Ask Me Anything and Panel Discussions

franksteiner79
Key Advisor

AMA - Demystifying HubSpot's lifecyle stages, deal stages and lead status

Hi all

 

I'm Frank Steiner, Principal Inbound Consultant at HubSpot (Germany). I've been with HubSpot since May 2018 and have been a HubSpot fanboy and customer since 2014/15 when I did my first HubSpot implementation whilst working as Marketing Manager for an IT Service Provider in the UK.

 

Lifecylce stages, lead status & deal stages can be pretty confusing, especially if you're learning about HubSpot for the first time. That's why I'll start with a few definitions first:

 

Lifecycle Stage: Describes a contact's relationship with your company

Lead Status: Describes sales activities during the qualification process

Deal Stage: Represent steps in  your companies sales process

 

I came up with this little visualisation, keep in mind I am not a designer! 😉

How lifecycle stages, lead status und deal stages are connectedHow lifecycle stages, lead status und deal stages are connected

 

 

1. Lifecycle phases

Let's first take a look at the lifecycle phases. These form the foundation for editing and categorizing contacts in HubSpot. The following points should be noted when working with lifecycle phases:

 

  • Lifecycle phases should "increase" incrementally, resetting an LC phase is possible but not recommended.
  • HubSpot Lifecycle phases cannot be modified or added to. (*yet…)
  • A lot of HubSpot features and standard reports use HubSpot Lifecycle phases, for this reason creating your own custom LC phases should be well considered.

 

Setting of lifecycle stages in HubSpot

My colleagues and I are often asked which of these phases is automatically set by the system and when:

 

  • Subscriber: Automatically set when a new contact: Manually created*, imported*, filled out a blog subscription form, or created via the conversation tool.
  • Lead: Automatically set when a new contact: was converted via a form*, was created via Salesforce Sync, or was created via the HubSpot Sales plugin.
  • MQL: Not set automatically by the system, but based on user-defined lead scoring criteria and through workflows.
  • SQL: The contact has been qualified by sales (according to BANT model or similar) and the purchase intent has been classified as probable.
  • Opportunity & Customer: Can be enabled in Deal Settings in HubSpot, and means: if a contact is associated with a deal, its lifecycle phase is raised to Opportunity. If a deal is later set to Won, the LC phase automatically changes to Customer.*

 

* Small addition: unless another lifecycle phase was set when manually creating, importing or in the form. Existing customers with which further deals are associated keep their lifecycle phase "customer" and are not reset by this setting.

 

 

When is an MQL an MQL and who sets the SQL status?

As soon as a contact has cleared the "hurdle" to becoming an MQL, in the ideal scenario the transfer of the contact to Sales takes place. But often the definition of the MQL already proves to be difficult. From experience I know that this question alone deserves an AMA, and there can and should be many different implementations. In the end, however, an MQL represents a lead that is more likely to become a customer than other leads.

 

Once we have defined our MQLs and set up lead scoring, we come to the next controversial point - how does an MQL become an SQL and who is responsible?

 

There is often policy discussion here, in some cases the marketing team defines and sets the SQL status, which I personally find rather questionable. This decision should be left to the sales, inside sales, pre-sales (whatever the team is called in the company). After all, this should ideally be the qualification of the MQLs according to proven models and criteria. BANT (Budget, Authority, Need & Time) is a well-known model here. While much of the marketing activity can be automated, direct and personal interaction via emails, calls, video conferencing is recommended here. And here we move seamlessly into the "Lead Status" topic....

 

2. Lead status in HubSpot

Is a detailed look at the MQL/SQL lifecycle phases of a contact. The lead status property is predefined, but can be fully customised and changed to meet the unique needs of each sales team and process. Ideally, the lead status represents the typical activities that are performed during the qualification process.

 

Furthermore, the Lead Status is not set fully automatically via HubSpot's system settings, but either:

 

Manually by the respective sales staff, or.

Via workflows (e.g. If a contact is associated with a new deal for the first time, then set Lead Status to "Open Deal").

By combining several properties, we are thus able to better segment our database, and in particular our leads, and can for example display contacts whose lifecycle phase is MQL, but whose lead status has not yet been set. These should be qualified by sales as soon as possible.

