Demystifying The Customer Journey: Defining Lifecycle Stages and Lead Status
Understanding the nuances of your customers’ journey is critical to driving meaningful engagement and ensuring a smooth transition from interest to loyalty.
Two key components of managing this journey are lifecycle stages and lead status. While often discussed together, they serve distinct purposes in guiding sales and marketing strategies. In this post, we’ll demystify the difference between these two concepts and offer insights into how they work together to help you nurture relationships and convert leads effectively.
How they work together
When Lifecycle Stages and Lead Status are used together, they provide a comprehensive view of where a contact stands in the overall customer journey and the sales pipeline. For instance, while a contact might be categorized as a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) within a Lifecycle Stage, their Lead Status could show they are “Attempting to Contact.” This layered approach allows sales and marketing teams to better align their strategies—marketing can nurture leads based on their lifecycle stage, while sales can prioritize their outreach efforts based on real-time lead status. By integrating both concepts, businesses can ensure that no opportunity is overlooked and that each contact receives the appropriate level of attention at the right time.
Here's a closer look at how we define Lifecycle Stages in Lead Status.
Lifecycle Stages:
Lifecycle stages represent the key phases your contacts experience as they progress from a potential lead to a loyal client. These stages indicate where a contact stands in their overall relationship with your business.
Common lifecycle stages might include:
Subscriber: Someone who has signed up to receive updates through your blog or newsletter service (for example), but hasn't engaged further.
Lead: A person who has shown interest in your product or service, typically through an action like filling out a form or visiting with you at a conference.
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): A lead deemed more likely to become a customer based on specific criteria or actions. We sometimes call these contacts "self qualified" because they reached out to you through a contact form, phone call, or possibly through a referral.
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL): These contacts are being pursued by an Inside Sales Team and have been vetted to be ready for direct sales follow-up. A lead may stay in this stage for a period of time while determining their fit with your business.
Opportunity: These contacts are actively speaking with your sales team, an associated deal (with a real dollar amount) has been entered into your sales pipeline, and we are working towards closing on new business.
Customer: A contact associated with a Closed/Won deal.
Evangelist (optional): This is a special category that can be used for those contacts who strongly advocate for your brand such as a key partner, former customer, reseller, etc.
Other: Depending on the business, there might be other specific stages that are needed to categorize contacts not associated with your sales pipeline. This may include non-qualified leads, competitors, media, job applicants, staff members, etc.
Custom Lifecycle Stages: We've seen many scenarios where additional stages are needed to classify contacts who may not neatly fit in the stages mentioned above. This may include contacts being researched Customers who are not currently active, etc.
Lead Status:
Lead status is more detailed, reflecting specific actions or the current status of a sales lead at any given moment. Sales teams typically use them to monitor a lead's progress and level of engagement as they queue them up in their opportunity pipeline.
Common lead statuses might include:
New: A lead that has just been captured and not yet contacted.
Open: A lead that has been assigned to a sales team member, but there’s no further action yet.
Attempting to Contact: The sales team has reached out, but hasn’t yet connected.
Connected: Direct contact has been made, and there's some preliminary level of engagement through an initial meeting, phone call, or email correspondence. In certain scenarios, communications through tools such as LinkedIn messaging may count towards being connected to a lead.
In Progress: Active engagement is happening, such as ongoing conversations or a demo being scheduled. Once a lead has reached "In Progress" — they may stay in this stage through out the sales process.
Bad Timing: The lead could be interested but isn’t ready to move forward at this time.
Unqualified: A lead that has been deemed not a good fit for your product or service and will no longer be pursued by sales. Consider if it's important to return this lead to marketing for recycling efforts.
Disqualified: Similar to unqualified, but with a clear reason for why the lead isn’t pursued further.
What are the key differences between Lifecycle Stages and Lead Status?
Scope: Lifecycle stages encompass the entire customer journey, from the initial contact to becoming a loyal customer. Lead statuses are more focused on the sales process and indicate the current action or status of a lead.
Granularity: Lifecycle stages are broader, overarching categories, while lead statuses are more detailed and specific to the sales interaction.
Purpose: Lifecycle stages guide marketing and sales teams in understanding a contact's journey and customizing communication. Lead statuses assist sales teams in managing daily interactions and prioritizing their efforts effectively.
In Summary:
Mastering both lifecycle stages and lead status allows businesses to better understand where a contact stands in the customer journey and fine-tune their outreach accordingly. By clearly defining and applying these elements, you can create a seamless process for tracking engagement, fostering connections, and ultimately driving growth.