Hi,
I’m keen to hear your thoughts and ideas on what are the best practices in managing the Lead pipeline stages along with Lifecycle Stages.
Example:
Let’s say you worked a lead and had to disqualify them because of budget constraints. At this point, the Lead Pipeline Stage will be set to disqualified.
What do you usually do in terms of the associated contacts Lifecycle Stage? Logic tells me the contact’s Lifecycle Stage would also then be set to Disqualified.
What if a year after, there is an opportunity for a renewed potential to sell to that same person. Then we can create a new lead for that contact. (Can this only be done manually? or there are ways to automate this?)
At this point, how will you manage your Lifecycle stage? Would you set it back to SQL? I have heard that Lifecycle Stage’s best practice is just to keep it moving forward.
Hi @marie9423498 ,
You’re correct when you say that best practice is to keep moving the Lifecycle stage forward! In fact, you actually can’t automatically update (via a workflow) the Lifecycle stage of Contacts/Companies to move backwards.
I think it’s important to distinguish between these 2 concepts.
1. Lead - This Community post gives a great explanation of the Lead object. Point 2 is of particular interest for your question!
2. Lifecycle Stage - This property represents where a Contact/Company is in your entire process - inlcusive of Leads, Deals and all of their associated activities.
A Lead can be disqualified this year, but as you said they may come back as a potential opportunity next year. Thus their Lifecycle Stage is not disqualified, but instead would remain something like Sales Qualified Lead. The Lifecycle stage should not be updated to disqualified unless you have determined that a contact/company is never going to be a good fit, for example if you operate in a B2B market and it is a B2C contact/company.
In answer to your question about creating Leads, this can be done both manually and automatically via workflows. To do so automatically you would just need to determine what would trigger the creation.
Hope this helps to answer your question,
 |
| Louise Hare she/her |
| Freelance HubSpot Expert |
| If my reply helped to answer your question please mark it as a solution to make iteasier for others to find! |
I wouldn’t completely disqualify a lead due to budget constraints. Typically I would have reps choose a picklist field when they disqualify a lead to understand the reason. In this case, the reason would send them back to a Nurture lifecycle stage as if they made it to pipeline we can assume the account is qualified and doesn’t need to be re-qualified in the future. But marketing should continue to stay in contact with the lead until the time when they are ready to re-enter the pipeline with a new deal.
In my experience the Lead objects is working over the Lead lifecycle’s stage
and the outcome of this could be qualifying a lead into MQL or SQL, not only to create a deal.
In general we replace the usage of Lead status with the Lead’s pipeline in the prospecting workspace.
Disqualify reasons can be positive, let say that will admit a follow up or nurture in the future, or negative meaning a final disqualification because its not you target audience and may consider deleting this contact from the CRM. Depending on the reason, the following steps to take.
In the future if the contact returns, you can create a new lead in the prospecting workspace and re-qualify it.
Leads can be created manually or by workflows if you have PRO licences.
Let me share with you this video talk I’ve had with my partner about this topic
Hope this helps
Let me know if you have any other question.