Use lifecycle stages

Lifecycle stages help you to categorize your contacts and companies based on where they are in your marketing and sales processes. Using the Lifecycle stage property helps to determine where a specific contact or company is in your processes, and to better understand how leads are handed off between marketing and sales.

There are default lifecycle stages created by HubSpot, but you can also create and customize your own lifecycle stages.

Lifecycle stages

Lifecycle stages are used to track how contacts or companies move forward in your process. Default automatic updates to the lifecycle stage property will only move the stage forward (e.g., no value to Subscriber, Subscriber to Opportunity, etc.). Learn more about how to manually update lifecycle stage values.

The Lifecycle stage property contains the following default stages as options in sequential order:

• Subscriber: a contact that has opted in to hear more from you by signing up for your blog or newsletter.
• Lead: a contact or company that has converted on your website or through some other interaction with your organization beyond a subscription sign up.
• Marketing Qualified Lead: a contact or company that your marketing team has qualified as ready for the sales team.
• Sales Qualified Lead: a contact or company that your sales team has qualified as a potential customer. This stage includes sub-stages that are stored in the Lead Status property.
• Opportunity: a contact or company that is associated with a deal (e.g., they're involved in a potential deal with your organization).
• Customer: a contact or company with at least one closed deal.
• Evangelist: a customer that has advocated for your organization.

• Other: a contact or company that does not fit any of the above stages.

If you'd like to customize these options, learn how to create custom lifecycle stages and edit the default lifecycle stages.

Set up automatic updates to record lifecycle stages

In your HubSpot settings, you can choose to automatically set lifecycle stages in the following ways:

• Set a default lifecycle stage for newly created records.
• Update lifecycle stages based on a record's associations.
• Set a default lifecycle stage for records synced from each connected app.

Update a record's lifecycle stage

While the lifecycle stage can be set based on the record being created or the record's associations, you can also update the Lifecycle stage property manually or via another tool in your HubSpot account. To update the Lifecycle stage property, you can do the following:

• Manually update the Lifecycle stage property for an individual contact or company.
• Bulk update the lifecycle stage of your contacts or companies from an index page.
• Import a Lifecycle stage column to update the Lifecycle stage property for contacts or companies.
• Use the Set [contact/company] property value action in a chatflow.
• Use the Set a property value action in a workflow (Professional or Enterprise accounts only).
  
• Set the lifecycle stage within certain integrated apps that sync the Lifecycle stage property, such as the HubSpot-Salesforce integration.

You can see the source of an update in the Lifecycle stage property history.

Lead Status

• New
• Open
• In Progress
• Open Deal
• Unqualified
• Attempted to Contact
• Connected
• Bad Timing

Learn more about how to use the different lead statuses to manage your sales process. You can also customize this property, or use this property with workflows to automate your sales lead tracking and reporting.