Automating Company Lifecycle Stages (Customer, Opportunity) based on multiple Deals

[Kelsey_R]

Our organization only uses the Customer and Opportunity Lifecycle Stages. Our team hasn't been consistent about updating these when a contract ends, or an opportunity closes out (won or lost).

I have attempted to set up Workflows to automate this process - for example: 

If the Deal Contract End Date (custom field) is more than a day ago, then change the Lifecycle Stage field.

However, it appears that this will trigger for each individual deal, and in our organization its possible to have overlapping contracts (i.e., a won deal associated to a 3 month contract + a won deal associated to a 1 year contract). Similarly, even for a non-customer, our reps may have multiple opportunities going within an organization and close out on as lost (which would trigger the automation to remove the "Opportunity" value from Lifecycle Stage) while leaving another opportunity open.

Any way to have it assess all open deals on a company? Any third party integrations that might be useful here?

Also - why is there not a former customer field available for Lifecycle Stage, and what are your work arounds for the time being?

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hello @Kelsey_R,

Could you clarify one thing, you're trying to set the Lifecycle stage of a contact to an earlier stage than "Customer" when their contract ends, is that correct?

It sounds like you're approaching this with deal-based workflows – if a deal fulfills certain criteria, then update the Lifecycle stage of the associated contacts. The issue here, as you described, is that HubSpot will roll out this change to all contacts regardless of whether a contract is still running. From a deal-based workflow perspective, there isn't any fix here.

You can however approach this from a contact-based workflow perspective: If a contact is associated to a deal that has a specific deal contract end date, change the Lifecycle stage –  but only if there isn't any deal contract end date is still in the future. (This last part would either be included in the enrollment or exclusion criteria of the workflow.)

You might run into the issue that you can't use deal properties for re-enrollment in contact-based workflows. That is a limitation of the tool.

Hope this helps!

[ConnorSlivensky]

Are you using Companies at all or trying to do it all through individuals?  I think one of your big problems is trying to use lifecycle stages as the crux of it. It's really meant to go forward not back and acts wonky as you can see. As for your former customers, you can create a custom property for a simple yes or no to "Active Customer"  or whatever. If you start associating everything (Contacts, Deals etc) you'll have a much better view of what is going on.