Will changing lifecycle field in HubSpot affect reporting data?

Smart CRM & Sales Hub CRM
1

Dear all,

When setting up Hubspot sales, we weren’t happy with the Lifecycle Field, and just changed it to be customers/partners/investors. Then we managed our sales lifecycle through Lead Status instead.

But now we are now worried that this will mess things up for senior management when they view the lifecycle stages and conversion rates. Is that actually true or can we simply work that through Lead Status??

Thanks,

Sara

2

Hi @SaraAgarwalAH,

There are a lot of tools that work with the lifecycle stages and assume that the property actually reflects where someone stands in their buyer’s journey (lead, mql, sql etc) and not what type of contact they are (customer, partner, investor).

These include:

  • Funnel reports (showing a conversion rate from customer to partner to investor doesn’t make sense)
  • Ad analytics (cost per lead, cost per mql, cost per opportunity yield more information than cost per customer, cost per partner, cost per investor)

Here’s what I recommend:

  1. Create a “Contact type” property or similar with options customer, partner, investor
  2. Bulk edit your contacts so that the new property has these values: Bulk edit records
  3. Clear your lifecycle stage fields for all records
  4. Rename lifecycle stages back to their original values

karstenkoehler_0-1768025900633.png
karstenkoehler_0-1768025900633.png668×601 40.8 KB

You can see what was originally behind the current names here:

karstenkoehler_1-1768025923375.png
karstenkoehler_1-1768025923375.png789×404 29.3 KB

This post by @franksteiner79 explains how and why to use lifecycle stages: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/Ask-Me-Anything-and-Panel/AMA-Demystifying-HubSpot-s-lifecyle-stages-deal-stages-and-lead/m-p/514256 -- and that the lead status (be it the contact property or the stages of the lead object) is meant to reflect sub-stages of a SQL.

Best regards!

3

Hi SaraAgarwalAH,

Karsten’s guidance is spot-on, lifecycle stages are heavily used across HubSpot reporting (funnels, ads, attribution), so repurposing them for categorization and/or naming conventions can definitely create confusion at the leadership level.

An additional way to think about this, most especially if the same person can play different roles over time, is to separate the ‘journey’ from ‘role’ entirely:

- Lifecycle stage → where someone is in the buyer’s journey (lead → customer)
- Role/relationship → how they relate to your organization (customer, partner, investor)

For many teams, a contact property (like “Contact type”) is sufficient.

For more complex models, where one contact can hold multiple roles across accounts or over time; teams sometimes model roles outside the lifecycle layer (for example, via associations or a dedicated role structure), so funnel and conversion reporting remains clean.

The key is keeping lifecycle stages consistent for reporting, and storing categorization in a structure that won’t distort those metrics.

Hope that helps add another lens as you decide what fits your setup best.

Best,
Joeniel

Drafted with AI assistance, reviewed and validated by me.