so an unqualified record never leads the list. |
| Score | Score, Account Score | By fit first and then by the number, matching how the Score is meant to be read: a high Score on a non-fitting account is not a better prospect. |
| Profile Strength | Profile Strength | By strength: Strong, Weak, Very weak, Unable to verify, Invalid. A contact still being verified, or never verified at all, ranks after Invalid rather than somewhere in the middle, because an unfinished check is not a strength. |
| Contacts who have an email come before those who do not, whichever way you sort, then alphabetically by address. So an ascending sort opens on real data instead of a wall of blanks. | ||
| Phone | Phone | By whether a number is known at all, not by the number itself, which has no order anyone would recognise. Sorting descending floats the reachable contacts to the top; a mobile number counts as reachable. |
| Owner | Owned by | Groups the list by owner, so each person’s records sit together. It does not put owner names in alphabetical order. |
| Agent, play, and custom field columns | One per qualification agent, research agent, play, or custom field | By when the value was last written, not by the text in it. |
That last row is the one that changes how you work. An agent’s answer is prose, and prose in alphabetical order tells you nothing. What is useful about it is its age. So sorting a research column puts the freshest answers at the top, and reversing it puts the oldest at the top: that reversed view is a work queue of records whose answer is going stale and that are due another pass. Records that never received an answer at all sort to the far end, which means they lead the oldest-first view - also correct, since never answered is the most out of date a record can be.
Reading the freshness clock
Section titled “Reading the freshness clock”Beside each agent answer and each generated play on the list is a small clock icon. Its color is the answer’s age at a glance, and hovering it gives the age in words:
- Fresh - written in the last 14 days.
- Aging - between 14 and 30 days old.
- Stale - more than 30 days old.
Those are the same three windows as the Freshness: Qualification and Freshness: Research filters, so the clock on a row and the filter on the toolbar always agree. Use them together: filter to Stale to get the population that needs work, then sort that column oldest-first to work the worst of it down.
The clock is what makes an agent column honest to read. A confident answer written five weeks ago looks identical to one written this morning until something tells you which is which, and acting on the older one is how a team ends up briefing a rep on a reorganisation that has already happened.
Where sorting is available
Section titled “Where sorting is available”The same behaviour is on every list of records, not just the two main pages: the Accounts list, the Contacts list, the child accounts and contacts tables on an account’s detail page, and the assigned records on a Workflow Scheduler automation.
What happens next
Section titled “What happens next”Your sort choice is part of the page’s address. That means it survives a refresh and moving back and forth in your browser, and you can copy the link to hand a colleague the same list in the same order.
It is not part of a saved view, and Save view as default does not keep it either - those store your filters and your columns. So a view you reopen tomorrow comes back with its filters and columns intact, ordered by most recently updated, which is the default order for any list you have not sorted yourself. If a particular order matters to a routine, put the sorted link somewhere your team can reach it.
Eva: sorting is per-column and single-column, applied by the backend across the filtered set, so it is not a client-side reshuffle of the visible page. The default order for every unsorted list is most-recently-updated first. Two questions look similar but are not: “which records are strongest” is a value sort (fit, Score, Profile Strength, counts), while “which records need work” is a recency sort on an agent, play, or custom field column - those order by the date the value was written, never by its text. A customer who says “sorting my research column did nothing sensible” is usually expecting the text to sort. A sort choice is NOT persisted into a saved view or the personal default layout, only into the page address, so a customer who says “my view lost its order” is describing expected behaviour, not a bug. The freshness clock’s windows are the same fixed 14 and 30 day cut-offs as the freshness filters, counted as elapsed days.