What lifecycle stage do you assign churned clients

[Mhpoulsen]

I am really confused here. Since there's no way to change the lifecycle stage property (booo HubSpot), I was wondering what you guys are doing out there.

What lifecycle stage do you assign churned clients. Do you keep it as it is or do you set it as others?

[Kapil_Arora]

@Mhpoulsen HubSpot provides default life cycle stages and those cannot be changed. You always have an option to create a custom field for life cycle stages according to your business need and start using that field instead of the default HubSpot field. 

You can create a custom field say "Live_life_cycle_stages" and have all the stages you want to move these leads into. Mostly for the churned customers,  companies uses "Recycled" bucket. 

Please let me know if that works. If yes, please mark this as a solution so other users can read and adopt this. 

Regards,

Kapil Arora

[Mhpoulsen]

I am well aware, but HS will still default to their own lifecycle stage for reporting, so that won't work for me 😞

[gelflex-cc]

@Mhpoulsen I use other for a host of items. Churn is one of those. At the same time, I use notes and pin the note.  Additionally, I add custom lead status which may help you instead.

Good luck.

Chris

[Mhpoulsen]

Thanks you for your feedback. We've thought about that too. 

[gelflex-cc]

@Mhpoulsen You're welcome. I wish we could add lifecycle stages.

If I find anything, I'll be sure to let you know.

[Josh · Accepted solution]

Hi @Mhpoulsen,

I agree with @gelflex-cc, we typically use Other for churned customers.

We also do what @Mhpoulsen mentioned and create a custom property that will allow us to better define what "Other" is. In that case we can create workflows, lists, or filters based on the combination of the 2. 

For example a list that pulls all contacts with lifecycle stage of other and the "Other" type is equal to "Churned".

[Mhpoulsen]

So I just talked to my friends wife who used to work in HS. She just told me that they'd put churned clients as Subscriber, because that way they can work themselves back through the stages through automation. 

Just thought I'd share that with you guys here. 

[gelflex-cc]

@Mhpoulsen INTERESTING Thanks for sharing

[daniezaika]

If you do this, you will lose all timestamp data associated with when that lead moved through the lifecycle stages previously. You can't set a lead "backwards" in the lifecycle stages without messing up historical data, unfortunately. 

[kbjornaas]

When selecting "Other" do you lose the timestamps related to lifecycle stages from before? 

[Josh]

@kbjornaas,

The timestamps for prior lifecycle stages will remain intact. You can see them in the history of the property.

Josh 

[gelflex-cc]

@kbjornaas Just expanding on your question and other answers. I use "other" as "subscriber" connotates buy-in and if they are inactive then they are not buying in. Since the lifecycle is fixed, I use custom fields in lead status. 

Another way to use dates is with last contacted; last modified, etc. I even use the next activity to say reach out in 6 months.  Don't forget "tickets" when you know why they stopped buying. This is powerful when looking at historical data. 

Once upon a time, I thought there was only one way to do things in HubSpot, I was told users do not always use the software the way it was intended and that means WE find ways to accomplish what we want. 

My favorite part of being here is "brainstorming" and paying attention to the Experts like @Josh who find amazing ways to get things done. 

Chris

[Phisher]

Great response. With that set up can lead scoring change the custom property that allows you to better define what "Other" is? Also will records be excluded from certain reports and Analytics Tools because they're not using the built in Lifecycles state (or result in inacurate reporting becuase the reports/analytics still lump everything together by the defauilt Lifecycle stage)?

[sgriggs63]

Thank you so much for this.  I was talking with Support and couldn't figure out anything.  Need to be able to go Lifecycle Stage: Former Customer

Is that so hard to ask?

[Tactitian]

Hello Mhpoulsen,

I am quite disappointed as well to find out that HubSpot has nothing in place for  managing churned clients. It seems that it is built for traditional transaction based business models, where a dormant status for a client is sufficient when he hasn't  purchased for a while.

But in a subscription based/ SaaS type business the notion of a churned client is very important to take into account that the client has no longer an active subscription. Otherwise I cannot know how many active clients I have.

Here is what I tried: creating my own company/contact "SaaS lifecycle stage" property with an additional churned client status.

With workflows I can then synchronise the "deal stage" variable:

- Trigger: "deal stage" has ever been contract started and is none of contract started

=> change property company/contact "SaaS lifecycle stage" to churned client

This works for moving the customer to churned client the first time.

But the problem is that workflows do not allow re-enrollment when they are based on a property from a different record (deal in this case). So once you win your churned client back, he will get stuck in churned client state anyway. And if you manually edit his state to client, once you lose him again, the workflow won't be able to re-enroll him to move him back to churned client

I see two possible solutions :

1. Hubspot creates a SaaS compatible "lifecycle stage" with proper synchronisation between "deal stages" and "lifecycle stages", taking into account churned clients 

(and adding a "client churned date" variable, similar to "close date")

2. HubSpot allows re-enrollment in workflows based on a variable from a different record, and users can parameter their custom "lifecycle stages" and synchronise them with "deal stages" via workflows

Has anybody found another solution for this ? What are your takes ? Surely there are people trying to use HubSpot for a subscription based/ SaaS type business.