What should a lead's lifecycle stage be if it is lost business?

[HRichthe2nd]

Hello,

I have been looking into the life cycle stages recently and I have noticed that none of them relate to lost business. 

So this means I could have an lead who is an oppotunity but whose business we lost... Surly if the lead's business is lost, thier lifecycle stage should reflect this?

It is making reporting confusing.

How do others here approach issues like this?

[Jigar_Thakker · Accepted solution]

Hi @HRichthe2nd,

One common strategy is to create a custom life cycle stage specifically for lost opportunities or bussinesses. You can tailor this stage to represent leads or opportunities where the business did not materialize, providing better clarity in your reporting. This way, you can ensure that lost business is accurately reflected, allowing for more precise analysis and reporting with HubSpot.

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions.

If my post was helpful in addressing your query, Support the community by indicating it as the solution.

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @HRichthe2nd,

There are different philosophies on how to approach this.

One option is creating an additional lifecycle stage or moving them to the default stage "Other". While this seems like a good idea at first, it comes with other problems, such as dealing with these contacts should they ever re-engage. Moving contacts back in lifecycle stage can, depending which fields you look at, erase historical lifecycle stage data, making reports that visualize lead generation over time, for example, unreliable. This option is however a potentially good choice if you're convinced that the contact will never come back and could never re-enter your sales funnel.

Instead, option two, you could simply keep these contacts where they are and interpret the lifecycle stage field as a piece of information of how far a contact got. This has the benefit that the aforementioned reports (e.g. leads, MQLs, SQLs over time) stay correct, since you won't ever be forced to set the lifecycle stage back.

If you go for option two, you still have plenty options to exclude these contacts from those reports where you don't want them to show up. For example, you could create a custom report that only shows opportunities which are associated to a deal that is not closed lost. This will only take a few seconds to configure.

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions!

[Lucila-Andimol · Accepted solution]

Hey @HRichthe2nd so this is a great (and frequent) question.

So lifecycle stage is meant to reflect on how this contact/company is the maturity process of your company. It could only be a lead or suscriber if they are downloading stuff from your web, or you have already qualify them from the marketing or sales perspective, or even they could have been customers in the past.

So if you have previous closed won deals > lifecycle stage sould be customer. Maybe you will have another custom property to set if they are an active or inactive customer.

If you have a closed lost deal, this could mean that they were a good fit for you (marketing or sales qualified lead) but not ready to buy. In this case I'd recommend leaving Lifecycle stage in MQL or SQL or Oportunity and use it paired to other custom property "lost reason" or "lead status" set to nurture so that in the future you can continue working this contact/company and try to sell them when the moment is right for them.

Hope this helps

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @HRichthe2nd,

There are different philosophies on how to approach this.

One option is creating an additional lifecycle stage or moving them to the default stage "Other". While this seems like a good idea at first, it comes with other problems, such as dealing with these contacts should they ever re-engage. Moving contacts back in lifecycle stage can, depending which fields you look at, erase historical lifecycle stage data, making reports that visualize lead generation over time, for example, unreliable. This option is however a potentially good choice if you're convinced that the contact will never come back and could never re-enter your sales funnel.

Instead, option two, you could simply keep these contacts where they are and interpret the lifecycle stage field as a piece of information of how far a contact got. This has the benefit that the aforementioned reports (e.g. leads, MQLs, SQLs over time) stay correct, since you won't ever be forced to set the lifecycle stage back.

If you go for option two, you still have plenty options to exclude these contacts from those reports where you don't want them to show up. For example, you could create a custom report that only shows opportunities which are associated to a deal that is not closed lost. This will only take a few seconds to configure.

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions!

[Jigar_Thakker · Accepted solution]

Hi @HRichthe2nd,

One common strategy is to create a custom life cycle stage specifically for lost opportunities or bussinesses. You can tailor this stage to represent leads or opportunities where the business did not materialize, providing better clarity in your reporting. This way, you can ensure that lost business is accurately reflected, allowing for more precise analysis and reporting with HubSpot.

Let me know if you have any follow-up questions.

If my post was helpful in addressing your query, Support the community by indicating it as the solution.