How to Use HubSpot Lifecycle Stages: A Step-by-Step Guide

While it may sound like a term you’d hear in a biology research paper, Lifecycle stages are key for any business that wants to properly segment its CRM and streamline operations between your marketing, sales, and service departments. 

The typical sales process sometimes takes 55 days or more for certain industries, so understanding where a contact is in your customer journey funnel is key to ensuring that all departments within your company are working with consistent information so that all communications can be tailored accordingly.  Whether you're new to HubSpot or are looking to maximize your CRM’s potential, this guide will help you better understand and effectively use lifecycle stages within your organization.

Step 1: Understanding HubSpot lifecycle stages 

When starting to think about customer lifecycle stages and how they align with your current processes, it's important to understand the default stages available within HubSpot. Here’s a quick breakdown:

1. Subscriber: Someone who has shown interest in your content (think blog subscribers).
2. Lead: A contact who has shown interest in your product or services. This is typically the default stage in which a user is entered into HubSpot.
3. Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): A lead that your marketing team considers ready for the sales team.
4. Sales Qualified Lead (SQL): A lead vetted by sales, ready for the next stage of the sales process.
5. Opportunity: A contact that has shown serious buying intent. A deal record is typically created at this stage of the buyer’s journey funnel.
6. Customer: Someone who is associated with a closed won deal record.
7. Evangelist: A happy customer who promotes your brand. 
8. Other: Contacts who don’t fit neatly into the other categories.

While these stages will not work for every business, these stages can help you segment your contact and company records when getting started with Hubspot based on where they are in their journey with your business. HubSpot lifecycle stages can also be customized to better fit your business so don’t feel like you need to fit your processes to fit these definitions.

Step 2: Mapping your customer journey

Before customizing your lifecycle stages to better fit your business, it’s a useful exercise to map out the customer journey. Without a full understanding of the journey someone goes through from lead to customer, there may be gaps in your process when you are building out your lifecycle stages. Each stage should correspond to a specific point in your buyer’s journey funnel. This helps you visualize where your contacts are and what actions you need to take to move them to the next stage of the customer journey funnel.

Marketing & Sales: Alignment is Key

Misalignment between marketing and sales is a very common root cause of messy CRM data. This is why it is so important for marketing and sales teams to align when building out HubSpot lifecycle stages. For proper alignment, stakeholders from both marketing and sales need to be aligned on a unified vision of the customer journey funnel and each of the actions that must occur. 

Define Stages & Process

Proper alignment between teams can be difficult when marketing and sales are not using consistent definitions and terminology. This can be a common problem when marketing and sales are using different platforms (For example: Marketing uses Hubspot and Sales uses Salesforce). Create documentation that clearly defines each lifecycle and deal stage. Clearly define entry and exit criteria for each stage and document a handoff process between marketing and sales to improve synergy.

Identify Touchpoints & Triggers

Both teams should have visibility into the specific actions that go into moving a lead through the customer journey funnel. This will help define what customer lifecycle stages and automation should be built out in HubSpot.

1. Identify Touchpoints: Where potential customers interact with your business and who is responsible for those interactions. Is it through your website, social media, email campaigns, in-person events, or direct outreach?
2. Define Triggers: What actions should push a contact from one stage to the next? For example, downloading an eBook might move someone from Subscriber to Lead, while a demo request might advance them to an SQL.
3. Set Goals: What do you want to achieve at each stage? Your goal might be to educate Subscribers, nurture Leads, and close Opportunities.

Step 3: Customizing lifecycle stages for your business 

HubSpot provides default lifecycle stages, but don’t be afraid to customize them to better fit your business model. Maybe you want to add a "Trial User" stage for those who sign up for a free trial, or perhaps "Churned Customer" for those who’ve left but might be won back.

1. Review Your Buyers Journey: Make sure the stages align with how your sales and marketing teams actually work. 
2. Add Custom Stages: If you have specific steps that aren’t covered by the default stages, create your own. For example, if you have a long sales cycle, you might want to add an extra stage for SAL (Sales Accepted Lead) before SQL and Opportunity.
3. Reorder Stages Accordingly: Whenever new stages are added, be sure to reorder them within HubSpot. Lifecycle the stages act as a funnel, so if you add a second stage custom value to the end of the stages, it acts as the bottom.
4. Assign Clear Criteria: Ensure each custom stage has clear, actionable criteria so everyone on your team knows when a contact should move from one stage to another.

Step 4: Automating stage progression

Once your lifecycle stages are set up, it’s time to automate the process of moving contacts from one stage to the next. This saves time and ensures data consistency across your marketing and sales efforts. 

