Lifecycle Management Practical Use Cases| HubSpot Admin HUG | August 22, 2023

Welcome everybody to this session of the HubSpot admins. Hug. Super excited to have Shiddhab here talking about lifecycle stages. Shiddhab, take it away.

Thank you Kyle. So this is me. Let me share my screen and I have like multiple screens, like three different screens. So if I'm not looking at you guys this doesn't mean I'm mad at you, just I'm looking at my other screen. So let's get started. So this is me. If you can recognize this pic from my LinkedIn profile. Kyle loves this. So I've been in sales previously and the CRM admin like everything broken. I was you know, in a end user, let's say a company running sales motion over there and then I onboarded HubSpot fully and let me know in the comments if you can't see my screen, if you cannot just ping me. And then I joined a agency as a HubSpot architect basically doing HubSpot full time. So full on, you know, building solutions and all of that stuff. Then joined REP Partners as the strategist for revenue operations, all things and then finally right now I'm a product manager over there. So I'm a certified trainer now. Hold around 30 certifications more or less. I like strawberries, as you can see. Love to watch some anime and then I hate driving and then along with that doesn't really, you know, match. But I also hate Clunky ui. All the software that have clunky UI and bad ux, I just hate them. So REP Partners, like what do we do? So we are basically an elite partner and we are basically developing and fairly developed the maturity models for CRM. So you have like five levels where if you achieve those then you have a certain level of visibility in your system and you can have a predictable revenue growth. So what we are going to talk about is level one right now is the foundational solutions and the core database that you get integrated. It's all about getting your life cycle stages set up, your sales pipelines, ticket pipelines, all of that set up. If you have external systems like for example your homegrown app, if you're a SaaS company or if you have external databases like Zendesk or all of that. So integrate that and how they're going to talk to each other, that's be level one and then level two, three, four, five, that's to be a comprehensive clinician. But you can read, I'll send the link to the slides and you can read on your own. That's pretty much about myself and my company. So this is the agenda time. Don't mind the times. Like we can be flexible, but this is just placeholders. So we'll talk about the background, the bowtie framework, the summer school we did, and I'll, you know, point you guys on the, on the direction you should take after leaving this hub as some next steps. Then we are going to talk about life cycle stages. Why should you care about those? Automating. Actually one sec. Automating life cycle stages. I messed up here. It should be life cycle stages. I still kept the AVM for some reason. So apologies for that. I'll correct that and then some time for Q A. So some background. So I'll be pulling a lot of information from the summer school and building by design for the theoretical part. So if you haven't checked those out, I highly recommend, you know, go into those. You will learn a lot about the scientific models for your business model. Go to market growth, linear and non linear sales functions, operating model, the CS side of things, all of that. And then summer school will help you, you know, capture all of those concepts and how do you think about them in the CRM world Next. So let's start with a story. So I personally experienced this, so I'll be sharing that. It's super funny. So I did a credit card application in 2016 and this is the real story. It's happening right now as we talk. I did a credit card application because everyone was applying for the same. I was in college at that time, did that. It got rejected because I was in college. Like I was not a full time, you know, a job person with a predictable income that the, the guys can trust. So it got rejected, but I got billed for a credit card that never existed, which is fun. And then I contacted support. I was like, hey guys, I got billed for something that does not exist. And they were like, yeah, it's a mistake on our side and we'll fix it. They build it again. I was like, dude, what's happening? They reduced the bill amount, that's for sure. But it happened again and then I escalated to like the maximum level. It was like super frustrating experience. But I did that and it didn't work. So we are in 2023, I still received that $1 bill. I'm like, you know what, let's keep this as a testament of if you have your systems, your CRM or whatever system you're using for connecting to your customers. If this is messed up, this is a testimony of how messed up this is. So I'm getting that $1 bill forever. So, so what are life cycle stages and why you should care? So it's a very special out of the box contact and company property. You can look at the quote, it says special because it is, it's like way different than your regular properties. So it's supposed to point where your contacts live on their buyer journey as of now and how they came in there. And it enables measurement of volume metrics, conversion metrics and time metrics. So what is the problem with out of the box lifecycle stages? So it's out of the box, it's awesome. But if you do not model it correctly, like tailor it to your business needs, it's gonna, you know, get really messy and you're gonna be sending that $1 bill to your customers fire state for thing that never happened. So you don't want that. So majority of the time when we look at clients, the customer journey does not match. So they have a contact in lifecycle stage, let's say opportunity. And they do not even have, you know, done any form submission. Doesn't make any sense. No deal open or anything like that. And then there is a mix of manual and automatic updates, which is not ideal. An unclear definition of what those mean to you guys. Like think about those debates for MQL and SQL moments and how how those go. So apop quiz, how confident are you for the audience are you right now with your contact database alignment with the correct bias journey of your life cycle stages? Let me know. A, B, C, D. So A is super confident. B is kind of confident. She is not too confident. See D, you're going to journey with Mars with Elon Musk. So good luck to you. Okay. We are. So no one gonna go Mars. Yeah, there is one doing the electric. Okay. Lots of seed. Okay, awesome. I think this will be a fun one. So the solution, and basically I'm gonna share two solutions in one. So you are gonna get a lot of value out of this. This is gonna be awesome. We'll have a lot of fun. So we have this flywheel and we have this funnel. But how do you replicate this in funnel? So the funnel that we get is not super actionable. We do have an evangelist stage, but that is not enough. So this is how you do it. You build out a bow tie. What is a bow tie? It's a framework where basically you can think about your volume metrics across, you know, your VM1 till VM8 or like, however, like how much number is that is, you know, totally up to Your specific business case. But you want to track your volume metrics. How many, you know, leads do you have, how many opportunities you have, how many sales qualified leads do you have? If you have a product, how much PQLs are you generating? So those are your volume metrics and it doesn't stop at customer stage. So you can see this committed. So we call it committed for customers. So you had that initial sale and you had this, but what happens after that? So you don't have that visibility. It's there somewhere in your ERP system which is not super relevant and not super, you know, actionable for you and for your CS teams. So we built some things on the right side as well. Second is conversion metrics. What is the conversion between your VM1 and VM2? So your think about your lead to MQL conversion. So lead to MQL, MQL to SQL and so on and so forth. Once you are in customer think about time to live. So basically that was a good one. But yeah, so think about time to life like you got your first customer in how much time you're taking and what is the conversion of actually getting people onboarded.

