Hi @ktfritchen,
This is a complicated one, as HubSpot isn’t explaining the potential mistakes in working with lifecycle stages when setting up a portal.
@ktfritchen wrote:
For example, none of my Company records have MQL as a lifecycle stage, even though I have hundreds of Contact MQLs that are associated to Companies.
That would indicate that the contact lifecycle stage doesn’t carry over to the companies. The two are not necessarily linked. Unless you have set up a workflow to move a company to the furthest lifecycle stage an associated contact has reached, there’s no reason why the company lifecycle stage would update.
@ktfritchen wrote:
I’m also finding weird discrepencies where Companies have skipped the Subscriber stage and gone straight to Lead. Most seem to go Lead > Oppty > Customer.
This is also not unusual. Unless you have deactivated the toggles under Settings > Objects > Contacts > Lifecycle stages, HubSpot will skip stages consistently:
You would have to deactivate these, then set up workflows making sure that companies always move through all previous stages before reaching their lifecycle stage destination.
@ktfritchen wrote:
Best I can find it that Company LC stage is supposed to update from the associated contact, but the opposite seems to be happening or the record isn’t being updated at all.
The default system settings works the other way around:
Company updates contact, not vice versa.
@ktfritchen wrote:
Further, I’m wondering if I move Companies backward or forward based on the Contact lifecycle stages, is that going to skew the report so much that it’s mostly worthless anyway?
You can use the ‘Edit record’ workflow action to clear the lifecycle stage field before applying a new more consistent logic and moving companies through all previous stages (see above), yes, but that means that you will lose historic information. A report showing when companies moved into the MQL stage, for example, would show that these all moved into the stage when you ran your new workflows. It’s a trade-off between incomplete and accurate data versus complete but (for now) incorrect data. Over time, reports will of course improve.
@ktfritchen wrote:
Am I the only one? Does anyone have any best practices for setting up this report in a meaningful way?
It’s looking like the Contact records are more reliable, so I’m thinking I’ll just use that even though Company funnels would really make more sense for my business. But, curious if anyone else has dealt with anything similar and has advice/best practices.
No, you’re not the only one, this is a lot harder than it should be and few HubSpot admins get this right. Chances are unfortunately that your contact lifecycle stage information is also not perfect, due to the mechanisms described above.
Cleaning this up is possible, as explained, but it’s not fun.
Let me know if you have any follow-up questions!
