HubSpot Tutorial: Automating the customer lifecycle stage

The concept of the lifecycle stage corresponds with the levels of a sales or marketing funnel. It indicates what stage of the customer journey the person is in. 

In HubSpot, the Lifecycle stage is a default property for contacts and companies. It is the recommended way to track the lifecycle stage of your contacts and companies.

The property comes with a set of pre-defined stages:

  • Subscriber
  • Lead
  • MQL (or Marketing Qualified Lead)
  • SQL (Sales Qualified Lead)
  • Opportunity
  • Customer
  • Evangelist

You can use the default stages or customize the lifecycle stages to fit your business model. For instance, at Encharge we use the following stages:

You can add new stages, re-arrange them, or remove un-needed ones.

Every business is different, so how you define these stages depends on your business model, sales process, and the overall agreement you have between sales and marketing. It's important that your whole team agrees on a concern set of stages to use across the organization. 

If you are using HubSpot as your single source of truth is critical that all of your contacts have the right lifecycle stage assigned to them. This will keep your organization in sync and your sales reps informed. They would be able to focus on the right leads (like MQLs, SQLs, PQLs) by creating views and lists with them. This is the SQL view we use at Encharge:

Automating the lifecycle stage

As you can imagine tracking the lifecycle stage of all of your contacts can be an extremely tedious task, especially if you have 100s or 1000s of contacts in your CRM. 

The HubSpot integration of Encharge allows you to automate the lifecycle stage based on which stage in the customer journey the segment is in.

Let's review the stages we use in our business and how we automate each one of them:

  • Lead -  a contact who have signed up for our blog lead magnets.
  • Prospect -  a subscriber who have signed up for our lead magnets AND have visited our homepage AND pricing page.
  • User - a user who signed up for the product
  • PQL (Product Qualified Lead) - a user who signed up for our product and has performed some (if not all) of the important actions in the app as defined by this Encharge flow.
  • SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) - a contact or user who have booked a demo call. Although their Lead status should be marked as Unqualified if they do not fit our customer profile after evaluation and/or demo call.
  • Opportunity - a good fit SQL
  • Customer
  • Evangelist - an advocate for Encharge. Agencies with multiple clients, content creators that produce educational content for Encharge, etc.
  • Other

To automate these stages we have created two flows:

  • HubSpot Lifecycle Stage Setter - a flow built only for the purpose of setting the customer lifecycle stage.
  • HubSpot Deals Automation - a flow that automates our deal processes and sales process. We use this flow to set the SQL stage.

HubSpot Lifecycle Stage Setter

In this flow, we use the Entered Segment trigger step connected to a Change Field action step:

The premise is simple:

We use the advanced segmentation of Encharge to specify when people enter different stages of the journey. Then we change the "HubSpot.Lifecyclestage" field to the appropriate stage. Since we have activated the two-way HubSpot sync, Encharge will automatically sync the lifecycle stage to HubSpot.

Here's what the conditions for some of the segments we built look like:

Leads are people who have downloaded a lead magnet through our lead generation tool (ConvertFlow). As we are connecting ConvertFlow through Segment.com we are using the Event condition "CTA Form Submitted".

Prospects are people who have downloaded a lead magnet but also visited our pricing page and our homepage. These are people that have shown at least some commercial interest in Encharge.

Users are people who have signed up for our software - i.e., people that have performed the "Signed Up" event.

And PQLs (Product Qualified Leads) are users that have performed the Signed Up event, but also performed a number of other events critical to our product like creating a flow, creating an email, and importing contacts. These are people that have engaged more with our product.

Learn more about how to use segment conditions in Encharge to create hyper-targetted groups of people.

Last, we have the Chargebee Subscription Activated trigger, which sets the value of the lifecycle stage to "Customer". 

That's it. Once a person enters a segment their lifecycle stage will be automatically set.

HubSpot Deals Automation

The only lifecycle stage we haven't automated in the flow above is the SQL (Sales Qualified Leads). For us, an SQL is someone that books a meeting.

We have created a separate flow called "HubSpot Deals Automation" that automates the majority of our deals and sales processes. It also sets the lifecycle stage in HubSpot to SQL when someone books a meeting in HubSpot.

With that, we have covered automating the majority of our customer lifecycle stages in our HubSpot CRM. The sales team can focus on reaching out to people, instead of trying to find the right leads to reach out and doing a ton of manual work.

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