You Must Use Lifecycle Stages with Lead Status in HubSpot. No Questions.

A lot of clients we've worked with have had incorrect setups for Lifecycle Stages in HubSpot, and this has a huge impact on data for reporting.

Lifecycle Stages CANNOT move backwards in HubSpot. You can clear the property and set it "backwards" but if you just try to set it backwards with a "Set Property Value" action it will fail.

There are tons of downstream impacts we've seen. Common one is that becoming a customer unenrolls contacts from certain marketing and sales workflows. Another common one is sending out onboarding messages + assigning onboarding tasks internally.

You can imagine the problems this causes at scale when it turns out 5% of your customers were marked as "Disqualified" in a custom Lifecycle Stage, but become a customer a year later. And then they fall through the cracks and get annoying marketing outreach.

And your reporting is messed up because your customer count is off. And your channel attribution has less credit than expected. And you miss them when sending blast messages to existing customers.

Short Explanation of Why You MUST Use Lifecycle Stages with Lead Status in HubSpot

Lifecycle Stages are the furthest someone has traveled on the LINEAR customer journey. Lead Statuses are non-linear steps that happen at the same time a contact is moving linearly through the customer journey.

Example

A prospect comes in and they are set to this in HubSpot:

• Lifecycle Stage = Subscriber
• Lead Status = New

Then they are disqualified based on a form fill:

• Lifecycle Stage = Lead (They filled out a form)
• Lead Status = Unqualified

Example of How A Lot of Companies Incorrectly Do It

A prospect comes in and they are set to this in HubSpot:

• Lifecycle Stage = Subscriber
• Lead Status = New

Then they are disqualified based on a form fill:

• Lifecycle Stage = Disqualified
• Lead Status = Unqualified or is kept in "New"

Don't Set Up Lifecycle Stages Like This

1. Subscriber
2. Lead
3. MQL
4. SQL
5. Opportunity
6. Customer
7. Other
8. Disqualified
9. Ghosted
10. No-Show

8 through 10 should be Lead Statuses, not Lifecycle Stages. A contact can be categorized as that and later move through other Lifecycle Stages.

Book a call to learn how our technical HubSpot strategy can help you avoid pitfalls like this (where you're missing out on big chunks of revenue and revenue opportunity).