According to where they are in your marketing and sales processes, Hubspot Lifecycle Stages will help you categorize your contacts and businesses. Finding out where a specific contact or business is in your processes and getting a better understanding of how leads are passed between marketing and sales are both facilitated by using the Lifecycle stage property.
In this article, we will cover all the necessary tips that will educate you on how to improve your leads and sales performance using HubSpot lifecycle stages.
But before we dig into the process, we need to find out why, what, and finally how to use HubSpot Lifecycle Stages in order for you to improve leads and sales.
Why Use Lifecycle Stage Property in HubSpot?
The main benefit of using HubSpot lifecycle stages is the ability to segment your contact list and tailor your marketing and sales efforts based on contacts' current stage of the sales cycle.
Considering it If you are aware of a contact's stage in the sales process, as well as the blogs and websites they frequent, you can use that knowledge to send them more pertinent content or use it as a signal for a salesperson to get in touch.
For example, you may notice that your middle-of-the-funnel eBooks and gated video demos are producing a lot of leads, but your sales team claims that these contacts are not yet "sales-ready" even though your marketing team has confirmed that these leads are a good fit.
As a result, you create a list to divide your contacts based on the MQL lifecycle stage in order to understand the current state of your contact database. Your current MQL contacts are listed along with their engagements, and you can see that the majority of them have been looking at your other middle-of-the-funnel content assets to learn more.
Create an email campaign specifically for MQLs to promote other middle-of-the-funnel content assets to increase engagement and educate your contacts until they are ready. This will help you nurture these leads until they are ready to speak with a salesperson.
Moreover, every business offers a buyer's journey to its prospective clients. Some are excellent and some are horrible.
Aligning your sales and marketing to where your contact is in their buyer's journey is the most effective way to move a contact through your buyer's journey.
Potential buyers are more receptive to your communications if you speak to them in a way that speaks to their current situation (see the three stages below).
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What Lifecycle Stages Is All About In HubSpot?
HubSpot Lifecycle Stages simply means the stages of the customer life cycle. It basically aids you and your team in understanding where customers who interact with your brand are along the buyer's journey. Let's now look at how HubSpot's lifecycle stage appears.
We have separated the stages into three major categories to help you better understand the HubSpot lifecycle stages:
- Visitors
- Leads
- Customers
Let me just make it clear for you by telling you what comes under these categories.
Visitors
Subscribers- Subscribers are those who are aware of your work activities and are eager to learn more from you.
There is a chance that they will become interested in what you have to offer if you keep offering them relevant, interesting, and appealing content.
Also. The majority of subscribers are likely to never convert to paying customers, making them a sizable pool of contacts. The best way to cultivate these relationships is to offer a steady stream of informative and pertinent content to subscribers of your blog or newsletter.
The main objective at this point is simply to increase subscriber interest in your company's products and services.
Lead
A lead is a contact who visited your website and showed interest in purchasing something other than just subscribing to your content offer.
Is also similar to how subscribers are nurtured, leads should be given access to valuable content that demonstrates the worth of your services. This content can take the form of downloadable white papers, guides, e-books, or how-to videos. Content should be heavily branded early on in the buyer's journey to create a connection in the lead's mind. You need to establish your business as the go-to option in your audience's minds at this point.
Three additional categories are used to further categorize leads, including:
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) - is a contact who is supportive of the marketing team's proposals but is not eager to hear from a salesperson.
These people are essentially those who filled out a form during a marketing campaign but did not express any further interest.
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) - is a potential customer who is eager to speak with your sales team. In essence, it is taken into account. These individuals express their interest by asking questions about your product.
Opportunity - It's a contact that's associated with a transaction. These contacts have been explored and are in fact potential leads.
Customers
Customer:
A contact closed business with your company successfully.
Evangelists: You could think of these clients as raving fans. Their network may contain contacts who can become your lead.
Other: This stage is used to describe contacts who don't fit into any of the stages mentioned above.
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Assign lifecycle stages in HubSpot
It's time to start using your lifecycle stages in HubSpot since you already know what they're all about. You have a few options for keeping this property up to date for contacts in your CRM:
Manually modify a given contact's lifecycle stage
For each individual contact, the lifecycle stage property is editable directly from the contact record. Specifically, do the following:
1. Click the "Contacts" tab in the top navigation menu of your HubSpot account and choose the "Contacts" option from the drop-down menu.
