HubSpot Lifecycle Stages are a fundamental organizing principle of HubSpot, but they also are one of the most understood, underrated, and underutilized tools in the HubSpot arsenal.
Whenever I work with a new client, I can tell a lot about the state of their HubSpot account just by looking at their usage of Lifecycle Stages. When set up and optimized properly in HubSpot, Lifecycle Stages create a fluid and seamless flow of prospects, leads, and customers that integrates with every department for optimal functionality and accurate reporting. When it’s not utilized or implemented correctly, it can be a disorganized mess of fields with partially automated systems that cause confusion, inaccurate reports, and inefficient marketing efforts.
How can you send the right message if you’re not reaching the right people at the right time?
HubSpot's Lifecycle Stages can seem complex or even overwhelming, even for seasoned HubSpot users. However, understanding and properly configuring this field is crucial for maintaining an organized, efficient CRM. Effective use of lifecycle stages ensures clear communication across your teams, accurate reporting, targeted automation, and a streamlined approach to managing leads and customers. This article will demystify lifecycle stages, providing you with the clarity and practical insights needed to leverage this essential HubSpot component for optimal results.
Let’s start with the basics. What are these stages anyway?
Anytime you look at your HubSpot contacts to organize, consolidate, or report, you’ll find the lifecycle stages. These fields are at the core of HubSpot’s philosophy of inbound marketing, and why they excel at converting cold strangers into paying customers, and eventually to enthusiastic advocates.
Lifecycle stages are designed to correlate to the phases of your customer journey. They are attached to each contact from the point of when they are captured by marketing, until they are super fans of your brand or product, sharing it with everyone they know.
Within your customer journey, HubSpot provides eight default lifecycle stages out of the box: Subscriber, Lead, Marketing Qualified Lead, Sales Qualified Lead, Opportunity, Customer, Evangelist, and Other.
These predefined stages offer a straightforward starting point, especially when you’re first adopting HubSpot. Each of these stages translates a specific point in your customer's journey towards becoming a buyer:
| Lifecycle Stage | Definition/Customer Journey |
|---|---|
| Subscriber | Shared an email to receive your content; earliest sign of interest. |
| Lead | Engaged beyond a sign-up (e.g., form fill, event chat); basic intent shown. |
| Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) | Met marketing’s threshold for high intent (demo request, quote, etc.). |
| Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) | Vetted by sales as a real prospect and ready for direct outreach. |
| Opportunity | Linked to an active deal; budget, timeline, or scope under discussion. |
| Customer | Closed-won deal completed; officially doing business with you. |
| Evangelist | Delighted customer who actively advocates—reviews, referrals, case studies. |
| Other | Important non-sales contacts (vendors, partners, media, staff, competitors). |
Lifecycle stages can be easily edited, customized, or expanded to better fit your unique sales and marketing workflows. Whether you stick with the default stages or create custom ones, correctly configured lifecycle stages are essential for accurate reporting, streamlined lead generation, effective automation, and cohesive alignment between your sales and marketing teams.
Let’s start by learning about each of the stages and how they relate to your customer journey.
Again, eight lifecycle stages in HubSpot include: Subscriber, Lead, Marketing Qualified Lead, Sales Qualified Lead, Opportunity, Customer, Evangelist, and Other.
Here’s a little more on each in detail, and how these categorizations can support your existing customer journey and sales funnel.
A subscriber is someone who has given you their email address. Whether through a blog subscription, website form, marketing link, or directly through conversation, this lifecycle stage represents people who are interested to hear more from you, but have no commitment to your brand or product.
Subscribers often enter your CRM by engaging with your content marketing or subject matter expertise. These individuals are typically at the early stages of exploring your offerings, so delivering consistent, high-quality content is essential to nurture their interest until they're ready to take a more meaningful action.
Our Take on the Subscriber Stage
This lifecycle stage is most valuable when your business regularly produces subscription-worthy content like blogs, newsletters, or helpful guides. If your marketing strategy doesn’t include consistent content delivery, the Subscriber stage may not be necessary or impactful for your CRM organization (remember this just a default lifecycle stage). Consider your content strategy carefully before deciding to actively use this stage.