It's.

It's not a good idea to have customers are on board and then you know, basically ghost them out and they churn at some point. So you need to have that conversion for onboarding once they are ready committed, onboarding completed. Now they are achieving impact. How are you tracking that? Is there a conversion between that? Yes. No. Good. Last final like they have achieved whatever you have promised them. Now it's time for expansion. You want to deliver more value. It's a win win situation for all of us. So that's how we represent like flywheel and this is originally, you know, you can look at, look up winning by design, go to market model and then you'll see this in more details on the theoretical part. So you'll get your conversion metrics and then the time metrics. So how much time do you take? So some of them are out of the box, some of them you'll have to build and I'll show you how to build one. Some are out of the box and I'll show you the out of the box as well. But it's very easy. You just have to build a time between property between to become a date stage and then you're good with that one thing that's a major pain point right now. And I'll share the link to the idea. We cannot currently build funnel reports for for company object here's the idea. I want you guys to go and update that. I'm having a chat with the PM of this reporting front next week, but I want to show some of our love for this tool. So just go ahead and do that before I start the demo. Guys. You want me to tackle some questions before we start the demo or continue? We do have a few questions over there. Let's see. That's not absolutely specific.

Sorry, I was off upvoting your idea. Yes, there are questions here. So one I think kind of the top right now is do we to sync or not to sync with companies? I don't know if that's a thing you're going to get to, but I think that's a great question to discuss.

So that depends. I don't like, I don't like that answer myself, but that is the correct answer. That depends. So if you are selling to multiple people in the same companies, if the answer is yes, then don't sync. If you are just selling to one person and you are like 100% sure, if you have converted one contact to a customer or whatever stage that correctly represents the company, then do it like just sync it. Next.

I think you can go ahead and keep going. Everybody remember there is this Q and A tab. I forgot to announce that at the beginning next to the general tab. And you can both add questions and you can upvote questions. And when we get to the end we'll, we'll start from the most upvoted question. Go down. Deanna also got creative here and put networking ideas. So if we do breakout room networking sessions in future hugs, are you a before the hug, after the hug, during the hug, upvote the one you like or upvote all three. If you just like the idea of networking, don't have a strong preference.

