Hi @Chinmayy and welcome to the Community! You’re finding a HubSpot expected behavior. In their design, HubSpot made it so lifecycle stages are linear. Once a contact or company hits a stage, that’s where they expect it to stay. It’s the stage they reached, not necessarily a fluid designation. Which means, as you’re experiencing, there’s a limitation when the journey isn’t so straightforward.
Here’s what I’m thinking might help, and confirming your initial thoughts on a solution. I’d also start with creating custom date properties for each lifecycle stage. This would allow you to A) track the original entry date for each stage, B) record the most recent entry date for each stage, and C) calculate time spent between stages. I think this should help provide more flexibility and accuracy in your reporting, especially for companies that move back and forth between stages.
Next, I’d think about adding calculation properties to measure time between stages. This can help you analyze your sales cycle and identifying bottlenecks. If it were me, I’d create one for time between each consecutive stage and one for total time from initial target to customer.
Then, to calculate conversion rates manually, you can use these custom properties in HubSpot’s reporting tools. This means crating custom reports that:
- Count companies in each stage during a specific time period
- Calculate conversion percentages between stages
I hope that helps confirm your thoughts and inspire additional help. I’d leave you with a few extra thoughts on this:
- Workflows: Create workflows to automatically update your custom date properties when a company’s lifecycle stage changes.
- Lists: Build active lists based on your custom properties to segment companies for targeted marketing and sales efforts.
- Dashboards: Design custom dashboards using your new properties to visualize your sales funnel and track key metrics. This will also help communicate effectively when you schedule them to email to the team reguarly.
- Data Cleansing: Regularly review and clean your data to ensure accuracy in your custom properties and calculations. This isn’t the most fun, but it’s important for sure.
- Documentation: Maintain clear documentation of your custom property definitions and calculation methods for consistency across your team.
This isn’t as easy as a one-button push solution, which is a bummer. It’ll require more setup and maintenance. But it does provide a more accurate and flexible way to track your company’s unique customer journey.
PS thanks for the tag @PamCotton! 