How to Make the Most of HubSpot Lifecycle Stages

HubSpot’s lifecycle stages are a set of detailed stages that a potential customer moves through as they move along your marketing and sales process. Even though the lifecycle stages are building blocks of HubSpot, they are among the most underused, underappreciated, and underestimated tools in the HubSpot arsenal.

Utilizing every bit of HubSpot’s lifecycle stages is important to strengthen and scale your business’ marketing and sales efforts. Is your business taking complete advantage of these lifecycle stages? If not, we are here to quickly walk you through the basics and how you can get the most out of it for growing your business exponentially.

Lifecycle stages are labels to where a prospect is in your sales and marketing pipeline. With an efficient understanding of the lifecycle stages in HubSpot, you can easily:

• Organize and segment your contacts 
• Nurture leads
• Convert more prospects into long-term customers 

An effective and reliable framework helps you communicate with your prospects—how to meet them where they are.

Even the most experienced HubSpotters can feel overwhelmed at times with the extensive list of features and tools. So we are here to help you better understand the lifecycle stages as one of the most powerful tools of HubSpot. 

What Are HubSpot Lifecycle Stages and Why You Should Use Them?

The lifecycle stages within HubSpot are properties that the contacts in your database are automatically tagged to, depending on the way they were acquired. These act as markers between your contact’s relationship with your business and their journey through your entire sales funnel.

HubSpot has 7 lifecycle stages that indicate the types of behaviors that a contact demonstrates at each stage:

1. Subscribers are people who are aware of your company and have signed up for your content offers, newsletters, and other services.
2. Leads are contacts who have shown meaningful sales interest beyond signing up for content material.
3. MQLs are contacts who have interacted with your marketing campaign in a specific, measurable way(s).
4. SQLs are contacts who have indicated that they are willing to be contacted by your sales team. SQLs are in the funnel's consideration stage.

                                             

5. Opportunities are contacts that have been assessed and determined to be actual potential leads based on your lead rating criteria.
6. Customers are people who have done business with you and have closed a contract.
7. Evangelists are customers who are also raving lovers of your brand.

As many as 96% of visitors who come to your website are not ready to buy. Instead of focusing on closing them too soon, you can leverage lifecycle stages to pinpoint accurately where they are in your funnel and target them with relevant content. 

Your contacts' needs will vary depending on where they are in the lifecycle. You need to provide them with relevant offers  to convert these leads into paying clients. Your potential customer will be turned off if you share bottom-of-the-funnel content too soon. On the other hand, mentioning your paying clients in an email designed to close the sale might be just as irritating.

When your company's marketing is built on HubSpot's inbound methodology, lifecycle stages are quite essential. A one-size-fits-all approach is not ideal with this technique, which helps you close consumers utilizing appropriate and non-promotional information.

Lifecycle Stages Vs Lead Status: What’s the Difference?

While lifecycle stages and lead statuses may look alike, they are vividly different. Lifecycle stages are the overall sum of steps a contact makes, from the first time they visit your website, until they get converted into customers.

But when a contact is in the sales qualified lead (SQL) lifecycle stage, lead status is closely related to particular actions your sales team is performing. HubSpot offers preset settings, but depending on your sales process, you may want to tweak them more. 

Lifecycle phases follow a contact's progress starting from the time they enter into your CRM, whereas lead status follows an SQL's journey from the time they are acquired until closed. Lead status is thus, in a sense, just a small part of the lifecycle stage ecosystem.

How Are HubSpot Lead Statuses Used?

Default lead status categories in HubSpot include:

• New
• Open
• In Progress
• Open Deal
• Unqualified
• Attempted to Contact
• Connected
• Bad Timing

Unlike lifecycle stages, you can customize lead statuses accordingly to fit the exact needs of your business.

Once you have labeled each contact with the correct lead status, you are ready to see how you can use the data provided by you to your lead statuses. Some of them include:

1. Deal Stages

Set workflows that will tie your deal statuses and deal stages together. These workflows could ensure that every time a contact moves in the lead, they are assigned the correct lead status. This is useful as your sales team only has to keep the deals organized instead of having to constantly update contact properties.

2. Segment Lists 

You might want to send different types of emails to different groups of people depending on their lead status. To encourage contacts marked as open prospects to move further in the sales process, you may send them an exclusive content offer. You can help the lost contacts to reconnect with your organization by sending them alternative emails or offers.

3. Other Campaigns

You can build other campaigns around each lead status. Create campaigns that start when a contact is assigned to a customer lead status. Once they become your customer, you will need to wait for a few days before you can send out a campaign asking for reviews and referrals from your happy customers. 

Conclusion

A lot of HubSpot CRM capabilities— reporting, attribution, marketing, and sales automation— revolve around the customer lifecycle stages. You should work with HubSpot lifecycle stages to maximize your business’ capacity. 

If all of these HubSpot lifecycle stages seem confusing, you are not alone. Learning all of the parts of HubSpot’s machinery and implementing them in the correct way can be difficult. Growth Natives have got your back! 

We are HubSpot’s Platinum Solutions partner and can help you scale your marketing and sales efforts with unique solutions that deliver tangible results.