Thank you Frank for your answer and the pointer to the AMA article. I found all that VERY useful.
I still find that some of the combinations of Contact Lifecyle Stage and Lead Status can cause confusion. Examples:
a) If Contact’s lifecycle stage = Lead is used to represent a new Lead, why would I need to have a Lead Status = “New”
b) If I have a Deal concept in Hubspot that is associated to a Contact, why would I need a lead status of “Open”, “In Progress”, “Open Deal” ?
c) Some of the Lead Status options (e.g., attempted to contact, connected) seem to reference the result of the last interaction, a concept that is different from Lead and thus should not be associated to it.
(Also, and as per my PS below, why would I need a lifecycle stage = “opportunity”, and the Lead Status “unqualified” looks to me that it should be a stage in the contact lifecycle, especially when the contact indicated no desired to be contacted again.)
I see that I can change the values of the the lead status property to something more akin to the way I think about all this, but the question is : would I be breaking anything that hubspot provides out of the box, like a report, something on the website, etc.? In other words, how “hardcoded” are those values into anything else?
I also read the suggested article about Enterprise version restricting access to properties, but I’m not sure that it is conclusive on whether I can control the visibility of the Lead Status based on the values of the lifecycle stage. It’s not a big deal for me because I can’t afford those versions, so I’m going to live with what hubspot offers out of the box in Free and later Starter.
Best regards,
Alex
PS:
After a bit of thinking, I realize that my problem is that because I’m not trained in sales or marketing, I tend to think of all this from a different perspective. I know that most CRMs use naming conventions for life cycles that are similar to Hubspot’s. This seems to be an engrained practice in the industry. And maybe these are the so-called best practices. To me, these practices may also be the reason for the many questions that pop up in this (and other CRM’s) communities.
I believe that at the root of the problem is the fact that we’re using one concept (Lifecycle Stage) to represent more than one aspect of the whole. In our desire to simplify, we actually complicate, because although it is comfy to think of just one concept, it’s also problematic. When problems arise, the solution is then to add sub-concepts (e.g., Lead Status) to supplement the thinking, but in fact the whole may be predicated on the wrong foundations.
I am fully aware that what follows is NOT how most sales and marketing people, and hence CRM products, think of all this. (Btw, I don’t know if it was the CRM industry that built it this way and then managed to convince everyone to think in those terms or was the other way around, but it’s probably irrelevant, it is what it is. )
In my little brain, I like to think along these lines:
1. There is a concept called Individual (hubspot Contacts > Contact). The lifecycle is about the strength of the *relationship* with the Individual, and has little to do with the status of any the deals that I may have.
The stages could go from something like “I don’t know this person” to “We have a rather strong relationship, one that has evolved over the years”. The lifecycle would include stages like “I am being ignored by this Individual”, “Our relationship is dead”, and others. I’m sure most people can find cute one-word names for each stage, so I’m focus on defining the meaning of each.
Note that we could assign numeric values to each stage to facilitate automation, and that we could need additional variables perhaps to provide the rationale for why we think the relationship is in that specific stage.
Irrespective of that, each stage in the Individual’s lifecycle would inform what I am supposed to do more of and less of. An obvious example for my business: I won’t send an offer of my services to someone I don’t know because my business is not like Amazon’s. I need to build a relationship and create trust before the person would consider me.
Note that aspects like frequency of interactions, turnaround time, etc. could be variables to consider when determining whether an individual is in one stage or another. Irrespective of that, none of the Individual’s lifecycle stages represents whether the person is an “opportunity” or a “customer”.
2) The latter terms are associated to the lifecycle stages of a Deal, the concept that represents my attempt to sell my products or services to someone. In this approach, “Customer” is not a stage in a life cycle of a contact. “Customer” is a flag that indicates that there is at least one product or service (a won Deal) that has been sold to the Individual -- or as is in my case, to the Company, because the Deal, although negotiated with one or more Individuals, is made with a Company.
I can have many Deals, each on a different stage, over the lifecycle of the Individual and there is no need to even think of resetting the lifecycle of that individual because of that, because the stage “customer” is not an option for Individual. Rather, it’s a concept derived from Deal.
Similarly, the concept “Opportunity”, as currently expressed by most CRMs including hubspot, would not be about the lifecycle of the individual. It’s another characteristic of a Deal, maybe derived from a BANT analysis. And it’s not a yes/no, but rather something that has greys.
Anyway, please forgive my babbling. I thought it would be useful to express why I think that some of these things open up so many questions. Hope this helps.
Thank you again for your prompt answer!
