topic Lead Nurturing in Tips, Tricks & Best Practices

Lead Nurturing

Stacks42 — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 14:58:08 GMT

Hello,

I am struggling to understand how I can build a lead flow for my personal use case. Currently our stages are New, Unresponsive, Attempting, Connected, Sales Qualified, Open Deal, and Disqualified. I need to decide how I can integrate lead nurturing into this for the Marketing Team.

My first idea is to create a Stale - Nurturing stage, maybe that would fit somewhere in the funnel, maybe for folks who have been attempted but haven't replied in 3 weeks or so? Is it OK to put the nurturing stage in the Not Started group of stages, or maybe it makes more sense to place it in between Attempting and Connected as an intermediate stage. There is also the unresponsive stage that sits in the Not Started group, but that may not be necessary for me to have in this case. Just considering best practice for moving Lead Stages backwards.

We would also not want to forget leads in Sales Qualified that are sitting for too long without an open deal. Those wouldn't necessarily be stale and need marketing but might be nice to create some follow up tasks there for leads sitting in SQL for too long.

Does anyone have any ideas for me in setting up a Stage that could be used for Marketing nurture, i.e. so I can do a email drip campaign or something to get them to move to Connected Stage>??

Re: Lead Nurturing

RubenBurdin — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 15:20:49 GMT

Hi @Stacks42

From what I know, the cleanest pattern is keep your existing sales-heavy Lead Statuses, then add one extra status called “Nurturing” that a workflow toggles on after a quiet period. That way reps aren’t asked to move records backwards, and Marketing can own the drip without cluttering the active pipeline.

Create the new status

• In Settings › Objects › Contacts › Lead status, add Nurturing under the Not started group (it’s fine there—HubSpot won’t penalise you for a “backwards” move as long as workflows handle it). Guide: edit lead-status values. community.hubspot.com

Detect stalled leads automatically

• Build a contact workflow (Automation › Workflows › From scratch).
• Enrollment: Lead status is Attempting OR Connected AND “Last activity date” is more than 21 days ago.
• Action: Set lead status → Nurturing. Workflow how-to here. knowledge.hubspot.com

Enroll them in the nurture drip

• Draft 3-5 Automated marketing emails that answer common objections. KB: create automated emails. knowledge.hubspot.com
• In the same workflow, add Send email actions with gaps (e.g., 5-day delays Tuesday–Thursday). How to insert delays. community.hubspot.com

Bounce them back to Sales on engagement

• Add an if/then branch: If Contact replies OR clicks any nurture email → set lead status back to Connected and assign task to owner.
• Else let the sequence finish and mark as Unresponsive or Disqualified depending on your policy.

Watch the SQL queue

• Separate deal/workflow: when Lifecycle stage = SQL and Create date older than X days AND no associated deal, trigger a Task “Follow up or recycle.” Use the same workflow tool—just target SQL instead of Lead Status.

Why not bury “Nurturing” between Attempting and Connected?
Sales often jump back and forth; putting nurture in the Not started bucket keeps the visual funnel simple, and a workflow can bump them forward automatically once they re-engage—no manual drag-and-drop.

Extra analytics
Tag every nurture email with a Campaign so Marketing can measure reopen-to-Connected lift; HubSpot’s Campaigns tool rolls that up nicely. knowledge.hubspot.com

That setup lets Sales keep hunting, Marketing warms the silent ones, and no lead gets stranded.

Hope this helps.

Re: Lead Nurturing

Trisha_M — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 15:32:26 GMT

That's a great question. I've always thought of lead progression more like the purple line in this drawing as opposed to the red. In general people are always moving forward, but they often stall - and that can happen at any stage. Because of this, I use 'time-in-stage' values to trigger actions that might help move that lead forward again. Lead stages are used to communicate how far that contact has progressed (so they don't change). With one change to what you have 👆, which is that Unresponsive is a Disqualification reason as opposed to a stage, and I use a workflow to set that Disqual reason after the person goes dark for X # of days.

Some examples:
* Time in Diqualified is 3 months and disqualified reason is none of email bounced, not a fit etc.
* Time in Opportunity is 1 year and Opportunity is Closed Lost.
* Time in Attempted is 3 weeks and last activity from contact is 2+ weeks ago.

Good luck!

Re: Lead Nurturing

PRaut0 — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 06:49:34 GMT

Hii @Stacks42,

I ran into a similar setup a while back, and what worked best was treating nurture as a stage after Attempting or Unresponsive, once sales had made enough tries, marketing took over with email drips until the lead engaged again. For SQLs sitting too long, we kept them in SQL but added follow-up tasks before recycling them. If the process starts getting messy, tools like LeadAngel or LeanData can make the handoff much easier.