When to Rethink Your HubSpot Lifecycle Stage Strategy

A few months ago, we started what should have been a straightforward project with a client we’ve worked with for years. Their sales team wanted to move faster, and we wanted to help by automating the parts of their process that didn’t need a human touch. Nothing exotic – we anticipated setting up some required properties between pipeline stages and maybe a few workflows to clear busy work off their reps’ plates.

We couldn’t build it.

The technology part was easy – but their processes weren’t ready. Every time we tried to write a rule for what should happen when a deal advanced from one stage to the next, we hit the same wall: The team didn’t have a shared answer for what those stages actually meant.

This, of course, is a big problem. Automation needs rules, and rules require alignment.

Before we could automate anything, we had to define the process. And since a lead might journey through several lifecycle stages before a deal is even created, defining their lifecycle stages was where we needed to start.

This situation is not unique.

Around the same time, two other clients came to us with various versions of this same core issue: Their lifecycle stages no longer reflected their go-to-market strategies. For all three clients, it was high time to rethink the foundation of their revops infrastructure.

Lifecycle stage problems often hide in plain sight

One of the first challenges with lifecycle stage problems is that they’re the product of decisions made years ago.

Lifecycle stages are like a time capsule

When a company first gets started on HubSpot, lifecycle stages are typically set up fairly early in the implementation. The problem here is decision overload; when setting up a HubSpot portal, there are many decisions to be made. Often the priority is to just get the darn thing up and running … but not necessarily perfect. So when setting up the lifecycle stages, someone probably made a series of fast yet reasonable decisions about what a qualified lead looked like, when marketing should pass the qualified lead off to sales, and what steps the sales team should take to convert the lead to an opportunity and close the deal. And then everyone moved on to the next decision to be made, and didn’t put much more thought into those lifecycle stages.

It’s not that those decisions were wrong. But think of it like a time capsule – the lifecycle stages now reflect what was true for the company at that point in time. In the time since then, life has happened. Markets have changed, strategies have shifted, new segments have emerged. Perhaps the company has launched a new product, or acquired a new company. Maybe leadership has turned over (possibly even more than once!).

Most likely, no one ever thought to take another look at those original lifecycle stage definitions – but they now describe a company that no longer exists the way it did back then.

Think back: When did you establish your own lifecycle stages?

The first client I mentioned above set their lifecycle stages way back in 2016, when they first purchased HubSpot. The current revops team inherited a structure they hadn’t built, with reasoning they hadn’t been part of. And nobody had the standing, or frankly the time, to question it – so each new person worked around the parts of the strategy that didn’t fit, and the workarounds accumulated.

Here’s the challenge: The symptoms of this disconnect almost never look like a lifecycle stage problem.

Lifecycle stage problems often appear to be something else

Across the three clients I mentioned, their problems looked very different. One client struggled to build targeted segments for their marketing campaigns. Another client couldn’t measure whether their marketing was doing anything at all (which is an uncomfortable position for a marketing leader). And that original client I described wanted to leverage AI to be more efficient in their sales process – until we realized they didn’t have a sales process.

Segmentation, measurement, and automation are three different systemic problems that share a common mechanism. A system can only act on definitions that have been made explicit. When processes are manual, it’s easy to not notice this. Your reps can look at a record, apply their own judgment, and move on. But a list, a workflow, or a report all need rules in order to work. And if your team never agreed to any of these rules, well, then your system has nothing to act on, and the failures show up in seemingly random places.

The solution, then, is to go back to the beginning and see if those original decisions still hold true.

Three key decisions underpin the whole system

Whether you’re asking your system to route a lead, build an audience, or project revenue, your entire lifecycle stage strategy ultimately rests on three key questions:

• When should marketing hand off leads to sales?
• When should sales hand off customers to service?
• What does a good customer look like?

Note that none of these is a HubSpot question. Instead, they’re decisions about how your company markets and sells, and they form the basis for your entire revops infrastructure.

Decision 1: When should marketing hand off leads to sales?

The honest answer is that there may not be a single handoff point, because not every buyer goes through sales at all.

First, think through how many buying paths you actually have. The client I mentioned that’s struggling to build the segments they need actually has two distinct types of customers with genuinely different buying behaviors. One group is a typical B2B buyer, but another group is entirely self-directed: They engage with a campaign, decide on their own whether to buy, and become customers without ever speaking to a rep.

So for this group, asking when a marketing-to-sales handoff should take place is entirely the wrong question, because there’s nothing to hand off. And yet, this company’s legacy lifecycle stages treated both groups identically, because only the traditional B2B buying path existed when those stages were originally built. Running both of these buying paths through a model designed for one meant their data consistently misrepresented how they actually acquired customers.

