Understanding Lifecycle Stages in HubSpot

HubSpot's Lifecycle stages are a key property to use in order to successfully categories your leads.

Each stage allows you to segment your contacts in an easy way so that you can easily align your sales and marketing communications. Here are the stages and what they are defined as:

  • Subscriber →→ Subscribed to your blog
  • Lead →→ Lead (a contact in HubSpot)
  • MQL →→ Marketing Qualified Lead (someone you have identified as being ready to be marketed to)
  • SQL →→ Sales Qualified Lead (someone you have identified as being ready to speak to sales)
  • Opportunity →→ Someone you are actively engaging with, a deal has been created for them
  • Customer →→ Someone who has bought from you
  • Evangelist →→ A delighted customer, someone who will give you a testimonial and promote your brand to others
  • Other →→ this is generally used for contacts you want to exclude from workflows or lists, or for contact you will not be marketing or selling too, an example is internal staff or suppliers

How are Lifecycle stages set?

There are only three stages that are automatically set by HubSpot by default.

  1. When a contact fills in your subscribe form (and nothing else), their lifecycle stage will automatically be set to Subscriber.
  2. If they fill in any other form, they will automatically be set to Lead.
  3. If a deal is closed, the contact associated to that deal automatically becomes a Customer.
All other stages either need to be updated manually or via a workflow. You can read more about this here.