Best Practices for Using the "Evangelist" Lifecycle Stage in HubSpot

[Janakan_S]

We are exploring the best way to utilize the "Evangelist" lifecycle stage in HubSpot and would like to understand industry best practices. Specifically, we have the following questions:

1. What criteria do companies typically use to classify a customer as an Evangelist?
2. Is it better to automate the process of assigning this stage, or should it be done manually? What is the industry's best practice?
3. If automation is recommended, what are the best and most suitable criteria for setting up workflows or triggers to move contacts to the Evangelist stage?

We’d appreciate any insights from those who have implemented this successfully. Thanks!

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @Janakan_S,

Personally, I'm not a fan of that stage, I rarely use it and often delete it from portals that I administrate. The reason is that, by definition, it is still a customer:

Evangelist: a customer that has advocated for your organization.

If that contact or company is still a customer, marking them as evangelist is misleading and means that users will always have to filter for both, instead of the simpler route of filtering just for customers. It's not a lot of additional work but it means that everyone has to understand that – in order to find customers – they always have to filter for customers and evangelists.

Secondly, tracking whether someone has advocated for your organization is not very straightforward and HubSpot doesn't suggest how to document this. If something like this does happen, you could also simply log a note to a company record or document this in a custom property to make filtering easy. A separate lifecycle stage is, in my opinion, not a good use for that.

Over the years, I've also seen some companies use this stage for employees, partners, candidates – but more so because there is another bucket, less because the naming makes actual sense. All of these contact groups might also just go into the 'Other' bucket.

Hope this helps!