Lifecycle Stages for Free Trial PLG

[nthatcher-airbr]

Hey, RevOps community! 👋

What lifecycle stages do you use if you are using a Free Trial Conversion playlist?
Our company offers both a Free Trial and a Free account option after the free trial is complete (30 days) and I am trying to figure out how to classify the lifecycle stages.
Here is what I have thus far.

1. Internet Lead- Anyone in our CRM that has interacted with our company
2. MQL- A lead that has successfully signed up for a new account
3. Free Active- An account that has set-up their first notifier and receiving errors
4. PQL- user or account that has shown strong product usage, fits your ideal customer profile (ICP), and/or has indicated buying intent.
5. Paying Customer- subscribed to a paying tier
6. MRR- A customer for more than 1 year and still active
7. LTV- More than 2 years as a customer and has upgraded and/or expanded their services
8. Evangelist- All of the above plus has helped us with leaving a review/case study/events

 I would love to hear feedback 🎉and recommendations from the community

[ClaudiuD]

Hi @nthatcher-airbr , this is a great thread, looking forward to hearing from you about how you decided to implement it.

In terms of the lifecycle stage, I am using:
- Subscriber: coming from the blog
- Lead: coming from demos, sales form, etc. (no account created)
- Sign Up: an account is created
- Activated: has interacted with the account - some actions
- Product Qualified Account: in our case, the product is for the team, so I am looking at the entire workspace data to define the product qualified accounts.
- Customer
- Evangelist
- Other
- Churned

not the best yet, still looking at some improvements, but I would like to hear your take on what was implemented with your setup.

There's another element to the PLG stuff, we have 2 sales pipelines - one for self-service (if the user doesn't need sales touches) and one for sales-assisted (when accounts have sales touches)

[danmoyle]

@ClaudiuD I love how you've customized these for your use case. That's great! 

[SellingSaas]

hey @danmoyle do you have sales interaction with this process? 
- I don't see an opportunity stage in there. 

And, is there any kind of classification or scoring done outside of this stage?

- meaning, if the lead down loads an asset from the website are the a web lead? if they show up to a webinar, are they a web lead? if they chat in or inbound call, are they still a web lead? 

[danmoyle · Accepted solution]

Hi @SellingSaas. Here are a few resources for you, as HubSpot's standard lifecycle stage does have opportunity as a choice.

• Use lifecycle stages 
• (For lead scoring) Set up score properties to qualify contacts, companies, and deals 
• (For sources) Understand Original and Latest source properties 

The Original source property tells you the first known source through which a contact interacted with your business. The Latest source property shows the most recent known source. These properties are automatically set by HubSpot, but you can update the value on a contact record manually.

A contact’s Original source or Latest source value will be one of the following:

• Organic search
• Paid search
• Email marketing
• Organic social
• Referrals
• Other campaigns
• Direct traffic
• Offline sources
• Paid social

Hope that helps!

[danmoyle]

This is fascinating @nthatcher-airbr. With the option to now edit and manage lifecycle stages, this is a good example of how it's different than the standard journey. I've alwys thought of simply using Deal stages, but this is different. I like it!