Best practices for lifecycle marketing approach (B2B existing customers)

[emarie]

Hello community,

We've been successfully using HubSpot for inbound marketing/lead nurturing for some time now, but not for our existing customers.  This is about to change. We're a B2B SaaS platform with a subscription model so our goals are to get customers into integrating and using our products in order to reduce churn. Hence, it's more of a lifecycle marketing approach than an inbound marketing approach. Btw, our CRM is Salesforce.

I was wondering if anyone here has any experiences with this usecase and would like to share their experiences?

Best, Maria

[MFrankJohnson]

Q: Best practices for lifecycle marketing approach (B2B existing customers)?

Short A: n/a

Longer A:

We tend to market to the 'Customers' Lifecycle Stage as if they were another 'specialized' segment of our CRM. Main difference is that we typically have LOTS more intelligence on customer behavior than we do on contacts in other lifecycle stages.

That being said, we tend to be hypersensitive to what the customer purchased in the first place, so we generally limit our marketing efforts to customers in that regard. In other words, if a client engages us for HubSpot CRM customization assistance we'll help them keep up-to-date on relevant CRM customization options as those options evolve over the life of our B2B partnership.

We've also had good success using a custom 'Customer Status' property for some our HubSpot clients. This custom contact property (and in some cases custom company property for the ABM-centric teams) helps to further refine the customer status without overwhelming the sales team with even more HubSpot Lead Statuses in the default Lead Status property which can quickly become a mess. (probably also true for Salesforce)

Example Customer Status Values:
- Delighted
- Need Feedback
- Visit This Quarter
- Gift This Quarter
- Renewal Conversation Time
- Requires Special Handling
- Exit Strategy

Using this approach we can auto-trigger events around these values in our Customer Status custom contact property (e.g., feedback requests, digital gifts, renewal reminder task creation, special handling notification to the service desk, etc.). We've found that segregating customer status from the HubSpot Lead Status property opens a world of possibliites for us to further delight customers.

[emarie]

Hi Frank, 

thanks a lot for your feedback! It's good to see how this is done at your company! It's a loittle difficult to apply this to our (or usual) lifecycle stages. We have

- onboarding

- product usage

- upselling (buy more features)

- heavy user / retention

and I'm not sure how your model is applicable to this, because lifecyclle stages are following one after the other .

Maybe there are some other best practices.

Thanks a lot!

Best,

Maria

[MFrankJohnson]

You're welcome Maria @emarie.

Point of clarification, I was speaking about a custom HS Lead Status (i.e., Customer Status) that we've used exclusively in conjunction with the HS Lifecycle Stage 'Customer'. Didn't mean to imply that it was in any way a substitution for Lifecycle Stage. It's not.

Someone who's probably seen more Salesforce-to-HS implementations than most is @bradmin ... maybe he'll chime in here as time permits. Also, @roisinkirby (from HubSpot) may be a good person from whom to gain perspective. We think she may actually dream about CRMs when she's not dreaming about marketing solutions. haha

Good luck with your project.

Best,
Frank

---

www.MFrankJohnson.com

[emarie]

Thanks @MFrankJohnson !!

[bradmin · Accepted solution]

Hi, @emarie (and thanks for the at-mention, @MFrankJohnson). While the lifecycle stage model works well for a lot of sales models, organizations with multiple products, or users who churn and repurchase frequently can create issues. 

You may want to reevaluate whether HubSpot's lifecycle stage is something worth marrying yourself to. While it's great that property is innately tied to a lot of HubSpot reporting, it's also limited by its own structure.

In the organization I'm at now, we use HubSpot workflows to datestamp custom HubSpot properties when key engagements happen; those dates (or the events that led up to those dates changing) are of greater value to us than the lifecycle stage value itself.

These datestamps are synced to Salesforce, and we rely more on Salesforce-side or BI-side reporting to emulate the native HubSpot reports and dashboards. While it would be a lot nicer and easier to simply use HubSpot reporting, we've effectively emulated that reporting into other sources that can handle the complexity of the cases we need.

Even then, it may still involve a lot of heavy lifting, and Salesforce cross-object automation, in order to get the appropriate data to and from HubSpot. 

The very short answer is that since the lifecycle stage functionality and behavior is virtually fixed, if it doesn't natively solve your problems, you may have to try duplicating the functionality you want into the tool that can handle it. I realize that's probably not a satisfying answer. 

[emarie]

@bradmin Thank you, yes it doesn't natively solve my problems but it does explain why I struggle with the HubSpot lifecycle model in the first place. It's a lot clearer now!