Should You Change Your HubSpot Lifecycle Stages?

TABLE OF CONTENTS
HubSpot’s Lifecycle Stages   |   Lead Status vs Lifecycle Stage   |   How to Edit Lifecycle Stages   |
When to Customize

Is there any HubSpot feature more misunderstood than the lifecycle stage property? When we get questions about how to improve HubSpot reporting, the first thing we review is how the client is using lifecycle stages.

HubSpot’s default property doesn't always match their specific customer journey, leading them to create custom properties or manually force contacts backward through the stages, essentially disabling some of HubSpot’s most valuable reports.

Because of these limitations, HubSpot customers can customize the original property by adding, removing, or even rearranging stages. But is a customized property really necessary? Or are you better off going with the default lifecycle stages? Let’s get into it!

What Are HubSpot’s Lifecycle Stages?

At first, customizing the property seems like an easy choice. But to know if it’s the right choice for your organization, let's first go back to the basics and explore the stages that already exist in HubSpot.

Subscriber

These are contacts who’ve signed up for your blog or newsletter but haven’t indicated any real interest in your brand, products, or services yet.

Lead

Leads are contacts who’ve shown some initial interest but are still early in the awareness stage. This can include lead form submissions, a sync from Salesforce, or preliminary conversations via email or in person.

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)

This is where things get a little complicated. There are two schools of thought here:

1. Contacts who’ve already been qualified by the marketing team and are being worked by sales to be further qualified
2. Contacts who’ve begun engaging more with your content, have shown stronger interest, and are actively being qualified by the marketing team before becoming a sales-qualified lead. In this case, this stage would function more as “marketing qualifying” rather than “marketing qualified.”

This stage is often underutilized or skipped altogether, especially when there isn’t a clearly defined handoff between marketing and sales, or if there's misalignment between the two teams. At this point, however, the prospect is typically defined as being in the consideration stage of their buyer’s journey.

Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)

Similarly, there are two different approaches to the SQL definition based on how your team handles the MQL stage. Ultimately, SQLs should be contacts who have shown true sales readiness and defined a problem that can be solved by your product or service.

Through this stage, both you and your prospects should be able to decide if you are a good fit for each other.

Opportunity

These are contacts actively in the sales process with a high probability of closing. They’re including their final decision-makers in conversations and should be aligned with the proposed budget and timeline (as needed).

Customer

Customers are contacts who have closed, whether they've completed a signed agreement, received their purchase, or made some other clear indication that they’ve committed to your product or service.

Evangelist

These are contacts who are so thrilled with their purchase or partnership with you that they’re now promoting you to others. Even if there isn’t an opportunity for upselling or additional purchases, these contacts can reach leads who may not find you otherwise.

Other

This label is meant for contacts who don’t fit into any of the other stages, including job applicants, vendors, employees, or even competitors.

These stages can initially seem pretty straightforward, but they get more complicated when applied to the ways your team is already working with contacts.

While not mandatory to utilize all stages for lifecycle funnel reports, every contact must have a defined lifecycle stage assigned. New contacts are automatically assigned a lifecycle stage upon being added to HubSpot.

Therefore, the most important thing to remember is that these stages are only supposed to represent forward progress in the buyer’s journey. It can be tempting to manually update a contact’s lifecycle stage when a lead cools off, for example, but that’s where lead statuses can help.

HubSpot Lead Status vs Lifecycle Stage

Lead statuses are best defined as individual activities that could contribute to moving a prospect through the buyer’s journey.

While both lifecycle stages and deal stages should only make progress forward through the funnel, lead statuses are much more flexible. Contacts can jump forward or backward, skip statuses altogether, and even enter into the same statuses while in different lifecycle or deal stages.

This property can also be used to segment prospects into different marketing audiences or help your sales team prioritize their outreach.

How to Edit Lifecycle Stages in HubSpot

Now that we’ve got the basics down, we can explore the considerations when adding, removing, renaming, or rearranging your lifecycle stages in HubSpot.

No matter what your buyer’s journey actually looks like, your HubSpot lifecycle stages can be set to match. For example, if your team doesn’t use the MQL stage, you can remove it. If you have a more involved sales process, you can add new, personalized stages.

As with nearly any other property, you can update your lifecycle stages manually. In your Settings menu, navigate to the Data Management section, then Objects, and finally to Contacts. There, you’ll see a tab for Lifecycle Stages (pictured here):

After you scroll, you’ll be able to modify your lifecycle stages as you see fit, as well as set some basic automation.

Editing an Existing Lifecycle Stage

If you’d like to rename any of your current stages, select “Edit” to the right of its name to change it. However, HubSpot will populate a warning:

If you're currently using lifecycle stages to track things like conversion rate, a name change can lead to inaccuracies in your reports. To avoid issues, only change a stage name if the new stage is similar to the old one (like Customer to Client or Lead to Hot Lead). If the stage you want to create is functionally different, create a new stage.

To clarify, HubSpot is recommending that you don’t repurpose an existing stage for something completely different. Instead, you should create a new stage and rearrange it accordingly.

Adding a Lifecycle Stage

Underneath the existing stages, you can select “Add stage” and provide the name for your new stage.

Deleting a Lifecycle Stage

Because everyone in your contact database should have a lifecycle stage defined for them, deleting an existing stage takes a little more legwork. All contacts currently within that stage will need to be migrated elsewhere before you’re able to delete it, as well as any workflows, reporting, or other assets where it’s used.

Rearranging Your Lifecycle Stage

To move your lifecycle stages around, select the group of ten dots to the left of the stage name and drag the stage to your desired position.

Other Lifecycle Stage Changes

• If you’re currently using a custom property for lifecycle stages, it’s recommended that you migrate to the default property and modify it as needed.
• If you’re currently using an API to update your lifecycle stages, you may need to update your integration to use the CRM Properties API to get the details of the property.

When Should You Change Your HubSpot Lifecycle Stages?

While it may seem exciting to have custom lifecycle stages, it doesn’t always make sense to move away from the original.

Pros for changing your lifecycle stages:

• You can now match the lifecycle stages exactly to your buyer’s journey and any related internal processes.
• Any changes you make are reflected across the portal, allowing you to use your custom stages for additional segmentation or filtering.
• Both default and custom reports will expand and contract to accommodate any changes without losing valuable funnel conversion data.

Possible cons of changing your lifecycle stages:

• Migrating contacts to a new lifecycle stage will update the related timestamps with a date unrelated to actual progress through the buyer’s journey.
• Any new stages you add aren’t supported for calculation properties, such as the “Became a (stage) date” property. So, while you’ll be able to see the total conversion rates through your funnel, you’ll lose the ability to see how much time on average your contacts spent in the new phases. This may not be an issue for everyone, but it’s a crucial piece of data for many others.
• Deleting or creating new stages will likely affect numerous reports, which can disrupt your team and make reporting messy.

Do Custom Lifecycle Stages Make Sense for You?

Ultimately, you’ll have to decide with your team whether or not it makes sense to change from HubSpot’s default lifecycle stages.

If you’re just wanting to update the names of each stage to something that makes more sense to you or your team, it’s not likely to cause any problems. But if you’re already feeling limited by HubSpot and hoping this helps, you could end up making things worse.

In any case, working with a trusted HubSpot partner agency or expert will help you determine how to get the most out of your portal and how to best use lifecycle stages — customized or not.

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