The Catalyst Stack - Aug 1, 2025

INTRO
Welcome to This Week’s The Catalyst Stack

We’ve been helping a client recently define how and when to advance lifecycle stages in HubSpot, along with how to use the lead status property effectively. It’s a topic that’s been top of mind, especially since many businesses skip this setup early on, only to face reporting gaps and workflow issues down the line. This week’s Catalyst Stack takes a closer look at how to get it right from the start.

CRM & Sales Enablement
Lifecycle Stages vs Lead Status: Setting Them Up Right the First Time

If you’ve ever looked at your HubSpot contact list and felt unsure about what stage someone is in, you’re not alone. Many small and mid-sized businesses adopt HubSpot quickly but skip the hard work of defining lifecycle stages and lead statuses upfront. That might seem harmless at first, but it creates problems over time, especially when it comes to segmentation, reporting, and marketing automation.

Let’s walk through what these two fields actually mean, how to define them clearly, and why getting this right early will save you time and frustration later.

What’s the Difference?

Lifecycle stage is a default property in HubSpot that tracks where a contact is in their relationship with your business. It follows the full journey from someone discovering your company to eventually becoming a customer or even an advocate.

Lead status, on the other hand, is more specific. It helps your sales team track where a sales-ready contact stands within the qualification process. It’s more of a working status used once the lead is actively being pursued.

Both fields are valuable, but they serve different purposes. Lifecycle stage drives reporting, segmentation, and campaign eligibility. Lead status supports day-to-day sales activity and follow-up management.

Why You Need Clear Stage Definitions

You don’t want team members guessing when to move someone from a lead to an MQL. That kind of inconsistency can throw off your entire pipeline. You need clearly defined criteria that explain when a contact is promoted from one stage to the next.

For example, you might decide that someone becomes a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) when they meet your target customer profile and engage with your content. A Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) might require a discovery call or internal sales vetting. Once an opportunity is created in HubSpot, that contact’s lifecycle stage should be promoted to “Opportunity” automatically.

These rules should be documented, agreed upon by sales and marketing, and revisited occasionally to make sure they still reflect your actual process.

Automate Stage Changes to Keep It Clean

Once your definitions are in place, the next step is automation. HubSpot workflows make it easy to update lifecycle stages based on behavior or form input. That way, your team doesn’t need to do it manually.

This is important because without automation, contacts get stuck in the wrong stage or never move at all. You lose visibility into what’s working, and your data becomes unreliable. Automating stage transitions ensures your reporting is accurate and that marketing campaigns only target the right segments.

Why It Matters for Segmentation and Reporting

Lifecycle stages are critical for smart segmentation. If you want to run a nurture campaign to re-engage cold leads, you need to know who those people are. If you want to personalize a newsletter to only go to MQLs or SQLs, your data needs to reflect those groups correctly.

The same goes for reporting. You can’t measure conversion rates between lifecycle stages if your definitions are unclear or inconsistently applied. Clean data lets you track performance, identify bottlenecks, and make better decisions.

Don’t Overlook Lead Status

Even though lifecycle stage gets more attention, lead status is just as important once a contact becomes an SQL. It helps sales teams stay organized and gives management visibility into follow-up efforts before a deal is opened.

Lead status should mirror your actual sales process. You don’t need twenty variations, but you should be able to distinguish whether someone is new, actively being worked, on hold, or disqualified. Just be careful not to confuse lead status with deal stages. Lead status is meant for contacts in the early part of the journey - typically those in the Lead, MQL, or SQL lifecycle stages. Once a contact becomes an Opportunity, it’s time to track progress through deal stages. At that point, they’re no longer just a lead, and using lead status beyond that stage can create confusion and clutter your CRM.

Final Thoughts

Getting lifecycle stage and lead status right isn’t glamorous, but it’s foundational. It supports automation, drives campaign targeting, and makes your CRM more useful to everyone on the team. If you take the time to define your stages clearly and build automation around them, your sales and marketing teams will thank you. And more importantly, your pipeline will actually reflect reality.