Sales CRM · Feature guide

Retire and restore contact associations

Keep the buying team current while preserving relationship history and the original customer-contact records.

Audience: authorised staffPermission: Opportunity Edit and current native customer access for editor and opportunity ownerReviewed 30 October 2026

Where to goSales CRM → Deals → Open opportunity → Manage buying team

Before you start

Use your own authorised staff account in the intended Pixie CRM workspace. The Sales CRM module must be available and your role must include the permissions stated above. Existing leads, customers, communications and customer portal pages retain their normal access rules.

Follow these steps

Select Retire association beside a person who is no longer involved in this opportunity.
Confirm the card is hidden from the default active view.
Enable Show retired associations to inspect retained entries.
Choose Restore association when the person should participate again. Their native contact must still belong to the linked customer and their role definition must be active.
Open History to inspect the recorded retirement or restoration.

Behavior and limits

Retirement changes only the opportunity-contact association. It does not delete or deactivate the native contact, revoke portal access, unsubscribe communications or unset the opportunity’s primary contact.
Retired associations retain their current role, observations and notes when the contact remains accessible. They still count toward the 50-association limit.
An association cannot be permanently deleted through this workflow.
A moved or deleted native contact is shown as unavailable, with its name, contact ID, notes and role details masked. An editor may retire that unavailable association while the current customer and owner remain accessible.
Restoration is unavailable when the contact no longer belongs to the current customer. It also requires an active role definition.
Archived opportunities must be restored through the ordinary opportunity workflow before their buying teams can change.

Check it worked

Toggle Show retired associations and confirm the expected card is retained.
After restoration, confirm the association appears in the active view and the native contact remains unchanged.

Troubleshooting

If restoration says the role is retired, ask an administrator to restore that role definition first.
If the contact is unavailable, review the customer’s native contacts through the normal permitted workflow. Do not add a different person to the old association.
If the opportunity customer changed, earlier associations remain retained but their former-customer details are hidden. Add contacts from the current customer.