Is your marketing team sending the same generic emails to everyone, whether they’re new leads or qualified leads? Constantly updating data manually, not sure if your sales reports really reflect where customers are? These are some classic symptoms of groups that have not adopted life cycle stages.
HubSpot’s lifecycle stages offer a structured way to track a prospect’s journey from their very first interaction with your company to becoming a loyal customer, improving engagement and conversion efforts. This simple feature, which is a drop-down property in contact and company records, gives you more accurate reporting and improves decision-making.
If you’re not taking advantage of HubSpot’s lifecycle stages, you could be wasting a lot of time and effort on ineffective methods, or worse, flying in the dark when it comes to lead management.
Some of the most common mistakes we see fall into these three camps:
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You manage a custom property you created to track your own version of the lifecycle stages
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You’re using the deal line incorrectly, with stages representing things too early in the process that could be better managed than lifecycle stages
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You do nothing to track this information, leaving you with little to no idea how effectively you’re generating and converting qualified leads
Let’s take a look at some of the high-level reasons why you shouldn’t ignore this feature, and then we’ll show you some of the use cases that our customers tend to find most useful.
Looking for the basics? We also wrote an in-depth explanation of it what are the stages of HubSpot’s lifecycle and how they work, including some best practices to get you started. You can also check it out Life Cycle Stages Video Guide from HubSpot Hacks, the YouTube channel produced by Simple Strat.
Why You Should Use HubSpot Lifecycle Stages
You can sort your contacts into the right stages, without a headache
Lifecycle stages offer a simple method of organizing contacts and companies in your CRM based on where they are in the buyer’s journey.
By identifying where each prospect is in their buying journey, you can tailor your communication to meet their exact needs more effectively. That way, you can make sure you’re speaking to them in the right way at the right time so your communications are more effective.
You can better rely on the educational resources provided
A big advantage of using lifecycle stages is that you can get more value from the wide range of training materials available to you, particularly from the HubSpot Academy. These resources make frequent references to lifecycle stages since they are so integral to the HubSpot platform. When you use them correctly, your use of the HubSpot platform will be highly aligned with these training resources, making them much easier to use in the future when onboarding new employees to HubSpot.
You can minimize manual data entry
One of the best things about life cycle stages? They can be almost entirely automated through HubSpot’s settings and workflows. For example, people who sign up can be automatically marked as a lead when they submit the sign-up form, progress to the marketing qualified lead stage when they reach a certain lead score, be marked as an opportunity once a deal is created, etc. etc.
This means less time spent on tedious tasks and more time to focus on growing your business. It’s all about making your life easier and keeping your files on-site with minimal fuss.
You will have improved reporting clarity and accuracy
Using life cycle stages helps you better classify and understand your leads, thereby facilitating how well your marketing and sales strategies are working. It keeps everyone on the same page using the same rules for tracking leads, reducing errors and confusion.
Additionally, HubSpot automatically provides useful data based on how signups are progressing through your lifecycle stages. The platform automatically dates stamps when entries enter a stage and the time they spend at each stage.
All this information allows you to easily create reports that show how many registrations enter the stages in a given time period, how effectively you convert buyers to the next stage (conversion rates), and how quickly you move buyers through the marketing and sales funnel. You can also drill down into this data segmented by campaign, channel, demographics and more.
The best ways to take advantage of HubSpot’s lifecycle stages
Let’s dive into some of the tactical approaches to using HubSpot’s lifecycle stages, allowing you to get the most out of what HubSpot has to offer.
Pro tip: While you can create your own custom lifecycle stages, we generally advise our clients to use the default stages provided by HubSpot as much as possible and limit changes. The stages provided are standard across all industries and company sizes, so using them is useful when recruiting new employees or sharing data with stakeholders such as boards or investors.
Automate lifecycle stage updates for seamless organization
HubSpot offers several automated ways to ensure that your lifecycle stages accurately reflect the progress of your contacts and companies. It allows you to:
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Set a default lifecycle stage on newly created records: Instantly categorize new contacts or companies for improved organization.
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Linking Forms to Lifecycle Stages: Automatically place contacts coming in through specific forms into the appropriate stage.
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Sync with HubSpot’s Leads object (Sales Pro & Enterprise): Seamlessly generate leads at a defined stage or update contact/company lifecycle stages when a new lead is created.
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Sync with HubSpot’s Offers object: Effortlessly update contact or company lifecycle stages related to new or closed deals.
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Leverage workflows for customization (Pro & Enterprise): As with any other property, you have the flexibility to update the lifecycle stages based on custom actions and triggers in your workflows.
Use your lifecycle stages for powerful reporting insights
Track progress with automated timestamps: HubSpot records exact dates of when contacts/businesses enter and exit each lifecycle stage, as well as how long they stay in each stage (Pro & Enterprise).
Get immediate value from built-in reports: Instantly leverage pre-built reports using lifecycle stage data. This is especially beneficial for organizations that are at the entry level of HubSpot and don’t have access to the custom report builder.
Understanding Asset Performance: HubSpot’s “new customers” metric is tied to the “customer” lifecycle stage and allows you to measure success on ads, landing pages, blog posts, and web pages.
Visualize your complete sales funnel: Combine lifecycle stages with lead and deal stages to get a complete picture of your journey. (Sales & Business Professional)
Analyze customer journeys: Lifecycle stage changes can be used in customer journey reports, allowing you to uncover critical insights and optimize customer experiences. (Business Marketing)
Optimize ad campaigns with lifecycle stage conversion tracking
Use lifecycle stages as conversion events in your digital advertising campaigns (Marketing Professional or Enterprise). This allows you to optimize your ad campaigns to increase real conversions, not just clicks.
This powerful feature works with Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and LinkedIn ads (the article linked here looks at Google Ads right now, but this works for all three).
Improve email campaign targeting
Effortlessly segment your contacts using lifecycle stages to distinguish customers from prospects. This allows you to create highly relevant newsletters and email campaigns, boosting engagement and achieving better results.
Increase personalization for emails and more with smart content
Deliver more personalized messages and content using lifecycle stages: display offers, announcements or language tailored to whether contacts are prospects, customers or at other points in their journey. By customizing content and CTAs at each stage, you provide a more relevant and useful experience, helping to improve engagement and conversion rates. This is available for certain sections in emails, blog posts, pages and templates.
Don’t forget to have a clear plan
As with many aspects of HubSpot, if you don’t set this all up without a clear plan, you’ll likely need to hire help later. Getting the lifecycle stages wrong can create a lot of confusion and wasted time. This often leads to missed opportunities, duplicated efforts, and misalignment between marketing and sales efforts.
But lifecycle stages aren’t the only thing that is commonly misunderstood by HubSpot users. If setting up HubSpot seems more complicated than it needs to be (or feels completely broken), you might want to take a look at our “Fix my HubSpot” services. We’ll take care of anything broken and make it easy to keep things clean and efficient, guiding you to use HubSpot with confidence.
