HubSpot Lifecycle Stages: Why Are They Necessary?
September 10, 2022
Lifecycle Stages play a vital role in organizing your processes when engaging with your HubSpot contacts across multiple departments. They help users create a fluid flow of prospects, contacts, customers, and leads as they interact with an organization. HubSpot Lifecycle Stages allow you to reach the right people at the right time through the CRM platform.
Before diving deeper into the different stages, let us understand what HubSpot Lifecycle Stages are.
What Are HubSpot Lifecycle Stages?
HubSpot Lifecycle Stages are the different fields in HubSpot correlating to the different phases of your customer's journey. From the moment a prospect is approached until they turn into a customer, the Lifecycle Stages cover the entire journey of a contact within your HubSpot database.
These fields are crucial inbound marketing elements, allowing businesses to convert cold prospects into loyal customers. Each of these Lifecycle Stages is attached to every HubSpot contact from the point they are captured until they end their association with the organization.
Throughout this journey, a contact passes through eight distinct stages. The treatment and approach in each stage are unique and in sync with the objectives of your business. Your team's intention should be to encourage a prospect to engage with your company and turn into a customer by moving across different HubSpot Lifecycle Stages.
In HubSpot, you cannot add or remove values from these fields. You also cannot change the names of these Lifecycle Stages. This static nature of these fields facilitates seamless analytics and reporting in HubSpot. How your team deals with your contacts during each stage determine how well you can convert your prospects into customers.
The 8 HubSpot Lifecycle Stages
Now that we know what HubSpot Lifecycle Stages are let us understand the eight stages involved and how to use them.
Subscriber
A subscriber is a contact who has given you their email address. This is the stage where you can communicate with your contact through personalized emails. You may obtain subscribers' email addresses through a lead form, blog subscription, website form, marketing link, or direct interaction.
This is the HubSpot Lifecycle Stage, where the contacts are interested in knowing more about your business and have given you their consent to approach them with your promotional messages. However, you still haven’t received their commitment, and the need to encourage them remains.
This Lifecycle Stage can be compared to window shoppers who are interested in your offerings but are still unsure if they should go ahead and make the purchase.
Lead
A lead is a contact who has gone beyond giving you their email address while interacting with your business. Once you approach a suitable contact, HubSpot would automatically group it as a lead from your email contacts, lead forms, or external CRM platforms. You can also manually add leads to your database after interacting with people at seminars, webinars, trade shows, and other events.
This is the Lifecycle Stage where an individual has shown interest in buying your offerings, but the response is lukewarm. Leads can be nurtured to encourage contacts to engage with your business. If you promise them a timely resolution, you can qualify these leads and bring them closer to becoming customers.
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a lead that has moved on to the consideration stage of its journey. Here, the contact has performed an activity that clearly shows their interest in making a purchase, such as requesting a quote, adding items to the cart, requesting a call-back, and more.
While managing your leads in HubSpot, it is essential to clearly define the actions one needs to perform to be moved to the MQL stage. This is often the stage after which a lead is transferred to the sales department to be nurtured and converted into a customer.
Moreover, it is crucial to understand that this field is not applied automatically by HubSpot. Your marketing professionals need to identify the leads that can be qualified and promote them in the HubSpot Lifecycle Stages.
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
This is an MQL lead nurtured by your sales department and is considered fit to be a potential customer. A sales-qualified lead (SQL) needs to meet specific pre-defined criteria to get qualified and move closer to becoming a customer.
HubSpot provides sales reps with the function of Lead Status Sub-Stages in this Lifecycle Stage. This allows your sales reps to track a contact's progress along the sales funnel, providing the team with accurate and valuable information.
Opportunity
This is the HubSpot Lifecycle Stage, where contact has entered the “real” sales conversation. At this stage, your sales reps actively interact with the contact and know their budget, motivation, needs, and preferences. Again, this brings your prospects closer to becoming customers if your sales team nurtures them well.
Customer
A customer is anyone who has closed at least one deal with your business. These contacts have engaged with your company and purchased your offerings. HubSpot allows you to sync or update these contacts manually based on the criteria they meet.
Evangelist
This is the HubSpot Lifecycle Stage that often varies across different businesses. HubSpot regards an evangelist as someone who has actively advocated for your business.
This can have different meanings for different businesses. It can imply that the concerned individual has referred your business to someone they know, talked about it on social media, or made active efforts to promote it on any media platform. An evangelist is someone who spreads the word about your business and encourages others to engage with the same.
Many businesses also consider happy customers giving positive feedback and talking about their experiences on media platforms as evangelists.
Other
This stage was created for contacts that do not fit any of the HubSpot Lifecycle Stages discussed above. As these contacts do not meet any specific criteria, it is essential to create a second custom field next to them for designating what kind of contacts they are.
Contacts added to this field can be vendors, influencers, staff, media contacts, competitors, suppliers, or anyone who does not follow the conventional journey from being a prospect to converting into a customer.
As trivial as this may seem, it can reach out to a subset of your contacts. Putting them into the Other category is advisable if you are unsure which HubSpot Lifecycle Stage you belong to; this allows you to keep these contacts in your database, which may provide you with profitable opportunities.
The Final Word
These were the major HubSpot Lifecycle Stages and why there needed along the journey taken by your contacts. These stages allow you to be there with your prospects every step of the way and close deals with efficiency.
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