For any contact who has interacted with your brand beyond providing an email address, they are classified as a Lead. HubSpot will automatically organize contacts as leads from lead forms, external CRM’s, or email contacts in Gmail or Outlook.
You can also manually enter contacts as leads for people you meet at events, conferences, or trade shows. Leads have shown some interest (and likely, minimal interest) by engaging with you, but they’re still luke-warm.
In relation to the buyer’s journey (Awareness, Consideration, Decision), Leads are aware of the pain and problem, and are just starting to look at your business to see if you have a solution to solve it for them.
Our Take on the Lead Stage
For most businesses, the Lead stage serves as the default entry point for new contacts. We often see companies rename this stage to "Prospect," particularly when implementing Account-Based Marketing (ABM) or conducting cold outbound sales efforts. Using this stage effectively helps clearly differentiate contacts who show initial interest from those who have only passively subscribed to content.
When a Lead moves clearly into the Consideration stage of the buyer’s journey by taking an action like requesting a quote, asking for a product demo, or opting to be contacted when downloading a guide, they are moved into HubSpot’s Marketing Qualified Lead Lifecycle Stage.
The key to the MQL Stage is to have a clear definition of the actions that determine if someone is ready to be handed to the sales team. This will vary depending on your business and product, but there should be some factors in place to verify that this is a contact who truly wants to speak to a sales representative.
This status is not automatically applied by HubSpot, so it’s up to your marketing team to accurately identify potential leads, and qualify them for sales with the MQL categorization. This verification can be as brief as getting additional information from the lead for an effective sales call (name, phone number, title, address), or as thorough and systematic as having reached a specific place in your sales funnel. Whatever you decide, it’s important to have clear indicators for your marketing team to properly qualify leads to optimize time and efficiency.
We see many organizations actively leveraging the Marketing Qualified Lead stage. Typically, this is the first stage reflecting direct, proactive engagement by the contact, such as initiating a chat, submitting a form, emailing, or calling directly. Because these contacts often result from deliberate marketing initiatives, the MQL stage provides a critical benchmark for measuring the effectiveness of your marketing activities. It allows businesses to accurately track how many marketing-generated leads move forward through the funnel and become genuine sales opportunities.
Once your sales team has interacted with an MQL and determined that the contact could be a potential customer, they can be categorized as a Sales Qualified Lead, or SQL.
Similar to the MQL stage, this lifecycle stage should have clear quantifiable qualifications to be designated as an SQL in HubSpot. To do this accurately, HubSpot offers an additional function of Lead Status "within" this lifecycle stage. This can help your sales team track an email contact’s progress through the sales funnel with accurate, accessible information for the entire team.
Most organizations retain the Sales Qualified Lead stage due to its strategic importance in the sales cycle—it typically represents the final lifecycle stage before formalizing a deal or creating a proposal. SQLs are contacts your sales team is actively nurturing and directly engaging, though they may not yet be ready to receive an official proposal or quote. This stage is particularly beneficial for companies with longer sales cycles, where leads require substantial nurturing before moving to the Opportunity stage. Accurately identifying and managing SQLs is critical, as the number of SQLs you generate often directly influences how many genuine sales opportunities—and ultimately, customers—you secure
A contact in the Opportunity stage of HubSpot’s Lifecycle has officially entered the “real” sales conversation. This means that they are in contact with your sales team, and you know who the decision maker is, along with their budget, timeline, and the product they’re interested in.
HubSpot offers specific automation that moves contacts automatically from a previous lifecycle stage—typically SQL—to Opportunity when an associated deal is created. This automation simplifies your lifecycle stage management by cleanly advancing contacts who have entered a tangible sales discussion and are officially linked to a deal within HubSpot.
We consistently see organizations retain the Opportunity stage (or a similarly named stage like "Proposal" or "Quote") due to its critical role in sales tracking and lead management. Not all Opportunities will become Customers, making it essential to monitor these contacts closely. Those who don’t immediately convert into sales represent an incredibly valuable pool for future nurturing and remarketing, often becoming prime candidates for generating additional opportunities later on.
A contact is automatically categorized as a Customer in HubSpot once they are associated with a "Closed Won" deal. While HubSpot allows you to designate any deal stage as "Won" under its deal probability settings, we typically see most organizations use a single, clearly defined "Closed Won" stage for consistency and clarity.
