HubSpot Lifecycle Stages

HubSpot lifecycle stages help keep your customer relationship management (CRM) database properly segmented, so you can confidently send the right emails to the right person. 

In this blog post, you’ll learn why the HubSpot lifecycle stage contact property plays such an important role in healthy customer relationship management, how to use the lifecycle stage to protect the customer experience (CX), and what lifecycle stage contact properties look like.

Have you ever worried you’ll accidentally offend a customer by sending a prospect-related email?

Has someone from your company ever accidentally sent customer-only insider information to prospects?

If so, HubSpot lifecycle stages can help. 

And if your sales, marketing, and customer success teams ever make the mistake of simultaneously emailing the same contacts, burning goodwill, and making your company look somewhere between overzealous and incompetent, you need lifecycle stages.

HubSpot defines the lifecycle stage as a “...property (that) enables your team to determine where a specific contact is in your processes and better understand how leads are handed off between marketing and sales.”

Since it can sometimes be confusing, let’s clarify that the lifecycle stage differs from the buyer’s journey stage.

The buyer's journey is the active research process that a person goes through between when that person identifies a problem to solve, a goal to achieve, or a question to answer -– and when that person makes a purchase decision.

The buyer's journey consists of three stages: awareness, consideration, and decision.

The buyer’s journey tends to be customer-centric. The three stages of the buyer’s journey address how your ideal customers navigate their journey with your company.

The lifecycle stage, on the other hand, is all about how your company classifies a particular contact -- based on the nature of their relationship with your company.

Most customer relationship management (CRM) systems categorize individual contacts as one of several lifecycle stages.

The lifecycle stage includes eight possible stages or contact properties:

1. Subscriber
2. Lead
3. Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
4. Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
5. Opportunity
6. Customer
7. Evangelist
8. Other

With most tech startups, the marketing team owns contacts in the subscriber and lead lifecycle stages.

The sales team owns contacts in the marketing qualified lead (MQL), sales qualified lead (SQL), and opportunity stages.

And the customer success team owns contacts in the customer and evangelist stages.

From a practical standpoint, what does this mean?

When the marketing team promotes an upcoming webinar for prospects, those emails should only go to contacts with a subscriber or lead lifecycle stage.

The sales team should only communicate with contacts in the marketing qualified lead (MQL), sales qualified lead (SQL), and opportunity stages.

And the customer success team should only communicate with contacts in the customer or evangelist lifecycle stage.

And if you’re serious about HubSpot Lifecycle Stages...

Learn more when you enroll now in our free 7-day eCourse: Go-to-Market Strategy 101 for B2B SaaS Startups and Scaleups.