 

franksteiner79_0-1634890761956.png

 

Assuming a contact has been qualified, we are sure there is potential here to sell our products/services, then we create a deal....

 

3. Deal Stages & Pipelines

Are a detailed look at the opportunity lifecycle phase and yes depending on the business model a contact can spend several weeks and months in this phase and deal phases help us go into a bit more detail here.

 

Again, some general info here:

  • Deal phases are predefined but can be completely customized.
  • The phases are strongly oriented towards the sales process of the respective company, golden rule: Multiple pipelines only make sense if they are also based on strongly divergent sales processes.
  • Deal phases can be combined with mandatory fields for deal properties and workflows.

 

There are 2 options how we can ensure that the necessary deal information is captured and stored in the system during deal creation & during the sales process.

 

  1. System-wide definition of deal properties that are queried during the creation of each deal (no matter in which pipeline).
  2. Pipeline and deal phase specific deal properties that are queried when moving a deal to a specific deal phase, these can be optional or mandatory.

franksteiner79_1-1634890761927.png

 

Additionally, we are able to associate a variety of automation options with reaching certain deal stages. This is where I am often asked - "What is best practice? What do you need to do?" This is where my standard answer kicks in again - it depends... The more appropriate questions are:

 

  • What are your company's internal processes?
  • Are there mandatory and "nice to have" notifications?
  • Are there internal approval processes that need to be mapped?
  • Do we want to change or set default or custom properties based on where a deal is located?

 

franksteiner79_2-1634890762002.png

 

In the above example, we do the following:

 

  • When deal phase "decision maker brought in" is reached, then create a task for the sales representative: 
  • Within 3 days, the first quote should be created.
  • We add deal specific info like "Deal Name" & "Deal Stage" in the task title and notes.
  • Once set up, this workflow is triggered whenever a deal reaches the "decision maker brought in" stage.

 

Summary

My top tip after nearly 6 years of HubSpot experience (and especially 3 years as a HubSpot customer) is that the need to have an open discussion between sales & marketing (Buzzword - Sales & Marketing Alignment!) and reach a common understanding of these properties and categorizations are essential. Not only for the successful implementation of HubSpot, but also for better alignment between marketing and sales and the long-term business success.

 

  • If possible, always stick to HubSpot lifecycle phases, and use custom lifecycle phases only in the absolute exception and consider their impact.
  • Lifecycle phases should "ramp up" incrementally, and not be reset
  • The "Lead Status" property provides a more detailed look at the MQL/SQL LC phase.
  • Pipelines & Deal phases are a detailed look at the Opportunity LC phase.
  • Golden Formula: Deal Pipelines = Sales Process, only if there are fundamental differences in the sales process do multiple pipelines make sense.
  • Deal phases can be combined with mandatory fields for deal properties to ensure good data quality.

 

Additional resources & reading

 

Now it's your turn!

What questions do you have about lifecycle stages, lead status and deal stages?

What experiences have you already had? Are there any implementation scenarios that puzzle you? Or maybe you've built a "best thing since sliced bread" setup that saves your company time and money?

 

From October 25-29, I’ll answer your questions about Lifecyle Stages, Deal Stages and Lead Status! I look forward to hearing from you.

 

Cheers

Frank




Found my comment helpful? Great! Please mark it as a solution to help other community users.


Frank Steiner

Marketeer | HubSpot Expert | CRM Consultant

InboundPro

Let's Talk About Your Project
32 Replies 32
BTeuschler
Participant

AMA - Demystifying HubSpot's lifecyle stages, deal stages and lead status

Hi @franksteiner79,

 

thanks for the great summary.

 

I have some questions and I hope you can maybe share your experience with me.

 

1) Are there only real leads in your HubSpot instance? We have the situation that our two Sales managers (which are also the founders and both are C Level) have their inboxes synced to HubSpot - meaning in HubSpot we also have "other" random contacts apart from real leads (e.g: VCs which we also track in a separate pipeline, but we wouldn't use the Lead Life Cycle for them).
Do you classify ALL the contacts with a lead status and life cycle? Also, who does the classification? The Sales manager or an Operations person?

