Creating a customer lifecycle overview in HubSpot
Creating a list of your customers in HubSpot.
It sounds super logical and basic (and it is) but there are several ways to get a clear and up to date overview of your active customers in HubSpot.
At the very start you want to have an accurate and up to date view of all your customers in HubSpot. It’s best to do this on the company object. This is like the basis where you can store all customer information. You can enrich this object by adding data in properties or in associated objects like contacts, deals, tickets or custom objects.
As a first step it’s important to create a list of companies in HubSpot that are your current, paying customers. The easiest way to do this is by updating the ‘Customer lifecycle’ property to “customer”. This is a default property value in HubSpot. However you might want to add extra stages.
Adding extra life cycle stages:
Add extra lifecycle stages in this property beyond ‘customer’. It’s a bit weird that HubSpot has 5 default stages for an account before becoming a customer and only 2 after becoming a customer (customer & evangelist).
At the very least you should add ‘old customer’ to map all your churned customers.
Based on your way of working you can also choose to add extra lifecycle stages.
There are 2 main ways of doing this.
Add extra values to the customer lifecycle stage property
Tip: add ‘customer before every phase so you can still easily filter on customers in HubSpot by searching for all the values containing the word ‘customer’)
Customer - Onboarding
Customer - Adoption
Customer - Value
etc
2. Create a new property called ‘customer phase’ or ‘customer journey’ and add your stages.
Onboarding
Adoption
Value
Etc
Updating the customer lifecyle property
From prospect to customer
You can either do this manually but HubSpot has a pre configured automation where the customer lifecycle stage is updated to customer if an associated deal is closed won.
Check out this HubSpot article that explains how to auto update customer lifecycle stages.
From customer to old customer
Either change this manually when a customer churns but better is to set an automation depending how you track renewals in HubSpot. Basically you want to update the customer lifecycle stage to ‘churned or old customer’ when the customer has not renewed.
A common way on how to do this is by creating an automation where if a renewal deal is closed lost; the customer lifecycle stage is updated to ‘old/churned customer’.
