Lead status best practice sharing

[samthemiller]

Hey all ! I know that HubSpot offers a ton of customisation options for this, but I am curious to know: how do your (sales) teams use lead status?

For us, we're currently using:

New (for everything that is fresh into our CRM and has never been worked)

In Progress (for everything the sales team is actively reaching out to)

Qualified

Unqualified

Nurture (goes straight into a nurture campaign from marketing, so if a prospect stops replying/says not interested)

Re-engage (set by the marketing team after they've completed a nurture campaign/have hit their MQL threshold)

This means sales reps are always getting either new or re-engage leads, and then are always setting them as either qual, unqual, or nurture after they've worked them. We ONLY track contact lead status (contact is king, as we're very marketing heavy).

I'm considering implementing a new "on hold" lead status that basically says to marketing - ok, don't offer discounts to this prospect (e.g. a sales person reaches out to someone, they're like "follow up with me in 3 weeks") - imo it is still worth marketing nurturing to them, but not offering discounts. I guess maybe we could just always exclude deals that are SQL and higher from any marketing discounts, and have sales set them as nurture still.

Does anyone use an "on hold" lead status or equivalent? I am super curious to know how everyone else handles this.

[Josh · Accepted solution]

Hi @samthemiller,

We've used a similar approach in the past. Another way is using an active list (using whatever criteria mix makes sense) and using it as a suppression list for the relevant workflows.

You would want to consider what happens to that lead if then no longer meet the criteria...would you want them to fall back into the same step of the nurture workflow or would they start over? Or potentially you would nurture someone different that re-enters the the nurture strategy.

This is very specific to your use case, but I think you're on the right track. It makes perfect sense to adjust automation for those involved in conversations, not only because of your example, but it can also be confusing to the recipient if they are actively speaking with someone and receiving automation messages that may or may not be in alignment with the active conversation,

Josh