Lifecycle Stage

Hi, I'm Amelia from Digital Reach and I'm here to help you out with this, um, lifecycle stage document that we've sent to you.

I know it looks like a lot, but it's actually really easy, but it is super important. We wanna be able to make sure that we're customizing these stages to your specific business so that HubSpot will be as customized and helpful as it possibly can to you.

So just to take us back to basics, what's lifecycle stage? Uh, if you never heard about it before, that's okay.

It's kind of HubSpot proprietary thing. So here, this triangle we're looking at here is the default lifecycle stages that HubSpot offers.

They are customizable. You don't have to use all of them. Talk with your DR reps if these look nothing like what you're doing, um, and we can definitely make something work for you.

Awesome. So typically each of these provides benchmarks for as leads move from never heard about your business to purchase, and then maybe even one step further to celebrating your business and trying to get more people to buy your stuff.

Um, what we need from you is to know things like, okay, what's a lead mean to you? Are you getting people from Zoom info or Seamless ai?

Um, are people submitting forms on LinkedIn? Um, or are salespeople cold calling and then adding folks to your database? Uh, is, is that what a lead is?

Usually this is defined as someone who's pretty new to your business but has expressed interest in may purchase. And you'll see that outlined here in the sheet.

If you're maintaining a blog, uh, or if you're sending emails, um, subscriber can be a stage that can be really helpful to use.

Um, it lives a little bit above lead because sometimes people will subscribe to you, uh, but they'll just never be someone who becomes, uh, a customer, um, because maybe they're just not in the right position to purchase or anything like that.

I'd also like to note that life cycle stage is something that can live on companies as well. So just because you're doing more account based marketing work with us doesn't mean that this isn't important.

So using lead as an example, what we would need to do is say like, Okay, here's the team that needs to do it and here's what we're doing with our leads.

You know, maybe we need to now that we know where they're coming from, where need to nurture them to try and get them to be marketing qualified leads.

And so now it's like, okay, tell us about your marketing efforts. What does this look like? Is there an email you're sending out that if they click at their marketing qualified or do they have to reply to it to be marketing qualified?

Do they have to submit a form? Do they have to have submitted multiple forms? Is there a specific form they submitted?

Right? So this kind of information will help us to be able to set up automations that will say, when this criteria is met, go ahead and mark this contact or company as a marketing qualified lead.

Therefore moving that person down the funnel and allowing it to be very easy for your teams to go into your HubSpot account and say, Show me all the marketing qualified leads today, because my job is to call them, uh, to get them to sales qualified lead or whatever that looks like.

Uh, for your specific, uh, business sales qualified lead is another one that can be optional, but is usually leveraged by BDR And SDR teams.

So if you have a team that lives just before, like inside sales, um, or if you have a process that involves doing work before inside sales, this is a great fit for you.

It allows those folks to go ahead and do outreach to those phone numbers or those email addresses and qualify uh, them a little bit further.

So this is a great fit for industries, things like, Okay, well I'm selling legal services or insurance, which means that folks need to be in certain regions.

Healthcare is another good one, uh, in order to, uh, even be a customer of mine. Um, so kind of think about those kinds of things as the way that sales qualified lead is used.

But if your business has something sort of different of like, here's our next layer of qualification, uh, definitely let us know in that sheet and we can go ahead and get some automation set up for you.

You can definitely tell us about what identifies opportunities in customers. The good news is a lot of the automation is already set up in HubSpot.

So the moment a deal is created for someone, they will automatically be moved to opportunity where their company will be moved to opportunity.

If those two things are associated, then if that deal becomes closed, one, which is HubSpot's way of saying you got the money, right?

Successful sale, uh, they'll automatically become a customer. If you're sending out feedback, surveys after purchase, uh, or if you'd like to in the future, um, one of the fields that we can create is then moving someone onto an evangelist, which just means that they like your business so much that they're gonna say good stuff about it.

So this can be helpful if you are looking to build a pool of people to communicate with, um, for kind of, uh, your own marketing efforts, right?

Hey, I need testimonials, or I'd like these folks to fill out reviews on Yelp, that kind of thing. It can be really helpful to try and identify evangelists.

So for this stage, if it's one you're interested in using, please tell us about how you request feedback from clients.

Is that would allow us to set up an automation that would say if they gave you good feedback, make 'em an evangelist, they didn't give you good feedback, maybe there's something else we ought to do with that client.

Awesome. So then when we're in here, we'll just go ahead and fill in this different information as well as the teams that are, um, doing this work for each of these stages.

Of course, if you have questions at any time, please don't hesitate to reach out to, uh, your DR point of contact.

We're here to help you. Um, and we wanna make this process as smooth as possible, but why does this matter to you?

Usually, I think life cycle stage reporting is one of the most overlooked things in HubSpot, and it's truly probably the most powerful, although it's very common for salespeople to know about looking at ideal pipeline and okay, how are my sales moving through that pipeline or that funnel, right?

Um, what if we zoomed out and looked at the process leading up to sale and then if the sales successful or not?

That's where lifecycle stage comes in. So if I jump over to this tab here, I don't have a ton of data in my test account, but these are the outta the box default reports from HubSpot that allow you to see this breakdown.

Like in my demo account, I have 880 Subscribers and, and I have a huge amount of leads, but it looks like I only have 21 marketing qualified leads and only 91 customers.

So looking at this number, I would think to myself as a leader, as like, Okay, there's something happening with the marketing qualification process.

Maybe we're not getting the best leads we could. Maybe we're not qualifying them well. So it can help you to identify those points where there's a lot of drop off.

It's the same thing that this funnel report will do when it has data in it. And you can also see time based reporting.

How long does it take for people to get to customer, that kind of thing. And these are just the default reports.

Imagine how much more work we could do with you. Uh, if DR is setting up custom reports for you to really power lifecycle stage so that you can get that bird's eye view of your entire database of people, your whole crm, and how they're moving through that journey and who these different people are.

Your marketing teams will appreciate it because it will be easy for them to identify a list of everyone who's ever purchased by saying, Okay, if lifecycle stage is equal to customer, or everyone who's currently in the sales pipeline or hasn't had a successful sale, but got close, show me everyone who's an opportunity.

So again, I'm painting with broad strokes because I'm making this video to speak to many people, but your Dr representative will be able to help you get more customized as time goes on.

But life cycle stage, although it takes some work and time is definitely worth it to set up because it will pay out in the future.