Blossom Blog

What are Lifecycle Stages, and Do I Need Them?

Written by Oscar Gonzalez | Nov 29, 2022 5:54:40 PM

Often times, we come across the term "Lifecycle Stages" and immediately think "Oh! My team needs these!". But, do we really need Lifecycle stages and what exactly are they?

HubSpot does a great job of outlining what Lifecycle stages are and they make it easy so that you don't have to do too much work.  Lifecycle stages help you organize your contacts and companies into categories based on a predefined marketing and sales process. 

The default lifecycle stages as defined by HubSpot are below: 

Lifecycle stages

The Lifecycle stage property contains the following default stages as options in sequential order:

  • Subscriber: a contact that has opted in to hear more from you by signing up for your blog or newsletter.
  • Lead: a contact or company that has converted on your website or through some other interaction with your organization beyond a subscription sign up.
  • Marketing Qualified Lead: a contact or company that your marketing team has qualified as ready for the sales team.
  • Sales Qualified Lead: a contact or company that your sales team has qualified as a potential customer. This stage includes sub-stages that are stored in the Lead Status property.
  • Opportunity: a contact or company that is associated with a deal (e.g., they're involved in a potential deal with your organization).
  • Customer: a contact or company with at least one closed deal.
  • Evangelist: a customer that has advocated for your organization.
  • Other: a contact or company that does not fit any of the above stages.

Blossom Approach
Our advice for building out lifecycle stages is to SIMPLIFY. Starting with every stage possible can be overwhelming and sometimes unnecessary,  especially as new processes are being developed.
 
With that said, here is what we typically suggest for small sales teams when it comes to defining Lifecycle Stages
 

  • Subscribers: People that scratched the surface with your content (Subscribed to your emails).

  • Leads: This one should be a bit looser, but should be contact/companies that meet your Ideal Customer Profile. Marketing is heavily trying to talk to them, show them ads, emails, landing pages, etc…to get them to gain stronger interest and validate that we believe they are a right fit for our product. (Sometimes, I'll combine these first two if it becomes overwhelming for the team).

  • MQLs: These are leads that have validated our hypothesis of being more than just interested in us. This can be validated by: Filling out a form (non-newsletter)…demo, contact us, etc…; Opened our emails X or more times; Visited our website x or more times; Met a Lead Score of X or above; Booked a meeting.

  • SQLs: At this stage, Sales is notified of the MQLs and required to reach out/validate they are worth pursuing or Sales Qualified. Here's the kicker, Sales can either be required to manual update the lifecycle stage to SQL or we set up a trigger to automatically do so. This is key as this provides a feedback loop for Marketing to better understand the quality of leads they are passing on to Sales.

  • Opportunities: The moment Sales creates a Deal within HubSpot and Attaches/Associates a Company or Contact with that Deal, the lifecycle stage will automatically switch to Opportunity.

  • Customers: Same logic here as in Opportunities. The moment Sales closes a Deal Won within HubSpot and Attaches/Associates a Company or Contact with that Deal, the lifecycle stage will automatically switch to Customer.

Automatic updates to record lifecycle stages

From HubSpot: "You can turn on settings in your HubSpot account to automatically set lifecycle stages when a record is created, or to sync stages with a record's associations. You can also select a default lifecycle stage to set for records synced from each connected app."

  • Be sure to have record creation settings turned on, otherwise the lifecycle stage value swill be left blank when a new record is created. Here are the exceptions:
    • Contacts and companies created on the contacts/companies index page or on an associated record will be set to the account's first lifecycle stage in display order, unless you set a Lifecycle stage value during creation.
    • Contacts or companies created via form submissions will be set to the account's first lifecycle stage in display order. You can customize which stage is set for each form's submissions within the form’s settings. If creation settings are turned on, the stage you set in the form's settings will override the default creation setting
    • If sync settings are turned off, the lifecycle stage will not be automatically set based on the stage of associated records.
    • If sync settings are turned off for closed won deals, the Close date property for associated contacts and companies will not be automatically updated.
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