As companies grow, their sales processes become more complex. They need an effective way to organize their leads and customers. This is where HubSpot's lifecycle stages come into play. These are a set of categories that classify leads and customers based on where they are in the sales cycle. In this post we will see the usefulness of these stages for Sales Operations in a RevOps context.
What are HubSpot Lifecycle stages?
HubSpot's lifecycle stages are a way to classify leads and customers based on their relationship with your business. HubSpot's lifecycle stages property contains the following default stages:
- Subscriber. A person who has signed up to receive emails, newsletters or other content from your company.
- Lead. A person who has shown interest in your products or services. This individual has provided his or her contact information.
- Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). A lead who has shown a high level of interest in your products or services. This person has interacted with your company and has shown some level of purchase intent.
- Sales Qualified Lead (SQL). An MQL who has been qualified by the sales team as a potential customer. This person has demonstrated a strong interest in your business' products or services.
- Opportunity. A lead that has been identified as a good fit for your products or services. This person has shown a high level of interest and is likely to make a purchase.
- Customer. A person who has made a purchase and is now your paying customer.
- Evangelist. A customer who supports and promotes your brand, products and business.
In addition to these default categories, you can also create and customize your own lifecycle stages, according to your sales cycles.
Why HubSpot Lifecycle stages benefit Sales Operations
Let's take a look at some examples of how HubSpot's lifecycle stages are incredibly useful for Sales Operations in a RevOps context.
Streamlined processes and increased mobility in sales pipelines
HubSpot's lifecycle stages provide Sales Operations a roadmap to streamline how your leads move through your sales pipelines.
By understanding the different stages of a lead's lifecycle, sales teams can develop customized strategies for each stage and implement them in HubSpot.
This allows, on one hand, to design better experiences for leads; on the other hand, to generate a more efficient and productive operational framework for your sales team.
Thanks to HubSpot's technical features, you can greatly enhance the mobility of your leads throughout your sales pipeline, improving your conversion rates and revenue generation.
For example, let's say a certain lead is in the MQL phase. Your Sales team (aligned with Marketing) can create a contact strategy tailored to the specific needs of this lead. Such a strategy helps the MQL to move to the SQL phase, increasing the likelihood that it will eventually become a customer.
It is worth mentioning here that the creation of personalized strategies based on the lead's lifecycle can be done manually or automated in HubSpot. In any case, it is useful to use the Buyer Personas profiles of your business for this purpose, following good Inbound Marketing practices. After all, HubSpot is a unique Marketing and Sales platform that allows you to create excellent experiences for your leads and customers.
Similarly, it is also important to consider here the priceless help of the lead scoring tool offered by HubSpot. It allows you to automate lead scoring with predictive scores based on machine learning. With it, you can automate your lead qualification. That's RevOps in its purest form...
Data-driven decision making and increased granularity of sales forecasting analysis
Sales forecasting is a key aspect of RevOps. They allow you to evaluate the revenue your business will generate over a given period.
HubSpot's lifecycle stage definition helps you to evaluate more effectively and with greater granularity your Sales Operations. The data generation and the evaluation of strategic KPIs in each of them will offer you unique opportunities to optimize your business processes, which is critical to any RevOps strategy.
For example: if you know that you have a certain number of contacts in the MQL phase, you can predict with a high degree of accuracy which leads will move to the SQL phase and, ultimately, how many will become customers.
You can use this information to estimate your future revenue and make informed, realistic and intelligent resource allocation decisions. In doing so, you can improve forecasts and actual results. You can even evaluate possible inconsistencies between different estimates and find gaps in revenue generation. Defining lifecycle stages in HubSpot therefore allows you to identify revenue generation optimization opportunities that would otherwise be invisible.
Increased opportunities for communication and collaboration between operational areas
Cross-team communication and collaboration have a direct impact on your business' revenue generation. It is, therefore, a major aspect for RevOps.
Defining lifecycle stages in HubSpot increases opportunities for collaboration (and access to valuable information) between Marketing, Sales and Customer Service teams. Opportunities that would otherwise not be done, or would be done inefficiently.
For example, to generate experiences that delight your customers, your Customer Service department may find it useful to ask the Sales and Marketing teams (or consult directly the information) about specific customer needs identified in the MQL and SQL phases. Also, this department, based on its experience, can communicate to the other areas possible optimization opportunities in the different phases of the lifecycle contact strategies.
Conclusion
HubSpot's lifecycle stages provide your Sales Operations with a clear and structured way to organize your leads in your pipelines, based on their relationship with your business.
Using it streamlines the overall sales process. Specifically, it improves lead qualification, sales and revenue forecasting, makes communication and collaboration between teams easier, and allows you to make intelligent decisions based on data analysis.
We can therefore conclude that defining lifecycle stages in HubSpot enables you to:
- Create excellent contact experiences for your leads and customers. It allows you to improve conversions and loyalty rates.
- Develop excellent, efficient and productive experiences for your Sales Operations team. It implements more efficient and user-friendly procedures.
- Optimize sales processes and improve your revenue generation.
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