CRM

FionaCK
Participant

Best Practice recommendations to manage ex-clients

SOLVE

Hello, does anyone have a 'best practice' recommendation for classifying client contacts when the company becomes an ex-client? What do we do with the lifecycle stage? How do others record an ex-client in HubSpot? Appreciate any advice. thanks, Fiona

1 Accepted solution
Phil_Vallender
Solution
Most Valuable Member | Diamond Partner
Most Valuable Member | Diamond Partner

Best Practice recommendations to manage ex-clients

SOLVE

Hi @FionaCK

 

This is indeed a tricky one. 

 

Given how lifecycle stage works in HubSpot, I think it is important to keep lapsed customers at the customers lifecycle stage, as its really an indication of progress toward that point and removing them from it could distort historic records. 

 

I would always recommend creating custom properties to track the lapsed status and lapsed reason (much the same as I would for deals) so that sales and marketing can easily segment and target that audience. 

 

Then I think its worth figuring out what the potential opportunity among lapsed customers is and building a few processes around key points. Perhaps you can send them new product annoucmenets that may address the features reason they left for. Or sales could reach out after 6 months to see if their alterative solution worked out or not. 

 

Hopefully this gives you some ideas. 

Phil Vallender | HubSpot Website Agency

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8 Replies 8
Lucinda
Contributor

Best Practice recommendations to manage ex-clients

SOLVE

We are also struggling with the lack of lapsed customer in the lifecycle stage. It would be much better to have lapsed customer recorded on the lifecycle stage rather than having to create another custom property to track this which adds another property to use when filtering lists, pulling deals etc. 

FionaCK
Participant

Best Practice recommendations to manage ex-clients

SOLVE

Hi Lucinda, we ended up implementing the following:

1. Company Custom Field: Client Type with a dropdown list of Prospect, Client, Client Dormant, Client Lost.

2. Lifecycle changes to Other when the Custom Field moves to Client Lost, otherwise we keep on Customer for Client & Client Dormant.

3. Contact Custom Field: Client Type (same as Company Custom Field)

4. Contact Custom Field: Contact Classification: Change to Ex Client Contact

5. I setup a workflow to clear a lot of the data from various properties on the Contact Record when the Contact Classification is manually changed to Ex Client Contact.

Not sure if this is the best solution but it was what we came up with. We still wanted to keep a record of our ex clients but not include them or their contacts in our client communcations.

Fiona

JGood
Contributor

Best Practice recommendations to manage ex-clients

SOLVE

This was helpful for me.  Thank you! The only thing I plan on adding is the "cancel date" (Or "churn date") so we know when someone cancels in Hubspot.

 

We have customers that sign up and then cancel and then sign up again and then cancel again so I'll have to clear out fields like you do each time this happens.  Thanks again!

0 Upvotes
JustinPerkinsC
Top Contributor

Best Practice recommendations to manage ex-clients

SOLVE

It sounds a lot like we have put in place honestly. I was looking at how to have Lifecycle stages for lost clients as well and determined to keep them at the "Customer" tier and use supporting fields to help identify.

 

For all associated contacts on current customers and lost customers, we have our own internal status field we use to track more specific status details which the lifecycle doesn't allow (such as lost customers). Leveraging workflow this gets shared across the attached contact records (assuming you don't have records with massive sets of contacts since this only works up to 100 contacts per company before the workflow will give up).

 

I find the sub-status useful for lost clients because a lot of time we just don't market to them the same way if at all once they hit that point. The second we mark a customer won or lost its roles out as I mentioned to all the related contacts. 


Be great to see how others are handling similar items. 

Justin Perkins
Marketing Operations Manager
JPerkins@contractlogix.com
Contract LogixLinkedin
0 Upvotes
Phil_Vallender
Solution
Most Valuable Member | Diamond Partner
Most Valuable Member | Diamond Partner

Best Practice recommendations to manage ex-clients

SOLVE

Hi @FionaCK

 

This is indeed a tricky one. 

 

Given how lifecycle stage works in HubSpot, I think it is important to keep lapsed customers at the customers lifecycle stage, as its really an indication of progress toward that point and removing them from it could distort historic records. 

 

I would always recommend creating custom properties to track the lapsed status and lapsed reason (much the same as I would for deals) so that sales and marketing can easily segment and target that audience. 

 

Then I think its worth figuring out what the potential opportunity among lapsed customers is and building a few processes around key points. Perhaps you can send them new product annoucmenets that may address the features reason they left for. Or sales could reach out after 6 months to see if their alterative solution worked out or not. 

 

Hopefully this gives you some ideas. 

Phil Vallender | HubSpot Website Agency
fifibonbebe
Participant

Best Practice recommendations to manage ex-clients

SOLVE

Hi Phil,

 

I have been looking into this too,  within my business we offer a PAYG model with a 12 month pricing agreement and so have some legacy customers that have stopped using the product after their expired pricing agreement. Unfortunately a lot of these were not given the attention they needed due to some less than savvy legacy relationship management (too many data silos and lack of onboarding past the sales stage!) anad we are now going through a re-qualification process with our sales team to "reactivate" or "win back" any "lapsed customers" and generate new leads within those organisations.

 

I was looking at moving any leads to "other" however we currently used "other" as "closed lost".

 

Lapsed Customer - Lifecycle stage - Other and Lead status - Lapsed Customer

Lapsed Customer to be Reactivated or "Win Back" - Lifecycle stage Other and Lead Staus - WinBack

 

We are still debating what to do and haven't looked into what this means for reporting success - would be interested to know what @FionaCK and her team have decided upon? How did your meeting go?

 

I feel like I'm missing something...

 

🙂

 

Phil_Vallender
Most Valuable Member | Diamond Partner
Most Valuable Member | Diamond Partner

Best Practice recommendations to manage ex-clients

SOLVE

Hi @fifibonbebe

 

I'd be interested to hear how this progressed too. 

 

Also, the introduction of recurring renveue support in the new Sales Enterprise could really help with this kind of challenge, if your sales team is big enough to justify going to Enterprise.

Phil Vallender | HubSpot Website Agency
0 Upvotes
FionaCK
Participant

Best Practice recommendations to manage ex-clients

SOLVE

Dear Phil, thank you for your reply and apologies for my tardy response. I will present your suggestion to our Sales Team and get their feedback. I would have thought that this situation would present itself very regularly with HubSpot users and therefore HubSpot would have a 'best practice' in managing 'lapsed or lost' customers.

 

thanks again for your advice.

Kind Regards

Fiona