Activating HubSpot’s built-in automation for lifecycle stages simplifies CRM management, eliminating the need to manually update contact statuses or build custom workflows. It seamlessly utilizes deal data to manage contact statuses automatically. Having accurate Customer data is essential, as it serves as a critical measurement point in your sales management process, clearly tracking the number of deals created versus those successfully closed.
We see companies consistently maintain the "Customer" lifecycle stage because it inherently captures contacts who have successfully completed at least one deal. Keeping this stage clearly defined is crucial because it marks the highest level of engagement and conversion achieved. The Customer stage is essential for accurate segmentation, streamlined reporting, effective account management, and ongoing marketing efforts targeted toward existing customers.
The Evangelist lifecycle stage represents contacts who have not only become customers but have also been genuinely delighted with their experience. These contacts often maintain a particularly close relationship with your organization and can represent the pinnacle of the customer journey. Evangelists might be ideal candidates for case studies, testimonials, social proof, or references in future sales conversations, clearly demonstrating the successful outcomes your products or services deliver.
Of all the lifecycle stages, we see the Evangelist stage used least frequently, primarily because its definition varies widely from organization to organization. For a SaaS company, an evangelist might simply be someone who leaves an enthusiastic product review. In other cases, evangelists may represent highly valuable relationships, instrumental for demonstrating results to prospective customers or for providing references.
This stage is also valuable for managing relationships strategically—such as ensuring these valued contacts receive tailored communication and are not mistakenly re-targeted with standard sales offers. Alternative names we often see organizations using for this stage include “Champion,” “Promoter,” or “Ally,” each reflecting the specific relationship dynamics businesses want to nurture.
If a contact or company doesn’t fit neatly into any of the standard lifecycle stages, the Other stage is the ideal place for them. These contacts typically cannot be directly sold to, or they exist outside of your usual sales cycle but remain important to retain within HubSpot. We recommend adding a custom secondary field to further categorize these contacts clearly, such as vendor, influencer, media contact, staff, competitor, or supplier.
This lifecycle stage is essentially a catch-all category, but it can still be effectively leveraged to ensure your contact list remains organized and meaningful.
A Lifecycle stage is a broad categorization of leads based on their engagement with your company. The Lifecycle stage refers to where a lead is in the buying process. Conversely, Lead Status reflects what has happened with that lead. It can be one of five statuses: New, Open, In Progress, Open Deal, Unqualified, Attempted to Contact, Connected, and Bad Timing.
Each status captures the necessary actions sales reps take with leads to move them through the funnel.
Short answer: No.
Longer answer: use the HubSpot lifecycle stages that best fit your marketing strategy. We recommend including Lead, Opportunity, and Customer, but sometimes you won't find as good a fit for MQL, SQL, Other, Subscriber, or Evangelist. You can always update what lifecycle stages you're using in your strategy later on.
It also helps that HubSpot lets you create and customize lifecycle stages and adjust automation as needed. You can add new stages (like "lost customer") or delete unused stages, and even adjust default stages with rules that are specific to your company.
The goal of these lifecycle stages is to streamline the sales process and communication between departments. You want to be sure the right people are receiving relevant content and information, while making sure your valuable resources in marketing and sales are being utilized efficiently.
It’s not required that you use every single lifecycle stage to make good use of HubSpot’s Lifecycles. In fact, you can leave some of them out if it makes your process more streamlined. You can always add additional stages later as your sales funnel gets more complex, or your team grows and responsibilities are reassigned.
Choose the lifecycle stages that currently work for your sales process, make clear qualifications for those stages, and be consistent. There is a lot more automation and customization that you can add to the HubSpot Lifecycle Stages, but knowing what they are and the basics of how to use them should give you a good start to organize your contacts and streamline your sales process.
Still have questions about HubSpot’s lifecycle stages or looking for guidance to fully optimize your HubSpot setup? Working with a HubSpot expert at Vaulted can simplify even the most complex CRM configurations, helping you unlock your HubSpot account’s full potential. Schedule your free consultation today to discuss how we can help streamline your sales and marketing processes.