Upcoming: Customized lifecycle stages for contacts and companies

Beginning on March 31, 2022, users will be able to customize the lifecycle stages for their contacts and companies.

What’s changing?

The lifecycle stage (lifecyclestage) property currently uses a set of options that cannot be modified by the users, meaning that the same 8 options are used for the property across all HubSpot accounts.

After this change, the same 8 options will be the default for the property, but users will be able to add new custom stages, or remove any of the default stages.

If your integration uses preset values for the lifecyclestage property, you will need to update your integration to use the CRM Properties API to get the details of the property.

When is this happening?

This change will be live for all customers beginning on March 31, 2022.

Please see the beta documentation for more details on customizing the lifecycle stage.

Please let us know if you have any questions by replying below.

This is good news! Three questions:

1. Lead and Subscriber are default HubSpot lifecycle stages and can’t be deleted, but will it be possible to add another lifecyle stage prior to Subscriber?

2. Will custom lifecycle stages also get their respective default associated properties such as “became a … date” and so on?

3. Will you be able to use the custom lifecycle stages in funnel reporting? (says custom reports, but doesn’t say specifically so just double-checking)

PS: Does this update open the possibility for multiple lifecycles stage logics in the future? (e.g. being a customer of one product but a lead in another?)

Best regards,
Zooma

Cool! We have several clients that would be pleased to hear this. :slightly_smiling_face:

Hi there again!

No response to the November questions, but it’s interesting to see that the developer changelog now says that we can “remove any of the default stages”. So that would answer our first question if that is true :slightly_smiling_face:

Any chance you can confirm and answer the other questions before Feb 1?

Is this still rolling out live to all HubSpot instances? I’m not seeing this functionality in my own account yet.

Hi all, we’ve run into a few issues during the testing for this, and the launch is now planned for March 31.

@Zooma for your questions:

1. The current plan is to let users edit, delete, and rearrange all custom and default stages, so you would be able to set a custom lifecycle as the first stage.

2. Custom stages will not get or update “became a…” properties like the current default stages.

3. Funnel reports will support custom stages.

Please keep in mind that this feature is still in development, so these items may change before the full launch.

Thank you for clarifying, and also for updating the launch schedule!

With regards to “became a…” properties, that is a HUGE bummer as historically a lot of the ways organisations keep track of progress is based on when a contact “becomes” a certain lifecycle stage. Not having this property means you can only look at a snapshot of current lifecycle stages and “has ever been…”-values for the custom stages which is less exact and can’t be compared or compiled with other “time-sensitive”-data like traffic and conversions. So, now that the timeline has moved, can you reconsider adding this feature?

Hey @Dadams -
(1) Is this still on track for March 31?
(2) Relating to @Zooma 's question - Is this planned eventually, or never? And in the meantime, I assume a workflow that stamps a custom Date field should be able to fire off of custom Lifecycle Stage updates?

Bumping on this @Dadams ! We really need to know if this is still on time for our ongoing Hubspot Salesforce integration

This is supposedly live today, but I am not able to see anywhere to make updates (am super admin, looking in contact object editor). Has the rollout been delayed?

Hi, Could you give us an update on release schedule? Is this delayed for a couple of days or weeks?

Hi - I too would appreciate an update on what must be a revised timing on this. Looking forward to a reply soon.

Thank you

Hi!

Because of the beta, I can no longer set the lifecycle stage in popup forms. Instead, I am referred to the beta to make the settings for the popup there. By clicking on the link I end up in the beta…but how can I set which stage should be assigned by submitting the popup?

Hey HubSpot community,

We’ve paused the rollout of lifecycle customization to work out a few things. The new target date is now April 28th, but we’re working to get this update in the hands of all customers sooner.

The good news is that the team is planning to support stage date properties for custom stages (e.g. became a [insert custom stage] date) in the near term (3-6 months).

Thank you all for your comments, questions, and feedback. Keep 'em coming.

@ybaptiste - I had posted a question on this on another thread early last week before you posted this and have been told this week by platinum user @Olivia_Bagnall that this is now availble to her. I don’t think she meant via beta. I am not seeing it yet. Can you tell me how I can get access? Thank you.

My thread is located here: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/CRM/Customized-LifeCycle/m-p/613663

Is the plan still to go live with this tomorrow?

Please give us an update on when this will be available. Especially for portals like ours which are not complicated by the issues causing you delays. Either that or open up for additional Beta users. Thank you.

Looks like I cannot get customised stages using the API. Is it correct behaviour?

{
"name": "lifecyclestage",
"label": "Lifecycle Stage",
"options": [],

How will this beta/update affect the current HubSpot restriction of not being able to move a lifecycle backwards? In other words, if we set up and use custom lifecycle stages, will we be able to set them to go backwards using forms, integrations/sync with other systems like Salesforce, workflow actions etc?

Allen Helms

HubSpot + Salesforce CRM Consultant

www.OrganicEndeavors.com

Hey Community, here’s a necessary update from the team on custom lifecycle stages.

We paused the rollout of this update to sort out a few issues. We hope to resume the rollout in the next few days. Thank you all for your incredible patience.