 

2) How do you handle contacts which are in the CRM but not necessarily leads but important for a CRM to track?
E.g.: We are doing B2B business and I have a potential customer company in HubSpot with 7 contacts, economic buyer and champion have been identified (2 people) - the other 5 need to be included in conversations (so it's good to have them in the CRM and follow their emails) around the deal, but they're not really people we follow up on (so the Lead status Open wouldn't be a good fit here). How do you classify these contacts?

 

3) In the same scenario as above: I have 2 real leads - they'd be SQLs or even Opportunities, but the other 5: are they also SQL/Opportunity?
When doing reporting, a contact count of SQL and Opportunity isn't wise since each individual would be counted as an SQL, so reporting shall be done on company level, right?

 

4) We also have competitors or partners in our CRM (since we communicate with them via E-Mail and hence the E-Mail integration they are in the CRM). I created 2 new Life Cycle stages to be able to identify them, but I'm not able to set an internal name, and it shows me numbers as an internal name - we're doing reporting with a Dashboard software which uses the internal names (I believe the HubSpot API is on transmitting the internal name), and the reports now have those IDs as values.

Can I change the internal value of new life cycle stages?
Or is there a completely different approach to handle Competitors and Partners?

 

5) We often have the case that a deal is considered Close Lost since the contact simply needs more time to decide and when we reach out again 3-6 months later, we get a positive decision. We do that to have reasonable Sales cycles, otherwise some deals would greatly enlarge the cycle. The deal is technically Lost (and we create a new deal when we reach out again), but the contact is not disqualified since we still want to "mark" it as a potential lead. How would you handle that in HubSpot?

 

Thanks in advance for your answers.

 

Best regards,
Barbara

franksteiner79
Key Advisor

AMA - Demystifying HubSpot's lifecyle stages, deal stages and lead status

Hi @BTeuschler 

 

Here is my attempt at answering your questions:

 

1. Generally everything that comes into HubSpot has a lifecycle stage of "Lead" but no "Lead Status" yet. If the contacts that are created are not relevant to your normal business, I would either mark them as "Other" or creat a custom lifecycle stage so you have a way to keep them seperate. The Lead Status gets initially trigger by a contact becoming an MQL, which sets the Lead Status to "New", then the Sales Reps or BDRs take over and manage the Lead Status manually based on the sales process. The only other automated step is when a deal is created which sets the Lead Status to "Converted to Deal". After that "Lead Status" is more or less being ignored, as we have taken the view that it is only relevant for "net new contacts/leads".

 

2+3. Good question - Generally I would only ever set or manage the lead status for contacts that are actively being worked on. Personally I wouldn't manage or set a lead status for the additional 5 contacts, but would ensure I am syncing the lifecycle status of all associated contacts. Depending on your HubSpot settings this will happen either automatically based on your lifecylce stage settings or you can use the workflow tool to implement your own automation and rules.

Screenshot 2023-11-23 at 14.40.59.png

In terms of reporting I would combine contact level reporting based on lifecycle stage and lead status to see what things are looking like before we start the sales pipeline and then report on deals and deal stages. If like you say, you know you are engaging with more than one person in order to even start the sales process, I think there is nothing wrong with having a contact report that shows me I created 500 MQLs, 400 SQLs and 90 Opportunities - and then seeing on a dashboard that I created 20 Deals in that period, 14 of which were "new business". Because on average we have 6.4 contacts associated with a deal...

 

4. Some tools set internal names/values automatically - and these can't be changed. Largely because HubSpot and you as a customer use this for API calls, so they should not change as otherwise API calls will fail and will be impossible to maintain. Having a separate lifecycle stage for competitors and partners seem sensible, alternatively you could have competitor and partner list which you then exclude from any lifecycle stage reporting.

 

5. Pretty common occurence and I agree with closing deals as lost at some point instead of keeping them open in perpetuity. In terms of handling that, I think the following makes sense:

  • I would capture the closed lost reason when marking a deal as closed lost
  • Then use automation to mark all contacts associated with a closed lost deal (either all closed lost reason or only specific closed lost reasons) with a special Lead Status - Lost-BadTiming or Lost; and create a follow up task for the sales reps to reach out again after a certain amount of time
  • the contact would remain in the lifecycle stage opportunity
  • you can then combine LC Stage Opportunity & LS "Lost-BadTiming" to see those contacts in a list or view, or even report on them

I hope that helps.

