Setting up lifecycle stages in HubSpot is crucial for tracking the journey of leads from initial contact to becoming customers. This blog post, part of my complete HubSpot setup guide, will walk you through the importance of lifecycle stages, how to customize them, and best practices to follow. By the end of this post, you'll have a clear understanding of how to set up and use lifecycle stages effectively.
The HubSpot lifecycle is one of the core native properties provided when you create your HubSpot portal. This property represents the different stages a lead goes through, from being generated to becoming a customer. It serves as a reporting property that allows you to build conversion funnels, helping you to identify the performance of your various processes.
HubSpot offers default lifecycle stages, such as Lead, MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead), SQL (Sales Qualified Lead), and Customer. These stages are generally sufficient for most businesses, but you can customize them to better fit your specific sales process.
Customizing lifecycle stages is crucial for:
One-Way Evolution:
Complete Stage Progression:
HubSpot has recently introduced time tracking for each stage, allowing you to analyze how long leads spend in each stage. This feature can provide deeper insights into your sales processes and help identify bottlenecks.
Accessing Lifecycle Stages:
Review and Customize Stages:
Adding New Stages:
Saving Your Configuration:
While automation typically requires a Professional or Enterprise subscription, HubSpot provides basic automation options even for Starter users. These automations can automatically move leads from one stage to another based on specific triggers, such as form submissions or email engagements.
Basic Automations:
If these automations match your needs, you can enable them; otherwise, you may need to turn them off and use workflows to create more customized automation paths.
Setting up and customizing lifecycle stages in HubSpot is essential for accurately tracking and managing your leads through the sales funnel. By following the rules of one-way evolution and complete stage progression, you can ensure that your reporting is accurate and that your sales processes are well-optimized. Regularly review and adjust your lifecycle stages as your business evolves to maintain accurate and actionable insights.
Stay tuned for more detailed posts in our HubSpot setup guide, where we will explore other key aspects of leveraging HubSpot to its full potential.