Frank, can you point me to a “how-to” for using “automation to keep the company LC property up to date” as you mentioned?
If you’re referring to a Workflow, can you point me to an example (like, inside a video, article, or image)?
Thanks so much for your super clear reply, Rich
Hi @RHandler
There isn’t a “how to” guide for this, but I’ve put an example Workflow together for you and will explain why I chose that approach and some key considerations based on HubSpot’s features and settings.
Here is the workflow:
Workflow: Contact → Company Lifecycle Stage Sync
Key Considerations
1. Deal Settings
I would always use the option to “sync lifecycle stages” in the deal settings. This means when a deal is created, HubSpot will change the lifecycle stage of associated contacts and companies to Opportunity. When a deal is won, this changes the lifecycle stage of associated contacts and companies to Customer.
Deal Settings HubSpot: Sync Lifecycle Stages
I’d like to stress the importance of consistently and correctly associating contacts and companies on deals. Too often I see either companies or contacts missing on deals, or a number of contacts missing, especially on complex B2B deals.
2. HubSpot’s handling of LC stages
An important rule in HubSpot is that the tool will not set a LC backwards. The only way to do this is to clear an objects LC stage and then copy in another value. This is good for us as it means we can ignore the case of a company having an LC of “Opportunity” and us trying to copy the “MQL” LC stage of a contact into the company.
Error message: HubSpot not setting LC stage backwards
3. Workflow enrolment - “is known”
Hubspot WF enrolment triggerOur contact workflow enrollment triggers are:
- The contact has an associated company AND
- The contacts LC is known AND
- The associated company (ignore the primary here, my test portal already has access to the flexible associations feature) doesn’t have an LC of Opportunity or above as that will be covered by the deal settings in point 1
The “is known” trigger has an often overlooked benefit as it also triggers when a value changes, which in combination with re-enrollment this essentially allows us to monitor and react to changes in values.
4. Workflow action - set property value
I then work my way down from SQL to Subscriber, checking which LC stage a contact has and then setting the corresponding LC stage for the company.
I did some quick tests and this works as intended. I’d also add that this is one way of doing it.
Another approach would be to “listen out” for specific LC stages at contact level have a WF for each and the trigger the “set property value” action.
Hope that helps.
Frank
Hi @franksteiner79 Thank you this is very useful. I understand this approch is comletely for Potential Cutomers. But what happens to LC and LS, if a Customer (Lifecycle Stage = Customer) comes to our page again some months after the first deal was closed, showing interest and/or requesting a quote for a different product or product line which is not related to the first deal?
Hi @SCustomers
I answered a similar question earlier.
For me LC shouldn’t change. I’ve bough a few months ago, so I’m still a customer.
Once my first deal closed, LS should either be cleared or set to a value that indicates as much “became a customer” or “deal won”.
If I then take any high-intent action in the future that could trigger a number of things:
- A simple lead revisit notification or form submissions notification for the assigned sales rep
- If reps work with filtered views in HubSpot, think about “hand raise views” for reps
- A workflow that sets the LS to “new lead” or another value that makes sense for your processes → this notifies the rep → a new deal gets created, either in the same pipeline with deal type set to “existing business” or you might want to consider using a seperate upsell/cross-sell pipeline.
Hope that helps.
Frank
Thanks @franksteiner79
My focus is solving for marketing -- I was wondering if you had an answer to my original question, “When we generate a lead that turns out to be an existing customer, I’m temped to mark them as a customer but worried that might mess-up the reports and analtyics.”
While there are benefits to full-funnel full customer lifecycle messaging and communications with further integrations and/or adopting more Hubspot functions. The central issue remains:
When a lead from marketing turns out to be a customer:
- Should I be worried about marking them as such?
Hi @hhawk
I assume this is to show marketing impact, i.e. how much interest are we generating from campaign X, how many downloads / signups / etc. are we getting; correct?
Even though you say your focus is on marketing, it seems to me that some work on sales/marketing alignment, tech stack and data quality is needed. But ignoring that for a second, my key advise would be:
- LC stage is one of many markers/data points and I wouldn’t focus too much on it, especially when multiple systems are at work and aren’t integrated in real-time.
- LC stage It should reflect the reality, so if a contact is an existing customer in another system it should be marked as such. The question then becomes how can we ensure that information flows as closely to real-time as possible between various systems.
- In order to report properly, and considering your setup, I’d move away from reporting on LC stage but rather consider campaign reporting, form submissions reporting at form or portal level, or look into custom reports, i.e. monthly/quartely report of selected forms and their submissions.
To your question - Should I be worried about marking them as such?
I don’t think so, but your current systems setup means that standard LC reports just won’t work, which is why I’d look into alternative reporting options mentioned in point 3.
Frank
@franksteiner79 this is GOLD. Thank you!
Thanks for the detailed breakdown Frank. Correlation betweeb, LifeCycle, Lead Status and Deal Stages have often ignored in the implementation process.
Kudos.!
What is the difference between lead stage and lead status?
Hi @JKirmess - great question and my honest answer is, I do not 100% know.
I have not laid hands on and tested HubSpot’s new Prospecting tool and find some the terminology confusing. Judging by this article and this one , this is different from the lead status but uses very similar descriptions which is of course confusing.
I have been asking myself this same question too. I was all over Google trying to find out why Hubspot had to go and create an entirely new object that has the same name as one of the Lifecycle stages. Way to confuse people.
Hi @franksteiner79,
thanks for the great summary.
I have some questions and I hope you can maybe share your experience with me.
1) Are there only real leads in your HubSpot instance? We have the situation that our two Sales managers (which are also the founders and both are C Level) have their inboxes synced to HubSpot - meaning in HubSpot we also have “other” random contacts apart from real leads (e.g: VCs which we also track in a separate pipeline, but we wouldn’t use the Lead Life Cycle for them).
Do you classify ALL the contacts with a lead status and life cycle? Also, who does the classification? The Sales manager or an Operations person?
2) How do you handle contacts which are in the CRM but not necessarily leads but important for a CRM to track?
E.g.: We are doing B2B business and I have a potential customer company in HubSpot with 7 contacts, economic buyer and champion have been identified (2 people) - the other 5 need to be included in conversations (so it’s good to have them in the CRM and follow their emails) around the deal, but they’re not really people we follow up on (so the Lead status Open wouldn’t be a good fit here). How do you classify these contacts?
3) In the same scenario as above: I have 2 real leads - they’d be SQLs or even Opportunities, but the other 5: are they also SQL/Opportunity?
When doing reporting, a contact count of SQL and Opportunity isn’t wise since each individual would be counted as an SQL, so reporting shall be done on company level, right?
4) We also have competitors or partners in our CRM (since we communicate with them via E-Mail and hence the E-Mail integration they are in the CRM). I created 2 new Life Cycle stages to be able to identify them, but I’m not able to set an internal name, and it shows me numbers as an internal name - we’re doing reporting with a Dashboard software which uses the internal names (I believe the HubSpot API is on transmitting the internal name), and the reports now have those IDs as values.
Can I change the internal value of new life cycle stages?
Or is there a completely different approach to handle Competitors and Partners?
5) We often have the case that a deal is considered Close Lost since the contact simply needs more time to decide and when we reach out again 3-6 months later, we get a positive decision. We do that to have reasonable Sales cycles, otherwise some deals would greatly enlarge the cycle. The deal is technically Lost (and we create a new deal when we reach out again), but the contact is not disqualified since we still want to “mark” it as a potential lead. How would you handle that in HubSpot?
Thanks in advance for your answers.
Best regards,
Barbara
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