Lifecycle stages consistently come up in my Small Group Coaching sessions as a HubSpot Professor. This property is vital, telling you exactly where a contact or company is in their journey with your company. If you want to know if someone is a customer, working with your sales team, or new and needs some nurturing – this is the data field that will tell you that. In HubSpot, this is tracked through a property (date field) called Lifecycle Stage.
But first, you need to set up the Lifecycle Stage property in your HubSpot account. Keep in mind there is a Contact and Company lifecycle stage that you’ll want to apply the following step to… let’s dive in.
Get started by reviewing the standard setup stages created by HubSpot, which can be easily customized (instructions here) to fit your unique customer journey. Customization is key to optimizing your CRM.
Pro Tip: Make sure the property is visible on the Contact and Company records so everyone can see it. Follow these steps to make sure it’s visible.
After you’ve set up your stages to fit your customer journey, the next step is to set up automatic updates for your lifecycle stages. I always tell customers you need to remove manual work, and this helps to ensure your contacts and companies are always up to date with the right stage. Let’s discuss two ways to set up automatic updates:
This option allows you to easily update the lifecycle stage of a contact when the lifecycle stage of their primary company changes. So, for example, when a company becomes a customer, every associated contact is set as a customer too.
You can also toggle on the following options and select which lifecycle stage is set when this activity occurs; the setting applies to both contacts and companies:
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A deal record gets created (this is when you identify an opportunity for a new customer)
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A deal moves to Closed-Won (this is when a sale is completed)
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A lead record gets created (this is when you start working a new lead, prospecting and qualifying an opportunity.
Take advantage of these easy setup options to quickly set up automation updates in a few clicks!
Fully customize what automatic updates occur to update lifecycle stages with the powerful, efficient automation tools called workflows. Map out what determines which stage a contact or company falls under—whether that’s based on data, events, intent signals, or all of the above. So, for example, if someone visits my pricing page 3 times in 24 hours, that shows interest, and I can have automation running to update the stage and hand off to your sales team to work this hot prospect. Ask yourself: what are those buyer intent signals for your business?
Then create a workflow to automate those updates. You can even use AI to build these workflows (learn more about building workflows using your Breeze Assistant). Just type out what you want to happen and let AI do the rest.
Congrats! You’ve customized the stages to fit your needs and automated property changes so the stage is always up to date. Check out this resource to learn more about lifecycle stages.
Next steps: I recommend checking out Data Management Excellence: Essential Strategies for Clean and Organized Data to learn more about organizing and managing your data to boost customer engagement and support strategic decisions. Continue the learning momentum and come join us at Small Group Coaching!