017. Making Sense of HubSpot Lifecycle Stages

Hello everyone, this is Emilio Garcia, your host at the Bound of Our Life. For those of you that are listening or watching right now, I hope you have you are having a great day and I'm really excited today for our topic. We will be discussing making sense of hubzuk Life Cycle Stages. That will be the that will be the chat for today. And part of the reason I decided to start with this topic today is we are in the midst of an implementation for CRM HubSpot CRM and I know for sure that this is one topic that is super relevant for new implementations, basically because different teams, marketing, sales and customer success look at contacts on a database in a different light. And I believe that HubSpot lifecycle stages or the lifecycle stages are the way that all those teams can work together and be aligned on what a contact means for the company. So it's going to be a packed session I hope. And as always, if you have any comments and you're watching right now, please say hi on the chat, leave us a like or share this content with someone that might find it useful. I will really appreciate that. And let us start right away with the first subtopic or part of the content that we are going to discuss today. The first question obviously is what is exactly or what do I mean by HubSpot lifecycle stages? Now, lifecycle stages in general for CRM platforms are not obviously only for HubSpot, they are. They are. There's a concept of it on any other CRM platform, marketing platform or any other platform where you store contacts or companies. So it's not necessarily something that is only unique to HubSpot. But obviously we will discuss it for today. And the best way to imagine them or envision them is that your buyers on your company go through a series of process and from your company's point of view they are at different stages. Because if you just add people, contacts or companies on a database and you want to interact with them without knowing at what level of engagement they are with your company, then you will have trouble yourself and other teams that work with that database will struggle to. So you want to know is this a person that have never heard of us before and never purchased from us? Is someone that is actively engaging with our content and we are with people within the company. It's a current opportunity, someone that is exploring purchasing from us or an actual customer, a happy or an inactive one, one that has purchased in the past but is not active right now. So all those different scenarios are answered by the concept of lifecycle stages, that's pretty much what they are now. In the specific case of HubSpot, the platform took a specific approach on them. There is within all records and by records I mean company records or contact records, there is a property called lifecycle stage and it has or contain A8 predefined, not customizable properties. And that's really important because it's one of those few properties within the system that comes with every portal and it require or is dependent on a lot of automation and segmentation and even reporting within the system. And you cannot change them so far. So they are predefined and therefore in theory they are pretty this post for certain actions and that's what we will explore in this section. So eight of them I will tell them, tell them right away is subscriber lead, marketing qualified lead, sales qualified lead opportunities, customer evangelist and other. And so let us dive into the meaning of each of them. As you can see, it's a progression from a contact that has not interacted a lot with the company to the point where you have someone have purchased in the past and is someone that is promoting the company actively. The first one subscriber, is most of the time defined as someone that you have on the database that is and this is very digital oriented is subscribed to your blog or your newsletter. Most of the time the information that you have about this person is just email. Sometimes you might have a name, the first name or the first and last name, but that's much it. There's no much information about that person. It's a passive contact that is consuming your content pass it interacted with any other form or premium content available on the website. Then you have lead. And this is usually the bulk of contacts. For most companies it's any person that is of interest for the company either because they have downloaded or acquired, participated in a webinar or downloaded a piece of content, or because someone within the organization, either from sales or marketing or customer success, have set up the contact. But it's not a client, it's just someone of interest. Right? So that's the name of lead. And usually this concept is the one that creates a lot of confusion. Because what sales means by lead and marketing means my lead can be different. And in theory the answer to that is the next two stages, Marketing qualified lead and sales qualified lead. The main difference between them is that on marketing qualified lead, there's something that marketing deems appropriate for that lead to be passed on sales. There are two ways to do that. One is based on behavioral data like people coming back to the website interact with the emails. Just being active on social media for the company profiles or pages. And the order can be more specific based on definitive actions like filling a contact form or just picking up the phone and asking for a meeting with a sales representative or requesting a demo for example of the product or service. Either way, marketing considers that this lead, this contact have moved beyond just being on the database and is deemed to be passed to sales and sales qualified lead usually is used as a way to confirm from sales that the lead it's a valuable one that is worth pursuing or having a conversation that because there might be an opportunity on it. So these two stages can be used as a way of interacting or a layer between marketing and sales. Now opportunities or the opportunity stage is for those contexts that right now are engaging in an open opportunity for the company. In the case of B2B, that usually means that there's an active conversation after the demo. For example, there's maybe a proposal going on right now. And obviously any of those stages of the deal, the contact itself is in the opportunity stage. Next one customer in that case obviously is when an opportunity got close and you have a new client or a new customer and the company or the contact is then a customer. Obviously here it's also people or companies that have purchased in the past but might not be current clients anymore. The next one evangelist is a special case for clients or customers. Not every company use them and in this case it's people that have been using the product or service for a long time or long enough to be promoters of the company itself. And they're usually happy customers. If you have an NPS survey in place, they usually your nines and tens and in theory you identify them because you want to do something different for them or with them compared to your