Pipeline was top-heavy and conversions low...

Good Morning {{first_name}}!

It’s Fri(yay) - and that means it’s time for your Revenue Play - an issue where I share some real stories from real ecosystems. And this week, I shared that HubSpot had implemented a feature that would allow you to force lifecycle stages to be used.

Even though it sounds rough for some teams, I think it will genuinely have great results.

No more Subscriber-to-Customer in a single afternoon. (Unless your sales team is absolutely crushing it. In which case, call me.)

Let’s dive in.

We have worked with more than enough companies to know that lifecycle stages and everyone following the same rules can be tricky.

The lifecycle stage data looked fine on the surface and told a completely different story the moment someone asked a real question about where the money was coming from.

Contacts sitting in Customer who never moved through SQL. Leads sliding backward to Subscriber after a deal is closed. Nobody flagged it because the CRM allowed it, and nobody had time to manually police it.

Lifecycle stage accuracy is upstream of almost everything: attribution, segmentation, automation triggers, lead scoring, and your MQL-to-close reporting. When stages move freely in any direction, every system that reads those stages multiplies the error. And when they skip, it doesn’t tell the full story.

One client I worked with had a top-heavy lead bucket and an equally big MQL bucket. But the SQL bucket was tiny.

They were working MQLs and putting them straight into an opportunity. The lifecycle stage didn’t update until the customer closed. And if the customer didn’t close, they remained an MQL.

Thus, conversions in comparison to MQL was extremely low.

This is where things get tricky. There isn’t really a way to clean things up. It’s a process issue where marketing and sales need to be on the same page about what an MQL is and what an SQL is. There also need to be rules and requirements for reps to move contacts through the system as set by the company.

While a workflow could clean things up, it is actually a process issue. Cleaning up is part data, part process.

It starts by identifying how things should be - and then moves into how they should be designed in your CRM.

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For teams that implement this properly, the downstream impact is real. Cleaner lifecycle data means more reliable segmentation. This also means that your segmentations and automations fire when they are supposed to. And best of all, you can provide some clear answers when asked about attribution.

Go into your HubSpot portal and review your lifecycle stage pipeline rules. Set a default creation stage, and then set up automations to move a contact along the lifecycle stages based on how you are measuring or evaluating them.

For example, is an SQL when sales start emailing them one-on-one? Is SQL when a deal is created in the pipeline?

Once you figure those things out, it’s smooth sailing.

TL;DR

Lifecycle stage accuracy was always a process problem. Now it is also a settings problem. You have both levers available to you, and you can use them to keep your teams aligned.

Need ideas for an email strategy that could potentially replicate this win here? Email me at [email protected] and let’s talk!