Building a customized lifecycle automation from companies to contacts

[EPirinen]

We have the ’Sync lifecycle stages’ enabled in our organization. However, there are scenarios, where we would like to use a custom automation instead of the standard setting.

In the early stages of the company lifecycle (subscriber, lead), the standard automation to update the contacts is usually just fine. It becomes more tricky when we talk about existing customers and bigger corporations especially. We would like to approach different decision makers and departments as new leads, so they shouldn’t be updated as customers. That’s the most common use case.

We have thought about turning off the standard lifecycle automation, but then it requires us to build a set of custom workflows, so that contact lifecycle gets updated in all kinds of scenarios. The lifecycle stage would be the most obvious trigger in these workflows, but I wonder if there are any additional triggers, filters etc. which should be noted. I’d be very happy to hear any ideas or references, which would help us to implement this!

[Phil_Vallender · Accepted solution]

Hi @EPirinen 

The best advice I, or anyone, can probably give you is:

1. Keep it simple, real simple
2. Diagram it first, and keep the diagram up-to-date - use something like LucidChart

You probably will need to turn off the automatic lifecycle stage update. Then, I suggest you build individual, if/then branching workflows for each lifecycle stage - base the branching off really simple, explicit company properties for the best results. 

Even when automatic updates are on, I build custom automation for the MQL/SQL stages following these basic principles. 

Hope this helps.