So here's the thing, there is some important guidance before we start the build. So if you are on marketing hub Protea the build will look a little bit different and I'll show you what are the specifics that you need to look out. If you are on enterprise then it will be a bit different. So I'll share that in a second. So first things first, life cycle stages, you can find it here and on the objects on the contact properties. If you navigate to life cycle stages, I want you to guys to you know, first go ahead and rename your life cycle stages as they represent in your company so you'll get out of the box, you know, subscriber lead, marketing, qualified lead, whatever. So whatever they represent first rename them and then I want you to just get rid of the evangelist one or you can push that at the bottom if it makes sense for your business and create the new ones that make sense. And then I'll also help you think about those in a second. So first customize this and you'll find that in contacts and in lifecycle stages property. Second, once you have identified how many stages you want, both until customer and post customer, I want you to build that amount of list. So for my example I have eight stages starting from Lead, mql, SQL Opportunity, Customer Activation, Impact and Lifetime Value. So I want you to create all of this list and then I want you to sit down with the relevant stakeholders and define them. Like clearly define them. What do this mean in my business? So is it a contact hitting a certain score or is it just getting created and we want to mark them lead for the case of let's say MQL if you want to look at they submitted a specific form or you again want to look at a certain HubSpot score or anything like that. So these are all dummy triggers, so don't worry about those. But I want you to look at all the different options that you have here and think about and clearly define those. Ideally you would want to go like pull out a Google sheet and start documenting those first. Then start building out your lists so you'll have your each and every single list. There is a opportunity that we recommend using lists first. So for example, if you are running multiple go to markets, you're running sales led growth or product led both at the same time and both of them have different triggers. So for example your app usage reaches certain threshold and based on that you want to move a regular user like a premium user to product qualified lead so you can build a different folder and then all the eight lists for that. Once you have done defining all of those then we'll go to workflows. Then you can use one single workflows and use both of the list in same workflow. That's why we use list, it's more scalable. But again this is a preference. You can build your triggers right within the workflow. If you can see, the first workflow is fairly simple as as soon as the contact is part of your inclusion list, which is the lead inclusion list, it will hit the lifecycle stage lead. As soon as it's in the system and hits that criteria mql it's bit different. So this is for all of you who are having, you know, pro hubs Like Marketing Hub Pro. So I am showing everything that is relevant for Marketing Hub Pro. I'll get to the enterprise in a second. So if you are building out this, so you need to ensure that your leads have passed through every single stage and there is a huge reason. So if you're building out this funnel report and if any contact misses any of these stages. So I'll show you in the back end how it looks. So if show contacts that have gone through all stages, so if any contacts misses any of this stage, it will just skip the entire funnel and you will not have that visibility to report on that. So we don't want that. We basically want to move people in the previous stage and then move to next stage. So we are checking if the became a lead date is known. So became a lead date became MQL date. These are all out of the box properties that HubSpot will generate for you. And as soon as the contact hits that stage stage, your life cycle, you know this will be populated with a date stamp of that date. So you do that and then move it to the next stage and then I'm gonna just show two more workflows just for the sake of it. So for example, we are looking at opportunity. So we look. Okay, you are part of the opportunity inclusion life cycle stage inclusion list. Fine. Were you a lead before? No. We are going to make you a lead and then we are going to, you know, wait one minute. We are going to check were you an MQL before? No. We are going to make you an MQL if you were already. Fine. Awesome. We are going to check if you are an SQL before. No. Then we are going to make you one and then wait and then finally we are going to make you the opportunity. So this is how we'll do it. If you have Pro Hub. Now if you have Enterprise Hub, this is like fairly easy. So I'll use customer list and make it for you. And this is, this is going to look wild but trust me. So I'm going to delete everything. It's a demo portal. It's so fun to delete stuff in this because we are not hurting anything. So people just enter your list and then you set property value. Look for life cycle stage and which list we are in. We are in customer. So as soon as you are part of the customer list we are gonna direct you, mark you as customer. Why I'm saying that? Couple of reasons. So let's go back to our dashboard. So if you have Marketing Hub Enterprise, you have the access to this tool Customer Journey analytics and you can get additional insights on of like if people are skipping, why is that happening? You will know that and this, this particular report will count people who have skipped these stages and it's going to show you that drops as no optional stage and how you can set that up. I'll just show you quickly so you can go to like I'll show it from the scratch just so you know, so it's more helpful. So you go to reports and then you create a report Select Customer Journey Builder. Oh sorry, excuse me. I'm so used to using this one Customer Journey Builder now that we have a deal one which is a different story. And then you select all of your stages. I'm gonna select just three for sake of it and then I'm gonna mark this stage as optional and then I'm gonna run my report so it's gonna look at this one and then you know, share the drop off wherever it's relevant. And it's like super ugly because the time ranges and stuff are bad. It's not based on the dummy data that I have in the system. So that's one setting that you'll need to take care. So if you are again just to reiterate if you are a pro hub I would recommend using this so that people do not skip stages and you have them in your funnel reports because you don't have access to Customer Journey analytics tool. Second change which is more of a nice to have but I definitely do that is go to properties and this is only enterprise so if you have marketing enterprise you should do it search for lifecycle stages and just remove access allow everyone to view. Do not let people to touch your life cycle stages manually. Like just don't do that. It's, it's, it's a bad practice only let your automations take care of that and you will you know, document all your automation triggers everything in a well documented manner. Have couple of calls with all the relevant stakeholders in your team and then go from there so that if I.

