Tracking Funnel Conversions from Stage to Stage

[Chinmayy]

Hi HS Community, 

We are having an issue in my company. We have lifecycle stages on our company level that are: Target -> Prospect -> Awareness -> MQA -> SAA > SQA -> Customer. We also have certain workflows that set some companies back to the awareness lifecycle stage if they don't hit a certain criteria that we have in our operations.

When we are doing the customer journey funnel reporting to track our total conversion to stage percentage it only tracks the original movement in the lifecycle stages. It won't track the movement of companies when their lifecycle stage is reverted back to something different. So for example if I am looking at a report from August 2023 to August 2024 it takes into consideration all the movements that happened in this timeline. But for example if we only wanna track the conversion rates in last quarter, this is not ideal.

What we have thought of is creating custom date properties for all lifecycle stages where we can capture the specific date a company enters a lifecycle stage. Like "Original date company entered awareness lifecycle stage" And then we have also decided to have properties for "Most recent date company enters awareness stage" for all lifecycle stages. And then a calculation property for "Time between Awareness and MQA" for all other lifecycle stage properties. Then we may have to calculate the conversion rates manually.

Do you think this is a good idea or have anything else you can suggest me? Any thoughts or ideas would be appreciated. Thank you.

[danmoyle · Accepted solution]

Hi @Chinmayy and welcome to the Community! You're finding a HubSpot expected behavior. In their design, HubSpot made it so lifecycle stages are linear. Once a contact or company hits a stage, that's where they expect it to stay. It's the stage they reached, not necessarily a fluid designation. Which means, as you're experiencing, there's a limitation when the journey isn't so straightforward. 

Here's what I'm thinking might help, and confirming your initial thoughts on a solution. I'd also start with creating custom date properties for each lifecycle stage. This would allow you to A) track the original entry date for each stage, B) record the most recent entry date for each stage, and C) calculate time spent between stages. I think this should help provide more flexibility and accuracy in your reporting, especially for companies that move back and forth between stages.

Next, I'd think about adding calculation properties to measure time between stages. This can help you analyze your sales cycle and identifying bottlenecks. If it were me, I'd create one for time between each consecutive stage and one for total time from initial target to customer. 

Then, to calculate conversion rates manually, you can use these custom properties in HubSpot's reporting tools. This means crating custom reports that:

• Count companies in each stage during a specific time period
• Calculate conversion percentages between stages

I hope that helps confirm your thoughts and inspire additional help. I'd leave you with a few extra thoughts on this:

• Workflows: Create workflows to automatically update your custom date properties when a company's lifecycle stage changes.
• Lists: Build active lists based on your custom properties to segment companies for targeted marketing and sales efforts.
• Dashboards: Design custom dashboards using your new properties to visualize your sales funnel and track key metrics. This will also help communicate effectively when you schedule them to email to the team reguarly.
• Data Cleansing: Regularly review and clean your data to ensure accuracy in your custom properties and calculations. This isn't the most fun, but it's important for sure.
• Documentation: Maintain clear documentation of your custom property definitions and calculation methods for consistency across your team.

This isn't as easy as a one-button push solution, which is a bummer. It'll require more setup and maintenance. But it does provide a more accurate and flexible way to track your company's unique customer journey.

PS thanks for the tag @PamCotton!  😊

[Chinmayy]

Hi Dan,

Thank for your reply 😄 I have a few counter questions. Firstly yes, we are planning to create the properties on company level for time between each consecutive stage. Like for example in our case we would have:

-> Time spent between Target to Prospect
-> Time spent between Prospect to Awareness
-> Time spent between Awareness to MQA
-> Time spent between MQA to SAA (Sales Accepted)
-> Time spent between SAA to SQA
-> Time spent between SQA to Customer

Sometimes companies move directly from Target to stages ahead of Prospect. So for that we'll also have:

-> Time spent between Target to Awareness
-> Time spent between Target to MQA

Sometimes it can directly go to SAA and SQA if its driven by sales:

-> Time spent between Target to SAA (Sales Accepted)
-> Time spent between Prospect to SAA (Sales Accepted)
-> Time spent between Awareness to SAA (Sales Accepted)
-> Time spent between Target to SQA
-> Time spent between Prospect to SQA
-> Time spent between Awareness to SQA

My follow up question to you is how do we exactly do this? -> Then, to calculate conversion rates manually, you can use these custom properties in HubSpot's reporting tools. This means crating custom reports that:

Count companies in each stage during a specific time period
Calculate conversion percentages between stages

Are these two different reports? Also how do you achieve it? Can you give me a step by step solution? 🙂

[danmoyle]

@Chinmayy honestly, I'd probably use custom properties and create calculated properties for each of these. For instance, in ur portal we have a custom Object called "Serivces." And in that object, we have a date property for for when the service was created, and one for when the kickoff call is scheduled, so that we can have our calculated property of "time between created and kickoff call." This way on each record we have that data. 

If I wanted to create a report based on that info, I'd probably create a gauge report of some kind in the custom report builder. 

[PamCotton]

Hey @Chinmayy, thank you for the detailed information.

Your approach of using custom date properties and calculating conversion rates manually is a solid workaround for tracking lifecycle stage transitions more granularly. Another option could be leveraging custom reports and deal pipelines (if applicable) to track stage-to-stage conversions over specific periods. HubSpot’s custom reporting might help simplify the process without manual calculations. 

To our top experts, @danmoyle and @ScottPennwood any recommendations for @Chinmayy matter?

Thank you,

Pam

[Chinmayy]

We have used the HubSpot Customer Journey reporting and it's not very helpful for this paritcular scenario as it tracks all the legacy data and doesn't track any lifecycle stage movement back and forth. Our operations have been set up in a way that our companies may move back and forth as per our business requirements. Also we focus on company lifecycle stages more than contact lifecycle stages which makes it even more trickier to use the custom reporting. Hence the only solution we thought of was what I posted above in my original post. 

[danmoyle]

And @PamCotton - just a little thank you gif. Appreciate you! 

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