Hi @BTeuschler
Here is my attempt at answering your questions:
1. Generally everything that comes into HubSpot has a lifecycle stage of “Lead” but no “Lead Status” yet. If the contacts that are created are not relevant to your normal business, I would either mark them as “Other” or creat a custom lifecycle stage so you have a way to keep them seperate. The Lead Status gets initially trigger by a contact becoming an MQL, which sets the Lead Status to “New”, then the Sales Reps or BDRs take over and manage the Lead Status manually based on the sales process. The only other automated step is when a deal is created which sets the Lead Status to “Converted to Deal”. After that “Lead Status” is more or less being ignored, as we have taken the view that it is only relevant for “net new contacts/leads”.
2+3. Good question - Generally I would only ever set or manage the lead status for contacts that are actively being worked on. Personally I wouldn’t manage or set a lead status for the additional 5 contacts, but would ensure I am syncing the lifecycle status of all associated contacts. Depending on your HubSpot settings this will happen either automatically based on your lifecylce stage settings or you can use the workflow tool to implement your own automation and rules.
In terms of reporting I would combine contact level reporting based on lifecycle stage and lead status to see what things are looking like before we start the sales pipeline and then report on deals and deal stages. If like you say, you know you are engaging with more than one person in order to even start the sales process, I think there is nothing wrong with having a contact report that shows me I created 500 MQLs, 400 SQLs and 90 Opportunities - and then seeing on a dashboard that I created 20 Deals in that period, 14 of which were “new business”. Because on average we have 6.4 contacts associated with a deal…
4. Some tools set internal names/values automatically - and these can’t be changed. Largely because HubSpot and you as a customer use this for API calls, so they should not change as otherwise API calls will fail and will be impossible to maintain. Having a separate lifecycle stage for competitors and partners seem sensible, alternatively you could have competitor and partner list which you then exclude from any lifecycle stage reporting.
5. Pretty common occurence and I agree with closing deals as lost at some point instead of keeping them open in perpetuity. In terms of handling that, I think the following makes sense:
- I would capture the closed lost reason when marking a deal as closed lost
- Then use automation to mark all contacts associated with a closed lost deal (either all closed lost reason or only specific closed lost reasons) with a special Lead Status - Lost-BadTiming or Lost; and create a follow up task for the sales reps to reach out again after a certain amount of time
- the contact would remain in the lifecycle stage opportunity
- you can then combine LC Stage Opportunity & LS “Lost-BadTiming” to see those contacts in a list or view, or even report on them
I hope that helps.
Frank