1. Build Automation: Building HubSpot workflows for automating lifecycle stage progression helps to eliminate human error from your processes. For instance, when a contact fills out a form for a demo, a workflow can automatically move them from Lead to SQL without your admin needing to manually update their stage.
2. Use Lead Scoring: HubSpot’s lead scoring tool can help you determine when a contact is ready to move to the next stage. Lead score properties can be set up for both best-fit criteria using demographic/firmographic information or based on engagement actions like SDR email opens, website visits, or form submissions. Using a combination of lead scoring properties on both the contact and company object can help automate the process of moving from Lead to MQL and MQL to SQL.
3. Skipped Stages: When a contact skips a lifecycle stage, it can sometimes cause inconsistencies in your reporting. Putting a process in place for how your organization will deal with skipped lifecycle stages will help fill in these gaps. We typically recommend using automation to kick users back through the lifecycle stages that were skipped to address these scenarios.
4. Inherited Stages: Pay attention to how company lifecycle stages should be inherited by contact records from their associated company records. Based on how you interact with different types of contacts within your customer organizations, it may or may not make sense to align lifecycle stages across the entire organization. 

Step 5: Personalizing communication based on stages 

After customer lifecycle stages are set up properly within HubSpot,  this information should be used to tailor any outreach to these contacts based on where they are in the customer journey funnel. Each lifecycle stage should have tailored communication strategies to meet leads where they are and push them toward becoming customers.

1. Create Stage-Specific Content: Develop content tailored to target leads based on different stages of the buyer’s journey to better speak to their unique needs. For example, you may want to write blogs for Awareness-level contacts (Subscriber / Lead), Whitepapers for Consideration-level contacts (MQL / SQL), and Case Studies for Decision-level contacts (Opportunities). 
2. Use Dynamic Content: HubSpot allows you to personalize content in emails and landing pages based on lifecycle stages. Dynamic content helps ensure that each contact receives the most relevant message. Instead of sending more general communications, include different messaging variations for each stage.
3. Leverage Segmentation: Use a combination of lifecycle stages and other properties to further segment your contacts into targeted lists. Use properties such as Lead Status, Industry, and other relevant information to send more relevant emails, create specific ad audiences, and tailor your sales outreach.
4. Recycling Lifecycle Stages: Consider how your team will deal with churned customers and how this will affect their lifecycle stages. While recycling lifecycle stages for potential re-engagement is possible, it comes with some pros and cons. If you recycle stages, you lose the ability to segment based on whether a customer has churned unless you build additional criteria into the process (Lifecycle Stage = Customer + Customer Status = Churned + Lead Status = Recycle). Setting lifecycle stages back for churned customers can also cause inconsistencies in your reporting.

Step 6: Analyzing and optimizing your lifecycle stages

After setting up HubSpot lifecycle stages, building the necessary automation, and crafting your content strategy, the final step is to monitor how your contacts are progressing through the stages and adjust according to any needed changes. Regular analysis helps spot bottlenecks, optimize your process, and ensure you’re moving contacts through the funnel efficiently and accurately. 

1. Use HubSpot Reports: Leverage HubSpot’s reporting tools to track how contacts move through each stage. Look for patterns—are too many contacts getting stuck at the Lead stage? Are your MQLs converting to SQLs as expected? What is your average time from Lead to Customer?
2. Refine Your Strategies: Based on historical data, refine your automation, lead scoring, and messaging. Maybe your content for Leads isn’t engaging enough, or perhaps your criteria for moving contacts to SQL is too strict.
3. Regularly Update Stages: As your business evolves, so should your lifecycle stages. Don’t be afraid to make changes or add new stages as needed. Automation doesn’t mean “set it and forget it.” Regularly review your stages, workflows, and lead scores to ensure they’re still aligned with your current processes. Be sure to hold meetings between key stakeholders from your marketing and sales teams to review reporting and the accuracy of your lifecycle stages.

Case Study: Lifecycle stages for SaaS video platform 

The team at Process Pro Consulting recently worked with a SaaS company specializing in personalized video outreach to set up their customer lifecycle and lead scoring process within HubSpot. 

Process Pro’s setup included an MQL score that determined the movement between Lead to MQL as well as an engagement score that moved the contact from MQL to SQL. We made use of a binary ‘Handraiser’ property that was automatically triggered whenever the contact would submit a demo or contact sales form. Whenever this property was toggled to ‘Yes’, the contact would have 50 points added to their MQL score which would move them to the MQL lifecycle stage. Along with the automation setup to move lifecycle stages, we also built out a process for addressing skipped lifecycle stages and lead routing based on the form submitted.

After building out this process, the client was able to streamline their internal operations and maintain quality data within their CRM. 

Conclusion: The power of lifecycle stages in HubSpot

Lifecycle stages are more than just labels in your CRM—they’re a powerful tool for managing and nurturing contacts. While HubSpot includes a strong default framework for lifecycle stages, customizing them to fit your real-world customer journey funnel will only improve the operations between your marketing and sales teams. By understanding each stage, customizing it to fit your business, automating stage progression, personalizing communication, and continuously refining your process, you’ll create a cohesive journey for your contacts that will lead to quality CRM data and increased revenue.