@DSpagnol - so much to discuss here! And I’m sure there will be many shades of opinion in the community, so I’ll just kick things off with my default approach - although even this is is influenced, project to project, by strongly held management views or client marketing/sales cultural differences.
Firstly, on Contact and Company lifecycle management:
I tend to switch off the automatic sync of lifecycle stages between the two objects, in favor of a customized approach set up with workflows. One reason for this is the different sizes and buying practices of your potential clients. You may have a Contact at MQL for IBM (as an example), but it seems likely this is a Contact champion at some smaller business unit, rather than a representative of a corporate wide initiative. Other Contacts across the organization, and the Company object itself don’t need to track that same lifecycle. lifecycle stage. For smaller targets of opportunity, you may feel differently according to culture, but it can all add to workflow complexity, without giving a huge reporting upside.
[For simplicity, I’m ignoring the option of parent/child company structures here.]
When the Deal is created, I think it is key that only the specific Contacts associated with that Deal get promoted to Oppty. ABM can be used to determine their specific roles.
I do tend to assume it is useful to set Company lifecycle to Opportunity when any Deal is created, and to Customer when any Deal is won - to give the bigger sales perspective (and organizational kudos) - but it doesn’t seem right to force all Contactsassociated with the Company (especially a large Company) to track that lifecycle update.
Use of Lead Status:
I believe the assumption of this property is that it can be used to mark progress between MQL and Oppty by subdividing the initial Sales engagement at SQL lifecycle for any given Contact. In a previous HubSpot era, when lifecycle was a pretty rigidly defined property, I had instances where Lead Status was used as a kind of alternative set of lifecycle tracking with company preferred nomenclature. Lifecycle cusomization now makes this trick unecessary, but some sales teams insist on very granular stages between an MQL and the creation of a Deal, where Lead Status could be a useful yardstick. It doesn’t seem useful to duplicate this at a Company level.
If a new Contact is introduced to a existing sales process - then consider whether they are important to connect to the Deal or not. If important, they enter at Oppty lifecycle and Lead Status is likely less relevant.
Attribution:
Depending on platform level, you have a wide variety of options/models available to assess campaign effectiveness. For simplicity of team communication, I would tend to start with a basic reporting option which may well turn out to be ‘first source’.
Does any of this help?
Steve