HubSpot Lead Status is designed to help organize your leads and keep them moving forward in your sales cycle. This feature is an element specific to the SQL Lifecycle Stage, or the Sales Qualified Lead.
If you have no idea what this means, it might be worth checking out this thorough overview on HubSpot’s Lifecycle Stages. If you’re familiar and well-versed, let’s jump into Lead Statuses and how they can optimize your sales strategy in HubSpot.
So you have a HubSpot contact who is in the SQL lifecycle stage. As a sales qualified lead, this contact has now officially entered your sales cycle. Congrats! Now what do you do?
Well, assuming you have constructed a sales process for your sales team with some HubSpot automated flows to help guide your new prospect, this contact should receive your initial outreach sequence until they take an action in the sales process like scheduling a sales call, replying to your email, or unsubscribing. If they don’t take action, they’ll need a different sequence of follow-ups to try to establish a connection and an opportunity. Pretty straightforward stuff. But with dozens or hundreds or thousands of new leads coming in everyday at different times and working with different sales reps…how do you know where a contact is in the sales cycle?
The answer lies in HubSpot’s Lead Status.
HubSpot’s Lead Status comes with these eight default sub-stages, or status options:
Like HubSpot’s Lifecycle Stages, Lead Status options can be customized to fit your sales workflow. However, we’ll cover how each of these options are generally used to provide a basic understanding of Lead Status capabilities.
Before we go any further, let's differentiate between HubSpot Lead Status and HubSpot lifecycle stages. Lifecycle stages track how a company or user moves through your sales process (from lead to MQL, etc). A lead status describes one of the substages within the Sales Qualified Lead lifecycle stage.
This is a common source of confusion. Let’s clarify:
Lead Status is a field attached to the Contact object. It’s a dropdown that shows where a prospect is within your sales process.
Leads are an entirely different object in HubSpot, linked to certain contacts, with its own distinct fields. HubSpot also allows customization of lead stages (similar to deal stages).
As of now, Lead Status and Leads don’t talk to each other. By default, HubSpot doesn’t sync information between them.
Why the confusion? HubSpot rolled out Leads and Lead Status at different times in its product evolution. Many accounts set up before 2024 still rely heavily on Lead Status, while newer accounts tend to leverage the Lead object more. Both serve different purposes but are often mistaken as connected because of the overlap in naming.