Adding / changing lifecycle stages

[LBennett7]

Hi - can I get some thoughts on making changes to the standard lifecycles stages in HubSpot please? We want to be able to differentiate between 'new' leads acquired and leads that already existed within our CRM. One idea we've had is to create 2 more lifecycle stages, 'Marketing generated leads' and 'Marketing influenced leads'. First of all, is it possible to change the names of the lifecycle stages in HubSpot and what impact does this have on the reporting? 

Would a better approach to be to create another field with a dropdown to select either marketing generated or marketing influenced? 

Would welcome any thoughts / experience with this.  

[SamBoshier]

Hi there,

I'd be interested in knowing if you have added any new stages for a a lead when it has been lost. For me it only seems to have 'other' and that could describe quite a few different types of leads!

Thanks

[CophieSollins]

We implemented something along the lines of what Karsten is suggesting, that works very well for us. 
We have lifecycle stages to track where in the pipeline the lead is and we also have a custom field called "Lead Source" with a number of options like, event lead, sales prospecting, affilate lead etc. to track where they came from. 

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @LBennett7,

On a high level, here's what happens when making changes to lifecycle stages.

• When you rename lifecycle stages, this will reflect in all tools and reports accordingly. Nothing breaks.
• When you delete default lifecycle stages, you cannot recreate them again and some functionalities in HubSpot will not work anymore like they used to. This is not recommended and HubSpot will warn you.
• When you add new lifecycle stages, nothing will break, you're simply adding to the defaults.

In your case, I would still not recommend using lifecycle stages for what you're trying to do. Whether a contact existed before or not is not a lifecycle stage information, it doesn't tell you where this contact currently sits in the buyer's journey. It's a source information. None of the existing source properties work well for this so I'd recommend creating a custom property that stores information about this duality (existed before / was created anew).

This also helps with the fact that a contact that existed before might become a SQL later, for example. With an extra property, you can easily spot both data points (source / where they are in the buyer's journey).

As far as the additional stages for marketing generated / influenced go, I'd apply the same logic. The fact that a contact was generated by marketing is an attribution data point, not an information about where a contact is in the buyer's journey.

Again, I'd leverage a custom property for this, alongside the regular lifecycle stages.

Let me know if this makes sense to you and whether you have any follow-up questions!

[LBennett7]

Makes sense, thanks for your response!