Hi @00437,
This comes down to personal preference. Some people consider the Lifecycle stage as a tracker how far a contact has ever made it, others try to have it always reflect the current qualification of the contact. I don’t think you’re setting yourself up for headache as long as you keep the below in mind.
I believe Hubspot works in the background to set Lifecycle Stages too, which has the potential to make a real mess for my communication with contacts.
Correct, you can find those automatic rules for Lifecycle stage updates here. In your case, you’d have to keep in mind that any form submission will upgrade a contact to a lead. This might also happen between companies and contacts.
I’ve read a bit about this and want to make sure I’m not setting myself up for failure here, or rendering my funnel conversion data nonsensical.
When a workflow of yours clears a Lifecycle stage for a contact before moving it to a lesser value, HubSpot will reset the Became a [lifecycle stage] date value. This is used in some default reports. It’s not necessarily bad, you just need to keep in mind that the default lifecycle stage funnel report will now show how many contacts have made it ever to the SQL phase but how many currently are in there. You’ll draw very different conclusions from such a report depending on that.
Personally, I’d try to keep the back and forth between the stages to a minimum. I’d also recommend reviewing the definitions of each stage. In my eyes, a contact that is receiving a call is already a lead. If the call is not successful, the call could be logged with a specific outcome and you could enroll contacts into the encouraging workflow by looking at “Lifecycle stage is any of Lead” and “Contact is associated with at least one activity that has Call type Screening call and Call outcome…”. You always have the option to work with additional properties. Currently, you’re including a lot of implicit information in your lifecycle stages which has more potential for automation going wrong. HubSpot gives you a lot of other contact and activitiy properties to be more specific.
If the screening call promises potential, I would move a contact to SQL (a contact that your sales team has qualified as a potential customer), if not they’d stay in the lead stage. I wouldn’t encourage the sales person to select the marketing qualified lead stage since, per definition, this is a contact that the marketing team has qualified as ready for the sales team. Of course this again all comes down to personal preference and which definitions you’d like to apply.
I also want to highlight, that you can customize the Lead Status property. It’s meant to detail sub-stages of the SQL.
Hope this helps!