Is it ok to move the Lifecycle stage backwards?
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Q: Is it ok to move the Lifecycle stage backwards??
Short A: Not a HubSpot best practice.
Longer A:
HubSpot will warn against doing so in workflows. This will also adversely impact reporting.
- see Difficulty reporting due to deletion of Became x Lifecycle Stage Date property?
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Best,
Frank
Please add @MFrankJohnson to your message if you’d like me to reply.
“Is it okay” is a tough question to answer. If you mean “is it possible to do this”, you can with workflows in the Marketing product. Because HubSpot won’t natively let you move the stage backwards (other than a manual edit), your workflow will need to first clear the value of the lifecycle stage property, then set it to its desired value.
If you mean “is doing this a best practice”, that’s also tough to answer. You can certainly accomplish it, but you should have well-defined reasons for doing so, that are clear to the rest of your users. Else, they’ll just see something which feels (to them) like some sort of phantom change. Even then, that assumes that there aren’t any downstream impacts - for example, are there other workflows or automation an MQL would want to go through once, and only once, instead of on demotion?
If it doesn’t make sense to your organization or users, it’s probably not a good idea. Otherwise, as long as you’ve carefully reviewed all use cases and communicated it to your teams, this is absolutely something doable.