Frank

Found my comment helpful? Great! Please mark it as a solution to help other community users.


Frank Steiner

Marketeer | HubSpot Expert | CRM Consultant

InboundPro

Let's Talk About Your Project
JKirmess
Participant

AMA - Demystifying HubSpot's lifecyle stages, deal stages and lead status

What is the difference between lead stage and lead status? 

RMenezes
Contributor

AMA - Demystifying HubSpot's lifecyle stages, deal stages and lead status

I have been asking myself this same question too. I was all over Google trying to find out why Hubspot had to go and create an entirely new object that has the same name as one of the Lifecycle stages. Way to confuse people.

franksteiner79
Key Advisor

AMA - Demystifying HubSpot's lifecyle stages, deal stages and lead status

Hi @JKirmess - great question and my honest answer is, I do not 100% know.

I have not laid hands on and tested HubSpot's new Prospecting tool and find some the terminology confusing. Judging by this article and this one , this is different from the lead status but uses very similar descriptions which is of course confusing.

Found my comment helpful? Great! Please mark it as a solution to help other community users.


Frank Steiner

Marketeer | HubSpot Expert | CRM Consultant

InboundPro

Let's Talk About Your Project
saran_io
Contributor

AMA - Demystifying HubSpot's lifecyle stages, deal stages and lead status

Thanks for the detailed breakdown Frank. Correlation betweeb, LifeCycle, Lead Status and Deal Stages have often ignored in the implementation process. 

 

Kudos.!

StPatrick
Contributor

AMA - Demystifying HubSpot's lifecyle stages, deal stages and lead status

@franksteiner79  this is GOLD. Thank you!

hhawk
Contributor

AMA - Demystifying HubSpot's lifecyle stages, deal stages and lead status

Thanks @franksteiner79 

My focus is solving for marketing -- I was wondering if you had an answer to my original question, "When we generate a lead that turns out to be an existing customer, I'm temped to mark them as a customer but worried that might mess-up the reports and analtyics."

While there are benefits to full-funnel full customer lifecycle messaging and communications with further integrations and/or adopting more Hubspot functions. The central issue remains:

When a lead from marketing turns out to be a customer:

  • Should I be worried about marking them as such? 
franksteiner79
Key Advisor

AMA - Demystifying HubSpot's lifecyle stages, deal stages and lead status

Hi @hhawk 

 

I assume this is to show marketing impact, i.e. how much interest are we generating from campaign X, how many downloads / signups / etc. are we getting; correct?

 

Even though you say your focus is on marketing, it seems to me that some work on sales/marketing alignment, tech stack and data quality is needed. But ignoring that for a second, my key advise would be:

 

  1. LC stage is one of many markers/data points and I wouldn't focus too much on it, especially when multiple systems are at work and aren't integrated in real-time.
  2. LC stage It should reflect the reality, so if a contact is an existing customer in another system it should be marked as such. The question then becomes how can we ensure that information flows as closely to real-time as possible between various systems.
  3. In order to report properly, and considering your setup, I'd move away from reporting on LC stage but rather consider campaign reporting, form submissions reporting at form or portal level, or look into custom reports, i.e. monthly/quartely report of selected forms and their submissions.

To your question - Should I be worried about marking them as such? 

I don't think so, but your current systems setup means that standard LC reports just won't work, which is why I'd look into alternative reporting options mentioned in point 3.

 
 
Frank
Found my comment helpful? Great! Please mark it as a solution to help other community users.


Frank Steiner

Marketeer | HubSpot Expert | CRM Consultant

InboundPro

Let's Talk About Your Project
SCustomers
Member

AMA - Demystifying HubSpot's lifecyle stages, deal stages and lead status

Hi @franksteiner79  Thank you this is very useful. I understand this approch is comletely for Potential Cutomers. But what happens to LC and LS, if a Customer (Lifecycle Stage = Customer) comes to our page again some months after the first deal was closed, showing interest and/or requesting a quote for a different product or product line which is not related to the first deal? 

franksteiner79
Key Advisor

AMA - Demystifying HubSpot's lifecyle stages, deal stages and lead status

Hi @SCustomers 

 

I answered a similar question earlier.

