Configuring Our Previous Lead Status' to Hubspots

[JSetzer]

Hello Community,

We just switched over to Huspot. Our company buys homes from those who want to sell to a cash investor or partner company.

Our leads are almost exclusively inbound and we are looking for best practices moving forward. Most of these leads do want to sell their home but not always to us. 

We are also in an industry where right now it may take 50 deals(leads) to close one.

Challenge #1

In our prior system, we had dozens of leads statuses depending on the stage our potential client was at. Some of these are easy to translate to Hubpost such as new(new) and discovery(attempted to contact). 

Challenge #2

When we close a deal it's unlikely we will do busines again with them, yet they still remain in contacts as some status that looks eligible. 

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @JSetzer,

It sounds like now is a good time to consolidate and simplify lead statuses. Before you do that, I'd recommend reviewing this great overview by @franksteiner79 on how the lead status property is supposed to be used: AMA - Demystifying HubSpot's lifecyle stages, deal stages and lead status

As for your #1 challenge, I'd recommend going through that list of values and see which are redundant, not used much or could be consolidated for clarity. You don't have to narrow them down to the exact options in HubSpot. The lead status property is editable.

For your #2 challenge, I wouldn't be too concerned about this. There are ways of labeling contacts as not relevant for sales anymore (or for now). However, I would not use the lead status for this, see the article linked above. When a deal does not go through and is closed lost, I'd recommend updaving the lifecycle stage of the company/contacts to "Other". The lead status could be cleared. You'll be easily able to identify these contacts and companies via their association with the closed lost deals. Labeling them as lifecycle stage "other" makes it easy to exclude them and filter them out in reports.

Hope this helps!