Can interrupt you here Shadab there's a, there's a, there's good conversation happening in the chat. I think you should check out kind of around skipping stages and also someone asked, I've lost now but about repeating stages. Can people go forward and backward? And so I think just to, to kind of double tap on this thing a little more.

I'll go into that. We are just ending this slide like I have the last slide and we'll be done and then we can Chat.

Oh, okay, perfect.

So what's next? So I. The call to action is I want you guys to go ahead and review the summer school because what I've been through is like a very rapid fire of what they already shared in depth. The customer journey analytics part is missing on that because it didn't exist at that time. Now it does. It's super fast with update. And this is Brian. He's my team lead. He's like super smart. I think like one of the smartest people in the ecosystem. He's doing an inbound event on this topic. He'll go more in depth on the same topic. So if you want to learn more, I want you to, you know, visit his event as well. Let's go. Q and A.

All right, so now how about you just take a peek at the last little bit happening in the chat. People are asking questions about pros and cons of skipping stages and things. I will go sort through the actual Q and A and figure out what questions to ask you first. I'll give you.

So Bonnie asks, I'm sorry about the name pronunciation. Why is skipping stage a problem? Yeah, so the problem is when you're building your funnel report. So actually, when you're building out a funnel report, where is my funnel report? There we go. So when you're building out this report and it literally says that contacts have to pass through every single stage, so even if they like, it makes sense, like they can stages based on their marketing motion, sales motion, whatever. It's natural. So if they skip stages, it will skip the entire funnel and then you will lose the visibility. So you will not be able to catch. So like I'm able to figure out, okay, there is a huge gap. Like, everything looks flat up until the PQL part. But what is happening here at MQL to SQL, if they skip that stage, all of those contacts will be out of this funnel report and you will lose this conversion metric, visibility. Also the volume metrics as well, because like HubSpot will not show you in here. They have to move through every single stage to be visible here. And you can test it out in your own instance and sign up for a developer portal. I highly recommend not testing this stuff in a live instance. So sign up for a free developer account and do it in there. So hope that answers your question.

Great. And then also, people are curious about these lightning bolts in your portal.

So it's a. It's a. It's an app called Super. So, for example, if I want to teach my team what Are life cycle stages or what does opportunity mean to me? So we can create internal knowledge basis and then basically integrate right on the property level. So these are the life cycle, sorry, it's called super and you can do a lot more on that. You can go to their website super IO and talk with the relevant people.

All right, so now to the actual Q A. Let's see top questions here. Lisa asks by auto marking an SQL as an MQL and lead it looks like every SQL was an mql. So sales marks a bunch of unqualified contacts as SQL. Then it looks like marketing pushed unqualified contacts to sales. It blurs the lines of accountability just to show the funnel. Is there a way to still show the funnel but distinguish between real MQLs and auto MQLs?

