Lifecycle Stage - Date entered... / Became a {value}... issue and questions

[EmilyRivera]

Hi all - we have about 9,000 contacts that our consultant imported during HubSpot setup.  Roughly 1,300 of those were active, engaged subscribers to our old system.  The remaining ~ 7,700 were in various states, but we thought we'd be conservative since we didn't have opt-in records, not set them to marketing contacts, etc.

The problem is that our consultant imported them all as "Leads" in Lifecycle Stage.  Using some posts/solutions here (thanks) I was able to use Workflows to "unset" all 9,000 to a blank Lifecycle Stage, and then set those 1,300 back to Subscriber.

The problem is all of the dirty data in the "Date entered..." and "Became a..." fields.  From various posts here, it's clear I can't alter the "Became a..." fields (yet Salesforce advanced support was able to do something like this at the database level for over 300,000 records in the past - I suppose it's not worth wasting my breath trying to push HubSpot to escalate and run a database update manually?)

I suppose I should just live with it, and use the "Date entered..." field for any reporting in the future (assuming I can, I'm obviously still brand new to the platform), and presumably the 7,700 blanks will rewrite the current/correct date when they enter "Lead" for real in the future?

The only other solution I saw mentioned here for similar issues is to delete and recreate all of the records in the CRM with an export/import, but that scares me and I can't imagine I won't lose at least some information that can't be imported.

Trying not to overthink and borrow trouble, but if I have to start over from scratch, I'd rather do it before we've even turned this loose to people, than a year or two from now when we can't do the historical reporting and modeling we need as the company grows.

Anybody been through this or have suggestions?

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @EmilyRivera,

You're correct – if you have done some work from your CRM (marketing email sends, activity logging, capturing information via forms etc), that would be lost by exporting and re-importing. And export and import would only cover information stored in actual record properties. I would not suggest doing so unless you really just imported the data and didn't do anything else after.

For the rest of your question, you're also correct, it's not possible to manipulate the dates that HubSpot automatically captures in the Became a / Date entered fields. Escalating this through HubSpot support likely won't yield any results either. In more than 10 years of working with HubSpot, I haven't had an instance where anything similar was presented like an option.

Regarding the behavior of the Became a / Date entered fields, when I last tested this, here's what I found: https://community.hubspot.com/t5/CRM/Can-you-clear-the-field-Date-entered-quot-Marketing-Qualified/m...

HubSpot has announced, that "the Became a [stage] date properties will be sunset beginning November 20, 2024. It's recommended to migrate to the new lifecycle stage calaculated properties." https://knowledge.hubspot.com/properties/hubspots-default-contact-properties

Personally, I'm leaning towards just living with it – due to th limitations around this property's behavior. In your reports, you'll see spikes at the time of your original imports anyway and it won't be possible to get information accurate for before-HubSpot times. When creating Subscriber and Lead reports, add a comment explaining that for pre November 2024 (for example) subscriber and lead lifecycle stage date information is not correct because of [...].

As you continue to use HubSpot, over time, it will become less and less important.

Hope this helps!

[EmilyRivera]

Hi Karsten - thank you very much for the detailed reply and great information.  You said what my gut said (just live with it and it will become less and less important), but I guess I needed some therapy to make sure I was correct in that thinking. 🙂  Again, thank you.