2. To edit a contact, search for their name and click it.
3. Navigate to the "About this contact" section in the left side panel once you are in their contact record. To edit and make changes, click the lifecycle stage property.
4. Click Save in the lower left corner.
It's fairly easy, but keep in mind that you should only use this solution when you need to update the lifecycle stage of a single contact or a small group of contacts. To handle bigger updates, there are far more effective ways.
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Import contacts into HubSpot to change the contacts' lifecycle stage property.
Since most companies frequently need to import new contact lists, typically from another software/CRM system or a recent trade show, this situation is not uncommon. Fortunately, HubSpot includes a feature to handle this circumstance.
Start by importing the list of contacts into HubSpot if your team needs to categorize them into a specific lifecycle stage. One of the steps will ask you to set the lifecycle stage for the contacts in the import as you proceed with the process. The stage should then be applied to the entire list of contacts when you choose a specific value from a drop-down menu.
To assign lifecycle stages, use a hidden form field (professional or enterprise accounts only)
You might want to assign lifecycle stages to contacts based on form submissions for a variety of reasons. Contacts can express their level of interest in your business directly through forms. It's probably safe to assume that a contact who fills out a form for a top-of-the-funnel educational download is still in the awareness stage of the buyer's journey and could be categorized as a lead.
A different contact who submits a form for a request for a quote is obviously further along in the buying process. This contact now desires a direct follow-up from sales and therefore should be classified as an SQL.
In HubSpot, you can add a hidden field in addition to your regular questions on any form you create. The actions listed below must be carried out in order to add a hidden lifecycle stage field:
1. Navigate to Marketing > Lead Capture > Forms in your HubSpot account.
2. To edit or create a new form, click the name of the existing form.
3. Find the lifecycle stage field in the form editor, then drag it beneath the other questions.
4. Then, to edit, select the pencil icon to the right of the lifecycle stage field.
5. Select the "make this field hidden" checkbox in the left pane.
6. Next, under the field options section, choose the appropriate lifecycle stage to give contacts.
7. Finally, select "publish" from the top right menu.
When used properly, this field won't ever be seen by those completing the form. The lifecycle stage should have been set to the value you specified in the form following a successful submission, which you should be able to see in both the contact record and the form submission details.
How to set a HubSpot workflow's lifecycle stage (professional or enterprise accounts only)
This is how we prefer to set up and maintain the lifecycle stages in HubSpot. It's simple, and you can pretty much set it and forget it. I think automation is great.
You must first choose the appropriate enrollment triggers for each stage of the lifecycle before setting up the workflows to assign them. Most of the time, you'll want to assign a particular lifecycle stage based on the qualifying factors your team has identified as unique to that stage in your flywheels, such as form submissions, original source, page views, or other contact activity. The ideal situation would be for this material to have appeared at the time your lifecycle stages were defined.
With the aid of this info, workflows can be made in HubSpot to change a contact's lifecycle stage automatically as soon as they satisfy the requirements. You should take the following actions:
1. Go to Automation > Workflows in your HubSpot account.
2. In the top right corner, click "Create Workflow."
3. Pick the "Contact-based" option from the life side menu on the following screen, then click the "Start from scratch" button in the center of the screen. Additionally, during this step, give your workflow a name.
4. The next step is to set the enrollment triggers for the particular stage that this workflow is assigning to you (You can toggle through the different property types to find the ones you need).
5. You must now add actions after setting your enrollment triggers. To add an action, click the "+" icon next to the enrollment trigger.
6. Select "Set property value" under the new action, then "Lifecycle stage" from the dropdown menu. You can choose the specific lifecycle stage to set this property to by selecting this option, which will cause another dropdown to appear.
7. Finally, activate "Review" by clicking it.
You can watch this video if you still don't understand how to set up a HubSpot workflow very well.
Conclusion
Your contacts and businesses can be categorized using Hubspot Lifecycle Stages. I believe you will now be able to understand how leads are transferred between marketing and sales from the above information.
Also, to get additional tips you can check here.
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