regular or the rest of the database that you consider your customers. And finally catch all stage is others in theory here, this one you can use for anything that is not necessarily tied to the business but is relevant for the company. For example, can be employees that you have on the database, can be partners that you work with, or it can be providers or suppliers that are part of the company and for whatever reason you want to have and there's some communications going on. But obviously they will not follow these more client or buyer oriented process out of itself. So those are the stages. And now obviously the question is why or why do you use why? Why to use them? Why rely on this concept? And there's a couple of examples that I'm going to share here that I found, I have found that are the most relevant or the most common from the conversations that we have with clients. The overall principle, and this is the first one, the overall principle will be that life cycle stages become really relevant when you have more than one team working on the CRM platform. And what I mean by more than one team is that more or beyond marketing or sales or customer success. And to put that in perspective, for example, is that when there's just one team working with, the database is still a little bit relevant, but not as much when there are many. Because changes on the contact information not only affect the team that is working with the data, but it does affect the rest of the teams. If marketing is working with context and some of them are being follow by sales or customer success that matter, right? So to create that alignment, like in the example of the marketing qualified lead and the sales qualified lead, when a contact belongs to marketing, when a contact belongs to sales. Lifecycle stitches are a great resource because allows the team to work with potential clients, with people that is actively on deals and with clients or evangelists that maybe customer success is taking care of and giving support. So in the overall scheme of things, the biggest reason that you want to especially use them is because you want to align the efforts of those three client facing departments. Now being more specific, for example, for marketing, if you have multiple campaigns and and some of them are geared toward people that have barely hear of your brand that are in the awareness stage versus people that might be down the funnel, that they already know your brand, they already know the kind of solutions that you offer and they are looking for case studies, for example, and understanding if you are the right fit for them. Your campaigns need to support that. And using lifecycle stages is a great way to understand which campaigns are you geared toward. Each of the of the groups, for example, top of the funnel will be maybe for leads. And if you have marketing qualified leads, maybe you want to offer them by email or other sources like advertising case studies instead of regular more middle of the funnel offers. So in marketing in general, your offers, you can segment those based on that. And obviously the biggest way that you can implement that segmentation is through email. So when you are sending your email campaigns and you want to customize them based on the stage, you can use that as a reference. The other great advantage too is that because usually in this case on HubSpot, your database have those stages if you want to, you can change the way that your website looks like and through A feature called smart content based on the stage of the contact. Right. If you have a customer, maybe you show your website, things are relevant to your customers. They don't have to be sold. Maybe they need more support information. And if you have someone that have never visited the website or have rarely visited the website before, maybe they're looking more for resources, you can point them in the right direction. So it's not just customer customization and personalization of emails and maybe advertising ads or copy. You can also personalize their experience on the website if you know if they're clients or not. So those are great areas where you can improve marketing in general. Now the other great advantage of having them is in general contact and company ownership. Right? As we were saying, these roles that marketing and sales and customer success have maybe subscribers and leads and marketing qualified leads belong in general to the marketing department. They might not have a specific person assigned to the contact or the company because those stages are still early on the buying cycle. But once you have a marketing qualified lead that you want to assign to a sales rep or SDR or definitely an opportunity that is being followed by someone you want to know who within the company is responsible for the communications and that ownership is relevant depending on the stages. So probably definitely opportunities are going to belong to sales and sales qualified leads. And finally customers, depending on the size of your company might be the responsibility of an account manager or customer success team and not the salesperson that closed the deal anymore. Definitely evangelist will be another scenario. So is not just who is the owner. Also is what happens when the client comes back to the company by any channel. If they come back to the website or they start a chat conversation or they just pick up the phone or fill a form. It will be useful to know if you have on the database already what is the stage that they are. So you can send that person to the right people or the right person within the organization. If it's a current client, you don't want to ask them or offer them things when they're really looking for help and the other way around. So having those or using those lifecycle stages allows you to assign owners and therefore immediately assign the right person to your contact or to the company that you are managing. So that will be a great use of lifecycle stages. Another one really really relevant too is will be in general for forecasting because you will over time have a cadence, right? X amount of leads become marketing qualified leads. X amount of marketing qualified leads eventually become sales qualified and so on. You have the percentages of people that move from one stage to the other and over time that will allow you to forecast your business results. Super relevant obviously for sales because they will be on the lookout for the numbers between SQLs and opportunities for example. But it's also relevant for other areas like in the customer success case they want to know the cadence of new customers so they can have an appropriate size for the customer success team. And definitely marketing that is in part providing new leads to the company will be interested in knowing what percentage of leads become marketing qualified leads. So if you are using those lifecycle stages, their reporting tools within Hopsville will allow you to know the percentages from one stage to the other and you can use that to forecast sales customer success requirements and obviously gauge how big your marketing effort has to