Yeah, this is a good question. So it is. So we definitely need the funnel that is non negotiable and I know I'm being a bit cold about that. So that is a non negotiable. You have to mark them as mql. But based on your specific go to market or based on your specific business model or your context, you can use either lead status or you can build a custom property and then when you are building out this funnel report so you can just do a filtering. So basically if I want to add let's say marketing or anything, I cannot remember the exact property right now, but you can actually filter out. So let's say if you have a qualification process, there can be a simple property that says yeah it's actually qualified. Then you can filter this out by you know, let's just use lead status for now. Lead status and then you can share is none of unqualified. And what this is going to do is going to remove every single unqualified lead that is in your system from this funnel report.

Next question Liz asks. Our lifecycle stage doesn't appear to sync with Salesforce as it shows contact stage. How does that field work to sync the Salesforce when it's a HubSpot field?

So couple of things. I have worked with Salesforce HubSpot integration. I haven't really, you know, connected the life cycle stages directly. So I would recommend pushing that data first in a custom property. Push that like build a, build a dummy or back end life cycle stage property. First push the data sync that field because this is like a. It's not really a full fledged property, it's property but it's more than a property. So build up simple property with lifecycle stages that exactly matches you including your API names with the values that you have on the contact stages. Sync those two and then build couple of workflows. So if your custom property, the backend property is mql, you know, push that in MQL and then you can even use that as a filter in your list, in your inclusion list. So that will, you know, sync up really nicely. That's why we promote list. You know what?

All right. Natalia asks where would past clients sit within the life cycle funnel?

Where would past clients sits in the life cycles funnel? Good question. So basically life cycle stages are representation of where at the most where they hit in your buyer journey. So for example, if Kyle is buying something from me and he stop till activation, he won't, you know, budge and buy something more from me. So even if he is a past customer, fine, he will still be on activation. If you want to represent their current status as like where they live. So you can build a property called as customer status. I have done that in like couple of clients portal. So customer status is active, inactive, churned, at risk. And then you have all of your other triggers that basically, you know, powers those. So trigger, we will mark someone as churned based on y trigger, we'll mark them as, you know, at risk or stuff like that. You represent that on a different property.

Yeah, if I can weigh in on that too. I, I mean, depending on what, why you want this information. If for example, you're thinking, I want to run a campaign, we're going to send a particular marketing email to all of our current customers. So we want to filter out everyone who's not a current customer. I think some sort of status property like Shadab is mentioning or if you have properties that track like subscription start and end dates, that could work really well. If you don't work in a subscription model. If you just sell some sort of product that people buy one time and they have it, there are, there's a standard property that's like recent deal, close date or something like that. You can see the last time someone bought from you and then you can start to filter out, you know, if it's been more than six months or a year, or if it's been like five years, we probably have a different email we want to send them than the people who just bought last month. So I think that's a couple different ways to get at that. Justine asks, how do you track life cycles of a current client? But they are looking to add a product, so they are essentially a prospect for that other product.

How do you Track life cycle of a current client looking to add a product. Essentially a prospect for. Yeah, we have. We had the similar situation. So it's going to be a very weird workaround. So you create a separate record for them. If you are doing this on the contact level and if you're doing this on the company level it's fair, fairly easel. But you represent them on a different record. That is like first recommendation. Second is you. You build another property to track that. Like I need to learn more about that business model. You can connect with me because this complex.

Yeah. Actually Justine, I mentioned HubSpot and Sales Hub were thinking a lot about prospecting recently. Next week we have the product team that's working on addressing questions like this here at the hug. I would recommend coming back and asking them that question. We are working directly on solving some of these problems because HubSpot has not been great at tracking and answering those kind of questions. I don't. I just got back after being out 10 weeks. I don't know what the status of anything is so I don't want to say too much. But next week they will probably give you some very direct answers about how we're solving problems like this. And so that's just a little plug for coming back because this has been tricky but it's going to get better. I think it's fine for me to.

Say that the way we solved it for one client they had three different ERP systems and each of the ERP systems basically they are homegrown ERPs actually fun. And each of them are business different business unit. It's owned by a group of companies and they only have one HubSpot instance. So the way we are doing it is basically creating three different records and then we created a custom object to containerize those records. So it's a wild workaround that you have to do to represent like each and every and then you have a custom property to segment out those business model as well. So contact let's say style one like Kyle in business unit one versus two and three. They all are marked and then you can use the same filter again represent them. You can build as many funnel reports as you want segmented out by your business units. So that's how we did it. But yeah, I'll definitely.

