Understanding Lifecycle Stages in HubSpot

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

Each stage allows you to categorise contacts and companies based on their journey with your business. They help track where someone is in the customer lifecycle and tailor your interactions accordingly. Here are the standard stages and what they are defined as:

• Subscriber →→ Generally we recommend this being used to categories contacts who have ONLY subscribed to your blog or other newsletters.
• Lead →→ Contacts who have shown more interest and engaged with your content, such as downloading a resource or filling out a form (not a subscribe or contact us).
• Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) →→ Each business may choose a slightly different way to categories MQLs but we recommend this is used for contacts who meet your marketing team’s criteria for further nurturing. e.g They have taken actions like repeated website visits or interaction with promotional content.
• Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) →→  Leads who meet your business criteria for being ready to speak to your sales team. There should be some kind of pre-qualification here on a form. For example, wanting to book a demo or interested in a service/product offering.
• Opportunity →→ Someone you are actively engaging with in the sales process. In HubSpot by default this stage is updated when a deal has been created for the contact (this automation can be turned off or moved to another stage)
• Customer →→ Someone who has bought from you. In HubSpot by default this stage is updated when a deal is moved into a closed won stage.
• 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

Where can I find Lifecycle Stage settings?

In HubSpot, the these settings live within the Contact or Company Object.

•  Go to Settings
• Scroll down to Object and click on either Contacts or Company
• Click on the Lifecycle Stage tab

From this section you can set the automation elements:

• Sync Lifecycle Stages: If you click on this box, you can manage your contact lifecycle stages and it will automatically update on a company level.
  • Remember, you could have different people from the same company at different stages in the joureny, with this activated the company Lifecycle stage will update based on the update of the last associated contact
  • However, lifecycle stages will not move backwards, so if your company Lifecycle stage is already Customer, it will not change if a new contact is added and has the lifecycle stage of MQL (for example)
• Set stage when a contact or company is created
• Set stage based on deal activity  

Can you created customer Lifecycle stages?

Yes, you can create a custom Lifecycle Stage. To create new Lifecycle stages:

• Go to Settings
• Scroll down to Object and click on either Contacts or Company
• Click on the Lifecycle Stage tab
• Scroll to the bottom and add your stage