How One Broken Setting in HubSpot Could Be Costing You Millions

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Hey there — Dan from Merge your Data here, and I’ve got to be real with you: I’m fired up. Not because of some big scandal, but because I keep seeing the same mistake over and over again in HubSpot accounts — and it's silently draining companies of millions in revenue potential.

If you're a SaaS company or any business growing between $2M and $30M, this might be the most expensive oversight in your entire tech stack.

Let’s dive in.

The HubSpot Mistake That’s Costing You Revenue

We recently jumped into a client’s HubSpot account and immediately noticed something off: Lifecycle stages were a mess.

"Big deal?" you might think. "It's just a lifecycle stage setting."

Nope. It's everything.

HubSpot is designed around lifecycle stages — they are the backbone of your automation, your lead nurturing, and ultimately, your customer conversion. If you're not using them correctly, you're basically tying weights to your ankles while trying to sprint.

Here’s What We Found:

• Over 3.15 million contacts were sitting in a single lifecycle stage.
• A few were scattered elsewhere.
• Some didn’t have a lifecycle stage at all.
• None were set up in a way that allowed automated marketing flows or targeted outreach to work properly.

Translation? They were flying blind.

Why Lifecycle Stages Matter (A Lot)

Lifecycle stages represent the furthest point in the customer journey that a contact has reached. HubSpot uses this field to decide what messages to send, when to send them, and how to trigger sales or marketing workflows.

If everyone is sitting in the same lifecycle stage — say, "Lead" — you can’t tell who’s a prospect, who’s a customer, or who needs to be nurtured. That means…

• No nurture emails
• No conversion campaigns
• No upsell or retention automations

So basically, you’re collecting leads and… doing nothing with them.

Let’s Talk Numbers (They’ll Hurt)

This was a SaaS company. High volume, lots of inbound.

From what we saw, there were over 300,000 non-customer contacts added in just 3 months.

Now, let’s play out a super conservative scenario:

• Convert just 1% of those contacts
• At $20/month subscription = $60,000 in new monthly recurring revenue (MRR)
• That’s $720,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR) — from just three months of missed opportunity.

And this issue? It had been going on for over a year.

We're talking over $5 million in ARR potentially lost — just from lifecycle stages not being set up correctly.

Growth Masking the Problem

Here’s the wild part: the company is growing. Numbers are going up. Leads are coming in. Everything looks good on the surface.

But it’s not.

This type of error hides in plain sight because you don’t know what you don’t know. And when things are "working," nobody wants to go poking around in the CRM to find problems.

The result? You miss out on the explosive, exponential growth you could be tapping into — and settle for nice, safe, linear growth instead.

Our Fix: Foundations

This is exactly why Phase One of our client onboarding is called Foundations.

We:

• Audit and fix your lifecycle stages
• Define and align them with your actual customer journey
• Build automation around them
• Involve your team so it’s tailored to how you work

This sets the stage for Phase Two — where we launch the revenue plays that guarantee measurable growth. We’re talking 15%+ in just six months, often much more.

TL;DR: Lifecycle Stages Can Make or Break You

This might not sound sexy — no AI, no revolutionary ad campaign. Just fixing your CRM.

But that fix? It could mean doubling your revenue with what you already have.

If you’ve got a growing contact list and you’re not sure if your lifecycle stages are set up right, you’re probably leaving money on the table.

Want us to take a look?

Book a call — it’s the fastest way to find out if you’re sitting on untapped revenue hiding in your CRM.

You don’t need more leads. You need to make the most of the ones you already have.

Let’s make your CRM work for you — not against you.

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