Lifecycle Stage when no longer a customer

[DGallegos]

I would love to hear how others are handling Lifecycle Stage when a Customer is no longer a customer. When someone Churns. 

Are you recycling after a set amount of time to an MQL? SQL? 

Are you clearing the Lifecycle Stage?

Are you leaving it at Customer and leaning on other properties to identify them as a former customer? 

I am doing some HubSpot auditing and we don't do a great job here. What happens at the end?

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @DGallegos,

This depends on how you'd like to use HubSpot. Once you clear the lifecycle stage property, the contact is also removed from reports, meaning that it looks as if they have never been a customer. If you need that information on reports, I would not clear it and instead work with another property to label a customer as churned or not.

If you're fine with losing this information on reports, you can clear the lifecycle stage value to whichever earlier stage applies. If you interpret lead as a contact whose contact information is known, a MQL as a contact who engaged with marketing contact and a SQL as a contact potentially ready to talk to sales, then SQL makes most sense in my opinion. I would also make sure to use an assisting property to document that this contact was a customer before or which products/services they had purchased before, for better filtering and segmenting.

Lastly and theoretically, you could use the new custom lifecycle stages to add an additional 'Churned customer' stage. As far as I know the roll-out of the feature was paused to solve some issues but once you see it in your portal, it would also be an option.

Hope this helps!

[Olivia_Bagnall · Accepted solution]

@DGallegos I completly agree with @karstenkoehler on this one. This really depends on how you use HubSpot AND what you intend to do with these churned customers. If they are not to be treated any differently or targeted differently to your MQLs or SQLs then I would probably revert the lifecycle stage back to this.

The other thing that you can do is add a lead status of 'churned' so that you can filter for 'lifeycle stage = X' AND 'lead status = churned'. This will allow you differnciate your MQLs/SQLs from one another. 

Let me know if you have any questions and if you found this repsonse useful, please mark it as a solution 🙂 

Olivia Bagnall Inbound Consultant and Project Manager Baskey   o.bagnall@baskey.eu www.baskey.eu Rheingasse 14, 50676 Köln

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @DGallegos,

This depends on how you'd like to use HubSpot. Once you clear the lifecycle stage property, the contact is also removed from reports, meaning that it looks as if they have never been a customer. If you need that information on reports, I would not clear it and instead work with another property to label a customer as churned or not.

If you're fine with losing this information on reports, you can clear the lifecycle stage value to whichever earlier stage applies. If you interpret lead as a contact whose contact information is known, a MQL as a contact who engaged with marketing contact and a SQL as a contact potentially ready to talk to sales, then SQL makes most sense in my opinion. I would also make sure to use an assisting property to document that this contact was a customer before or which products/services they had purchased before, for better filtering and segmenting.

Lastly and theoretically, you could use the new custom lifecycle stages to add an additional 'Churned customer' stage. As far as I know the roll-out of the feature was paused to solve some issues but once you see it in your portal, it would also be an option.

Hope this helps!