Difference between life cycle stages and lead statuses

[jrineakter]

Understanding your leads and where they are in the buyer’s journey is crucial to creating effective marketing strategies. Two common ways to track leads are through lifecycle stages and lead statuses. While these two terms may seem interchangeable, they serve different purposes in your marketing efforts.

In this blog post, we’ll explore the differences between lifecycle stages and lead statuses, how they work together, and why it’s important to have a clear understanding of both for successful lead management.

Stages of the life cycle
In the marketing and sales process, lifecycle stage refers to the different stages a lead goes through on their journey to becoming a customer. Some companies designate unique lifecycle stages based on the nature of their business, but HubSpot defines the different lifecycle stages as follows:

Acquisition Strategy - Smartbound

The first stage of the lifecycle, “Subscriber,” refers to someone who has subscribed to one of your channels to receive regular updates about your company. This could be an email newsletter subscriber, a blog subscriber, or even a social media follower.

Leads are contacts who have been determined to be potential customers. As you can see in the image above, there are several stages of the lead lifecycle: standard leads, marketing brazil telegram users mobile phone number list qualified leads (MQLs), and sales qualified leads (SQLs). Some brands choose to simply use statuses like “lead” and “qualified lead.”

These designations are different from lead statuses, which we’ll discuss later.

Opportunities represent high-quality leads who are ready to buy, while customers represent contacts who have already made a purchase.

Why are life cycle stages important?
The goal of assigning a lifecycle stage to each lead is to help marketers understand where each lead is in the buying process and tailor their marketing efforts accordingly. By tracking leads throughout their lifecycle stages, marketers can more effectively nurture them with targeted messaging and content that meets their unique needs and interests at each stage of the journey.

For example, a lead is only a lead if they have interacted with the business and fit their profile. They don’t become marketing-qualified customers until they indicate at least some interest in what the business has to offer based on their marketing efforts.

This brings us to lead statuses.

Lead status
A lead's status refers to its current position in the sales process. The goal of assigning a status to each lead is to help sales teams prioritize their efforts and focus on the leads that are most likely to become customers.

By tracking leads through their various statuses, sales teams can identify which leads require further nurturing or follow-up and which leads are ready for more direct engagement. Additionally, lead statuses can provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of your marketing efforts by revealing patterns in lead behavior and conversion rates across different stages of the sales process .

HubSpot has default lead statuses, starting with "new," that can be applied to leads manually or added based on triggers in automated workflows . Both HubSpot's lifecycle stages and lead statuses can be edited and customized to fit your business's needs.

These statuses are incredibly useful for keeping your sales team informed about how leads have been contacted and how they have responded.

For example, a new lead is ready to be contacted or nurtured further. They could be enrolled in an automated drip campaign to encourage them to engage further or sign up for an event.

An open lead has shown enough interest to sign up for something, such as a demo or webinar. An open offer, meanwhile, represents a sales opportunity because the lead has expressed interest in purchasing your products or services but hasn’t yet decided whether or not to buy.