be to match your business goals. So really relevant that that that point. Finally, the one that you can take advantage of is in general for automation and you can get a sense of what kind of automations you can have. For example, as we were saying, if you have a person that comes to the website and have an assigned owner and it's an opportunity or a client that you can trigger a message to the owner to let them know that they're customer is on the website, they might need something and they can proactively reach out, right? Or you can also use behaviors on the website to trigger stages like for example if someone fills a form they automatically become MQL's if they are not yet or if someone opens some of these automations that actually built or baked in on hubsuite already. But if someone creates a deal out of a company and contacts all the associations will transform that person or contact into an opportunity. The same goes for customers. Another example of an automation would be if for example you have a client that client rate you with a 9 or 10 on your NPS or your Net promoter score survey then or score then you might make an automation to define that person as an evangelist. So you can use automation in both ways. Either the changes on the stages trigger events based on ownership and any other information that you have with your contact, or you use certain behaviors and events within the company to trigger changes on life cycle stages. Either way, using them properly allows you to have successful automations that will simplify and make more efficient the work within your company. So those are in general the main reasons and if you come up with more, please let me know in the comments. I will be happy to read some of them. There's one final topic that I want to add to this conversation. And again, the reason I started the conversation today and is the difference between Lifecycle stages and another related very similar property, but not quite the exact thing called lead status and the leads and deal stages. So usually there's a lot of confusion around those three terms, Lifecycle stages, lead status and deal stages. So for example, Lifecycle stage and lead status, what they have in common is that both are properties for companies and contact records. But the difference is lifecycle stages. Again, they cover the whole buyer journey from someone that became a subscriber to someone that is an active client or is a happy promoter of your company. Lead status on the other part usually covers just a section which is the path between SQL or sales qualified lead and opportunity. It's required to have that granularity that those stages because usually on that stage the sales rep goes through a series of steps that are relevant to move the buyer or to follow the buyers from the process of being sales qualified lead for the company perspective, from the company's perspective, to be in an opportunity, like for example a sales rep get assigned the lead and that person maybe sends an email or start a phone conversation, they might not get an answer right away and they follow up for a little while, then they have a conversation and maybe assess the need, the feed the budget. And after that, after some of those conversations, there might be a decision to finally create a deal out of this or out of the conversation, or just decide that it's not the right moment or the person might lose interest or the opportunity might pass. And so all those different scenarios you can manage using league status, which is the last difference between the two. Lead status compared to Lifecycle Stage, you can change, you can create different fields so you can adapt it better to what you want to accomplish compared to lifecycle stage that is baked in the system, the different properties. Now for deal stages, the difference is that it's a completely different thing. Deal stages matter to deals, which is a different kind of record on the CRM, right? So in the case of lifecycle stages, you use that for contacts and for companies. And again it goes from being a subscriber to an evangelist. But when you have an opportunity, when the, when the, when the contact or the company is in the opportunity stage, then again you need that extra information to know if someone, for example, have a schedule, a first demo or appointment to understand or better understand the product, if there's a discussion with the team, if there's a proposal in process or a contract, have things. And so those stages, all those different steps that you have to Walk from the moment that you decide that a contact is an opportunity for the company up to the moment that they become a client, you manage through deals and the way that deals manage them is through deal stages. Those deal stages, just like lead statuses, can be customized and they have a special property because they have a percentage of close rate that allows you to gauge or forecast your pipeline. Right? So deal stages you will use for opportunities for that particular stage that give you granularity and lead status. Usually you don't have to, but usually you use for the step between sales qualified lead and opportunity. That will be the area where you take advantage of it. And it's usually the sales rep most of the time, the one that update that particular property. Right? And again, lifecycle stage is used for not just sales, but marketing, sales and customer success on larger companies. For example, for our particular example, we sometimes rely on others, sometimes we don't. Sometimes we create another feel that better reflects what we want to mean by others. There are clients and people that necessarily use evangelists, for example, that they don't have that specificity, they just use the NPS to know their promoters and they don't have any specific differentiation. There are other companies, for example, where the team is not large enough to justify the extinction in between marketing qualified lead and sales qualified lead. So they just have leads and then jump into opportunities, or they just have leads and one of the two marketing qualified and that's it. So you definitely can adapt what your intentions are around the lifecycle stages and use the one that makes sense for you. The only recommendation that I will have here is that you want to make sure that whatever decision you have, either if you're going to use them all or just some of them, that you have a document that explains to yourself and your team and the other teams that will be part of the implementation, that will be part of the platform on a regular basis. What each of the lifecycle stages means to your company. That will be my general recommendation. Right? And so we have got to the end today and I hope you have found value on this topic today. Remember, if you like it, please share it with any person that you think might find this valuable. If this is the first time that you're listening, subscribe or follow us on social media to get notified and let me know if you're interested in any other topic. I will be happy to add it to the series for sure. Have a great day and until the next one, bye bye.