 

For me LC shouldn't change. I've bough a few months ago, so I'm still a customer.

Once my first deal closed, LS should either be cleared or set to a value that indicates as much "became a customer" or "deal won".

 

If I then take any high-intent action in the future that could trigger a number of things:

Hope that helps.

 

Frank

Found my comment helpful? Great! Please mark it as a solution to help other community users.


Frank Steiner

Marketeer | HubSpot Expert | CRM Consultant

InboundPro

Let's Talk About Your Project
RHandler
Participant

AMA - Demystifying HubSpot's lifecyle stages, deal stages and lead status

Frank, the LC (Lifecycle Stage) and LS (Leadstatus) properties exist under both Company and Contact.  

 

(Meaning there's: LC Company, LS Company, LC Contact and LS Contact)

 

Where do you suggest we track LC and LS?  Under Company or Contact? Or some combination?

My understanding is that if we're B2B (which we are) then we should track it at the Company level, and if we're B2C at the Contact level.

Can you provide guidance?

 

Thanks for a well thought out post!  Very timely!

Rich



franksteiner79
Key Advisor

AMA - Demystifying HubSpot's lifecyle stages, deal stages and lead status

Morning @RHandler 

 

Good question. I would always "work up" from contact to company for the LC properties.

 

Even in a B2B context, you would initially have some sort of interaction with a contact at a company.

As long as you have a good process in place to ensure contacts always get associated with companies, you can then copy the contact values into the company properties. So the focus and work is done at contact level and we then use automation to keep the company LC property up to date.

 

Although we have a LS property at company level, personally I think it makes more sense to just "maintain" that one at contact level as we normally deal with contacts within companies.

 

How does that sound?

 

Cheers

Frank

 

 

Found my comment helpful? Great! Please mark it as a solution to help other community users.


Frank Steiner

Marketeer | HubSpot Expert | CRM Consultant

InboundPro

Let's Talk About Your Project
RHandler
Participant

AMA - Demystifying HubSpot's lifecyle stages, deal stages and lead status

Frank, can you point me to a "how-to" for using "automation to keep the company LC property up to date" as you mentioned? 
If you're referring to a Workflow, can you point me to an example (like, inside a video, article, or image)?  

Thanks so much for your super clear reply, Rich

franksteiner79
Key Advisor

AMA - Demystifying HubSpot's lifecyle stages, deal stages and lead status

Hi @RHandler 

 

There isn't a "how to" guide for this, but I've put an example Workflow together for you and will explain why I chose that approach and some key considerations based on HubSpot's features and settings.

 

Here is the workflow:

 

Workflow: Contact -> Company Lifecycle Stage SyncWorkflow: Contact -> Company Lifecycle Stage Sync

 

Key Considerations

1. Deal Settings

I would always use the option to "sync lifecycle stages" in the deal settings. This means when a deal is created, HubSpot will change the lifecycle stage of associated contacts and companies to Opportunity. When a deal is won, this changes the lifecycle stage of associated contacts and companies to Customer.

 

Deal Settings HubSpot: Sync Lifecycle StagesDeal Settings HubSpot: Sync Lifecycle Stages

 

 

I'd like to stress the importance of consistently and correctly associating contacts and companies on deals. Too often I see either companies or contacts missing on deals, or a number of contacts missing, especially on complex B2B deals. 

 

2. HubSpot's handling of LC stages

An important rule in HubSpot is that the tool will not set a LC backwards. The only way to do this is to clear an objects LC stage and then copy in another value. This is good for us as it means we can ignore the case of a company having an LC of "Opportunity" and us trying to copy the "MQL" LC stage of a contact into the company.