Once you have a grasp on the various paths relevant to your buyers, go ahead and map out the marketing-to-sales handoff process. Then you can define the handoff criteria directly.

But don’t stop there.

It’s also important to decide what happens when sales rejects a lead. HubSpot’s lifecycle stages were designed as a one-way journey. But for a lot of companies, that no longer holds true. For example, if sales connects with a lead and determines the timing isn’t right, will that lead then sit abandoned in a lifecycle stage graveyard?

For one of our other clients, we learned that was happening more often than they realized. And so we built a new path: If sales determines the lead is qualified but the timing isn’t right, sales now has a process to return the lead to marketing for further nurturing. And marketing now has a clear definition of what makes that lead sales-ready again.

Put all of these decisions together, and the shape of the entire revops model changes – and the system can finally reflect an intentional buying process.

Decision 2: When should sales hand off customers to service?

The handoff should happen at one clearly defined moment, and that same moment should be the only thing your closed-won reporting counts.

The client I opened with had a genuinely complicated situation. For them, once a customer signs their contract, the new customer enters an implementation process – and this process is key to a successful long-term relationship. To ensure the sales team remained engaged in this process, the company had tacked on several implementation-related stages to their deal pipeline structure. These additional stages happened after the contract was signed, and so they technically counted as closed-won stages.

Having multiple closed-won stages wreaked havoc on reporting. Forecasts were almost impossible to trust, and “days to close” metrics were wildly inaccurate.

It also meant teams were inconsistent about when to update a contact’s lifecycle stage to Customer. Should that happen when the contract was signed? Or when the account completed onboarding and was successfully up and running? Arguments could be raised both ways.

What’s wild is that this situation had been going on for years, and nobody had raised an alarm; everyone just assumed “this is the way we do things,” and it had stopped registering as fixable.

The good news is that the fix was actually incredibly simple: Split the pipeline into two, one for sales and one for onboarding. The signing of the contract became the sole closed-won criteria and the moment the contact’s lifecycle stage should be updated to Customer. Onboarding then became its own process with its own owner, and the sales and service teams could now collaborate more effectively to ensure the process was successful.

Decision 3: What does a good customer look like?

A good customer is defined by behavior over time, not by a single transaction – which is why the standard Customer stage often isn't enough on its own.

For the third client I mentioned, their customers are typically repeat buyers, so their growth comes not just from getting new customers but also from getting existing customers to place more orders.

The traditional lifecycle model has no good way to represent this. Under the standard definitions of the Customer lifecycle stage, a customer who ordered once three years ago and a customer ordering every single month both look the same – even though their buying behaviors are very different.

So, we added a stage. We defined an “active customer” as a buyer whose rolling 12-month order volume exceeds a specific threshold. The word “active” was a deliberate choice: The behavior we wanted to encourage is consistency, and this label made that clear. We also deliberately chose 12-month rolling order volume as the metric to base this new stage on, because we could implement it immediately – the calculation already existed in their sales CRM, and everyone on the team was familiar with it. This meant we could implement the new lifecycle stage and build alignment quickly, without feeling like we were rebuilding things from scratch.

Where to start when assessing your lifecycle stages

I want to resist any tidy conclusion here, because lifecycle stage problems almost always show up looking like something else – and that’s what makes this tricky. Unreliable forecasting has a dozen possible causes. So does weak campaign performance.

In none of the three examples I've referenced was "fix our lifecycle stages" the project we were hired to do. But in all three, analyzing the issues those clients were experiencing led us quickly to the same place: inconsistent, nonexistent, or outdated lifecycle stage definitions sitting underneath a set of seemingly unrelated problems.

If any of this sounds familiar, I wouldn’t start with a deep dive audit of your entire HubSpot portal. I’d start with a more focused perspective: Pick the thing you currently can’t do.

Maybe you can’t build a segment you need, or you can’t explain a forecast to your CEO with any confidence, or you can’t tell whether a campaign influenced revenue. Then trace backward and ask what definitions that capability depends on, and whether your team agrees on them. This will tell you quickly whether there’s something here to fix.

And if you realize you do need to rethink your lifecycle stage strategy, make your decisions intentionally, build alignment internally, and document everything as you go.

Your lifecycle stages are ultimately a shared agreement about how your company sells. When that agreement doesn’t exist, your team absorbs the difference by hand, usually without even realizing that’s what they’re doing. But when your definitions are accurate and your team believes in them, everything downstream gets easier.