Hi, @emarie (and thanks for the at-mention, @MFrankJohnson). While the lifecycle stage model works well for a lot of sales models, organizations with multiple products, or users who churn and repurchase frequently can create issues.
You may want to reevaluate whether HubSpot’s lifecycle stage is something worth marrying yourself to. While it’s great that property is innately tied to a lot of HubSpot reporting, it’s also limited by its own structure.
In the organization I’m at now, we use HubSpot workflows to datestamp custom HubSpot properties when key engagements happen; those dates (or the events that led up to those dates changing) are of greater value to us than the lifecycle stage value itself.
These datestamps are synced to Salesforce, and we rely more on Salesforce-side or BI-side reporting to emulate the native HubSpot reports and dashboards. While it would be a lot nicer and easier to simply use HubSpot reporting, we’ve effectively emulated that reporting into other sources that can handle the complexity of the cases we need.
Even then, it may still involve a lot of heavy lifting, and Salesforce cross-object automation, in order to get the appropriate data to and from HubSpot.
The very short answer is that since the lifecycle stage functionality and behavior is virtually fixed, if it doesn’t natively solve your problems, you may have to try duplicating the functionality you want into the tool that can handle it. I realize that’s probably not a satisfying answer.