What is a lifecycle stage?
A lifecycle stage is used to represent the different phases a contact or company goes through in their journey from initial awareness to becoming a loyal customer and beyond. Each stage signifies a specific level of engagement and interaction with your business. By defining and tracking these lifecycle stages, businesses can better understand where each contact stands in their customer journey, enabling more targeted and effective marketing and sales strategies. Lifecycle stages provide a structured framework for managing relationships, ensuring that communications and actions are relevant and timely, ultimately leading to improved customer experiences and business outcomes.
Understanding and effectively managing the lifecycle stages of your Contacts and Companies in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) can elevate the relationship and activities that occur between marketing and sales teams. These various stages help you categorize and track the progress of your Contacts, ensuring that each interaction is timely and appropriate to their position in your sales funnel.
Why Lifecycle Stages Are Important
Lifecycle stages are crucial for:
Tracking Progress: By monitoring how contacts move through your marketing or sales process, you can identify bottlenecks and opportunities for improvement.
Understanding Hand-offs: Clearly defined lifecycle stages help delineate the transition from marketing to sales, ensuring that leads are handed off at the right time.
Enhancing Lead Nurturing: By understanding where a lead is in their customer journey, you can tailor your engagement strategies to be more effective.
Common Lifecycle Stages
Even though lifecycle stages can differ from one company to another, the most frequently used stages, like the ones our team at Inveniv relies on, include:
Subscriber: An individual interested enough in the organization to follow and receive all news, stories, events, press releases, promotions, or any other company communications.
Lead: A person showing general interest in the company by exploring products/solutions and engaging through various forms. Leads can be categorized by their level of engagement (Hot, Warm, Cold).
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): A highly engaged lead showing serious interest through inquiries, most commonly through a contact form submission. They are determined to solve a challenge or fulfill a need. We will sometimes calls these Contacts “self qualified leads”.
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL): A lead with proven demand, a specific timeline, and budget, ready to engage. They begin the process of contract negotiations.
Opportunity: The prospect is actively discussing a deal or opportunity with Sales. The key here is that the Contact and Company are working with a defined budget. Negotiations continue through to Closed Won/Closed Lost. When a deal is “Closed Lost”, we find it to be important to recycle the Contact and reset their Lifecycle Stage back to Lead after a certain amount of time.
Customer: The deal has been won. The customer actively works with the business by receiving products and/or services, presenting opportunities for education and re-engagement.
Evangelist: A customer who champions and advocates for the company providing opportunities for co-marketing, business referrals, and various forms of partnership.
Customizing Lifecycle Stages
It's important to note that lifecycle stages are not a one-size-fits-all solution. Each company may have unique stages reflecting their specific customer journey. An effective marketing and sales alignment strategy hinges on a deep understanding of the customer lifecycle tailored to your business. By customizing these stages, you can ensure that your CRM reflects the realities of your customer interactions, leading to more efficient and effective marketing and sales efforts.
Conclusion
By leveraging lifecycle stages, businesses can gain a clearer picture of their customer journey, streamline their marketing and sales processes, and ultimately drive more conversions and higher customer satisfaction. Customizing these stages to fit your unique business needs will ensure that your CRM system works for you, providing actionable insights and fostering better alignment between marketing and sales teams.
