We had similar issues in not being able to appropriately track this process. We came up with the below solution after almost a year of working with HubSpot. Hope it is helpful to you!
Situation: Wellsource is a B2B software company that often has very long sales cycles. It is not uncommon for a prospect to become an MQL, then revert back in the buying journey and re-convert as an MQL months (or even years) later. The company’s process was if a MQL did not move into a deal stage, its lifecycle stage was set back to Subscriber so that contacts would automatically receive our monthly blog updates to keep them engaged. The marketing team is measured on the total number of MQLs delivered to sales per month.
Problem: Every time an MQL was reset back to subscriber, the ‘Became a marketing qualified lead date’ would get stripped from the contact. This meant that if marketing brought 20 MQLs to sales in the month of January, and 10 of those didn’t move to a deal stage and were set back to subscriber, historical reporting would only show that marketing brought 10 MQLs in that month. This meant that marketing was not providing accurate reporting of total MQLs delivered, but only those MLQs that moved forward into a deal stage. I posted this issue on the community forum in 2018. Many B2B companies seem to have a similar problem as seen with similar ideas posted here and here.
Solutions Explored and Failed:
First we attempted to simply copy the ‘Became a marketing qualified lead date’ value into a custom property so that it wouldn’t get stripped if the contact was moved back in lifecycle stage. However, because the ‘Became a marketing qualified lead date’ property was a date:time default, it could not be moved into a standard date stamp property.
Next, we tried exporting the entire history of the ‘Became a marketing qualified lead date’ property, reformatting the spreadsheet to make the date:time default compatible with the standard date property in Hubspot. This, while a tedious and manual process, did work. However, we then struggled with how to show how many TIMES a contact became an MQL. There were some situations were a contact had become an MQL 3 times in the course of a year. Marketing needed a way to show how it was reconverting prospects to MQLs through ongoing nurturing campaigns.
To try to solve for this problem, marketing created multiple custom fields. ‘First date became an MQL’, ‘Second date became an MQL’, etc. Each month, marketing would do a full property export of the ‘Became a marketing qualified lead date’ property, reformat, and import each date into the appropriate field. This was a time consuming process and was not a scalable solution.
Solution: Once a contact becomes a MQL, instead of being passed to sales via lifecycle stage, it now gets passed to sales as a new deal on a pipeline called MQL Pipeline.
The sales rep will then reach out to the contact and mark the lead status appropriately (reached out, connected, etc.) All MQL Pipeline deals will either get marked as Closed Lost or will be moved into the stage ‘Qualified Right Fit’ on the MQL Pipeline. This will trigger a workflow, which will move the deal into the Sales Pipeline under the ‘Qualified Right Fit’ deal stage. From here, sales should move the deal through either to a Closed Won or Closed Lost status as per the HubSpot Sales Process documents.
We are now able to report on how many deals move into Qualified Right Fit stage, and how many are marked as closed lost, and can even track re-converted contacts who have hit the MQL Pipeline more than once.
Marketing needed a way to report on both unique and total MQLs delivered to sales. Without fundamentally changing its process, there was no way to effectively report on its attribution efforts. By fundamentally changing the structure of how MQLs were delivered to sales using the Deals tool, marketing was able to effectively gather the reporting it needed to show its attribution efforts.