 

Error message: HubSpot not setting LC stage backwardsError message: HubSpot not setting LC stage backwards

 

3. Workflow enrolment - "is known"

Hubspot WF enrolment triggerHubspot WF enrolment triggerOur contact workflow enrollment triggers are:

 

  1. The contact has an associated company AND
  2. The contacts LC is known AND
  3. The associated company (ignore the primary here, my test portal already has access to the flexible associations feature) doesn't have an LC of Opportunity or above as that will be covered by the deal settings in point 1

The "is known" trigger has an often overlooked benefit as it also triggers when a value changes, which in combination with re-enrollment this essentially allows us to monitor and react to changes in values.

 

4. Workflow action - set property value

I then work my way down from SQL to Subscriber, checking which LC stage a contact has and then setting the corresponding LC stage for the company. 

 

I did some quick tests and this works as intended. I'd also add that this is one way of doing it.

Another approach would be to "listen out" for specific LC stages at contact level have a WF for each and the trigger the "set property value" action.

 

Hope that helps.

Frank

Found my comment helpful? Great! Please mark it as a solution to help other community users.


Frank Steiner

Marketeer | HubSpot Expert | CRM Consultant

InboundPro

Let's Talk About Your Project
hhawk
Contributor

AMA - Demystifying HubSpot's lifecyle stages, deal stages and lead status

Thanks @franksteiner79,

Our sales team works out of Close and our CS team out of FreshSales... we are not currently sync'ing in any meaningful way.

Campaign(s)
Example: A paid or organic search motion that existing customer completes a form fill. At that point we will check to see if they are an existing customer; if they are my desire is to set Lifecyle to Customer, and Lead Status to sign-up. 

  • Esp. w/ Paid efforts setting LC to Customer can have sevearl knock-on impacts
    • Generating conversion events via HubSpot's Event beta
    • Attributing a customer to the campaign


Our only sync'ing

Any close contact w/ an Email is added to HubSpot. Close Contacts who reach Opp. stage the deal size get's pushed to HubSpot. We do track Opp & Closed won deals from Inbound leads -- but not from Upsells or Winbacks.

Why?
Esp. with FreshSales, bringing over additional contacts isn't an expense we are looking to add, plus the complexity of it. 

franksteiner79
Key Advisor

AMA - Demystifying HubSpot's lifecyle stages, deal stages and lead status

Thanks for the additional context @hhawk!

 

What's the thinking/reasoning behind having Close, FreshSales & HubSpot for different teams?

I admit I know very little about the feature set and functionality of the other two tools but would expect HubSpot to be a match on most features.  I work with a number of customer who combine Inbound and Outbound approaches with the HubSpot Marketing and Sales Hubs and use the HubSpot CRM as their source of truth when it comes to customer data.

 

You mentioned "bringing over additional contacts from FreshSales" is an additional expense. How come? Is that an expense on the FreshSales side? We do seem to have an integration . I've not used it but it looks like getting the two systems integrated is possible and would allow you to sync contacts and companies.

 

Cheers

Frank

Found my comment helpful? Great! Please mark it as a solution to help other community users.


Frank Steiner

Marketeer | HubSpot Expert | CRM Consultant

InboundPro

Let's Talk About Your Project
hhawk
Contributor

AMA - Demystifying HubSpot's lifecyle stages, deal stages and lead status

Frank,

When we generate a lead that turns out to be an existing customer, I'm temped to mark them as a customer but worried that might mess-up the reports and analtyics. 

Background:
I'm generating net new leads and tracking results in HS.

Existing customers are tracked in a different CRM but often we find we get a form fill from a current customer (which would become in upsell lead); something we don't track in HS.



franksteiner79
Key Advisor

AMA - Demystifying HubSpot's lifecyle stages, deal stages and lead status

Hi @hhawk 

 

Can you tell me a bit more about what other CRM you are using. If it's integrated with HubSpot. If so, how. If not, why not. And maybe an example of a campaign where are an existing customer becomes an upsell lead.

 

Thanks

Frank

Found my comment helpful? Great! Please mark it as a solution to help other community users.


Frank Steiner

Marketeer | HubSpot Expert | CRM Consultant

InboundPro

Let's Talk About Your Project
Hesham
Participant

AMA - Demystifying HubSpot's lifecyle stages, deal stages and lead status

Thanks 🙏 I really appreciate it