Hello Mhpoulsen,
I am quite disappointed as well to find out that HubSpot has nothing in place for managing churned clients. It seems that it is built for traditional transaction based business models, where a dormant status for a client is sufficient when he hasn’t purchased for a while.
But in a subscription based/ SaaS type business the notion of a churned client is very important to take into account that the client has no longer an active subscription. Otherwise I cannot know how many active clients I have.
Here is what I tried: creating my own company/contact “SaaS lifecycle stage” property with an additional churned client status.
With workflows I can then synchronise the “deal stage” variable:
- Trigger: “deal stage” has ever been contract started and is none of contract started
=> change property company/contact “SaaS lifecycle stage” to churned client
This works for moving the customer to churned client the first time.
But the problem is that workflows do not allow re-enrollment when they are based on a property from a different record (deal in this case). So once you win your churned client back, he will get stuck in churned client state anyway. And if you manually edit his state to client, once you lose him again, the workflow won’t be able to re-enroll him to move him back to churned client
I see two possible solutions :
1. Hubspot creates a SaaS compatible “lifecycle stage” with proper synchronisation between “deal stages” and “lifecycle stages”, taking into account churned clients
(and adding a “client churned date” variable, similar to “close date”)
2. HubSpot allows re-enrollment in workflows based on a variable from a different record, and users can parameter their custom “lifecycle stages” and synchronise them with “deal stages” via workflows
Has anybody found another solution for this ? What are your takes ? Surely there are people trying to use HubSpot for a subscription based/ SaaS type business.