This is like their thing. Yeah. James asks, did you turn off all the default automation?

Yeah, I would. I would definitely. That's a good call out. The first thing I'll do whenever I install a new portal or get started with the new portal, I'LL first the thing, what I'll do is just jump in this and you know, set everything off first thing because it's going to fiddle with whatever automations you are building. So just let's just turn them off and then if you are keeping them on like contexts are gonna skip stages so we don't want that and just turn them off.

Cool. Hedar asks, what is the best practice for lost opportunities? Should the lifecycle stage be removed completely?

No, I wouldn't remove the lifecycle stage from the opportunity because we want that representation like they actually did, you know, reached life cycle stage opportunity and you can track what happened on the life cycle stage opportunity. So life cycle opportunity has an expansion that is happening on the deal level. So you can check that and you can build, you know, joint reports with contact and Deal and you can look at, you know, opportunities with lost deals and you can filter those out easily. If you want to go a little one step further then you can if you want to track that on contact or company level, then you can backfill that information using a custom property and then you can know, okay, this is lost. Basically, even though they reached opportunity, they are now lost.

Yeah, just another one. I would say come back next week. We're thinking a lot just about it. Anytime you're like, wait, how do I represent this? Those are the questions we're trying to answer. And so the product team would love to hear those questions. Some of them they will probably have awesome immediate answers. For some of them they'll be like, huh, we'll have to think about that. And then you get to make HubSpot better, which is great. Amelia asked, is there a guide on how to best set up the HubSpot scores?

That's a huge one guide. So the way we do it, there are two things. Again, it totally depends on your business model. But there are two things. One is fit and second is behavior. So think about in two dimensions, how does a CRM data like their job title, their industry or all of that information which is more or less static, that is their fit. How are they fitting as part of your buyer Persona in your system? That's like one part. Think about all of those factors and criteria for lead scoring for fit. Second is behavior. How they are interacting with your brand. Are they opening a lot of your marketing emails, clicking on your assets, interacting with your ads, anything that you're doing and they are interacting with that. That is behavior. So build two scores, like build two properties. One is fit score and one is behavior score. And then Build a calculation, average those two out and then that you will get a pretty good starting point to, you know, build start to build a robust scoring system.

Karina points out that there was a hug on scoring a few weeks ago. So check that one out and let's see. Bill asks how would you handle if the sales team wants different stages for different types of customers, e.g. b2B versus distributor, e.g. an extra stage or two needed for distributors.

So look, I knew this would come up. So my instance I am thinking about if you are running both motions so B2B and B2C. I am assuming that with that question but feel free to clarify. I'm monitoring the chat. Feel free to clarify that I'm assuming you are running both B2B and B2C. So I would do it this way. I would, you know, name my life cycle stages in both. So in B2B world it can mean something and in B2C world something same stage can mean something. And then I would build that, you know, folder like those 5 list or 6 inclusion list for both of the motions. So for example I have prospect in general. Like it's like just a placeholder stage. I have a lead and user. So lead is my sales led growth motion and user is someone who signs up through my app. MQL is someone who submits my form, let's like a demo form or something like that. PQL is someone who is like actively using my product and has qualified by the product based on the usage metrics. SQL had a chat with sales pql level 2. They are showing additional interest like more activation metrics or usage metrics that are pushing back in HubSpot. And then there is a, you know, in like a conversion point that is like opportunity. It can be different for your, you know, specific use case. Next question.

So I'm a little torn here. We have another dozen questions but they're not getting a lot of upvote and looks like the vast majority of people who voted about networking said they would rather do it during the hug. So my question to you all is do you want to keep peppering shadow with questions? That's what you came here for. I'm happy to commit to that and see it through. Or should we take these last 12 minutes to network? First Person who answers in the chat. We're going with your idea.

That's fun.

Network. All right. James has decided for all of us so thank you Shadav. This is great. We'll be sure to send this recording out if people want to connect with you afterward and ask some of these questions we didn't get to what's your preferred method for them to to find you?

So you can find me on LinkedIn pretty much every day. And you can find me on Sprocket Discord and you can find me via my employer rep partners. So all three ways, whatever you prefer. Happy to help anytime.

Great. All right, with that, I'm going to stop the recording. Bye. People who are watching the recording.