Best practices to tag companies that are at the onboarding stage

[MLatulippe]

Hi! We're a SaaS company with a 90-day onboarding process. Currently, we can’t see which companies are in the onboarding stage in HubSpot, which affects the accuracy of our reporting. To address this, we’re considering two options:

1. Adding a customer lifecycle stage called "Onboarding" (we already have the triggers in place for this).
2. Creating a custom property that could also be triggered by a workflow.

Does anyone have experience with these approaches? Any pros and cons for each, or any other suggestions we might be overlooking?

Thanks for your help!

[Jayecho]

Using a custom lifecycle stage like Onboarding is simple and works well if your team uses lifecycle stages to track customer journeys. A custom property gives more flexibility and can hold extra details. Both can be triggered by workflows. It depends on how you use HubSpot. Choose what fits your reports and team process best.

[MLatulippe]

Yes, that helps! Thanks for your help. 🙂 

[karstenkoehler · Accepted solution]

Hi @MLatulippe,

Both are perfectly valid approaches. Here are some general considerations:

• A property that says "Customer is in onboarding" (single checkbox) doesn't contain a lot of information, I'd always rather create, for example, two date properties, such as "Onboarding started date" and "Onboarding ended date", this will let you visualize onboardings over time in reports and by filtering for companies where the start date is in the past and the end date is in the future, you'll find all companies currently in onboarding. You can also easily identify companies with an upcoming onboarding.
• A lifecycle stage works as long as it's mutually exclusive from all other stages. In other words, having one that's called "Customer" and another one that's called "Onboarding" would be somewhat violating that rule, at least in my opinion. It's to some extent personal preference – but I'd like to be able to filter for "Customer" and get all customers without also having to consider that I need to check the box "Onboarding". If you have a small organization and everyone can keep this in mind, then you're all good. If not, maybe go with the date properties I suggested above.
• If you already have lifecycle stage based reporting, workflows, lists etc, adding a new one can mean that you have to go revisit all of those assets and update them accordingly. Especially reports based on when a company became a customer can become a challenge, if you now need to consolidate information from the pre-two-lifecycle-stages-for-customers-phase and the two-lifecycle-stages-for-customers-phase.

Personally, I'd go with one or two date properties 🙂 If onboarding always has the same duration, one is enough.

Hope this helps!