Deep Dive Part 2

Linear vs. State Data AKA “Why Churned is NOT a Stage”

Welcome back to our HubSpot Deep Dive

In our last installment, we talked about the "Zombie Lead", a churned customer mistakenly re-enrolled as a new lead. Today, we’re gonna look at why that happened.

It comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of CRM architecture: Linear Progress vs. Current State.

1. Lifecycle Stages (The Linear Journey)

Your Lifecycle Stage property should represent a one-way street. A contact moves forward:

• Subscriber → Lead

• Lead → MQL

• MQL → Customer

Ideally, they never move backward. Skipping is also frowned upon, but in a lot of cases, it still happens. Not as big of a deal as skipping deal stages (us HubSpot consultants really don’t like that!")

A customer who cancels is still a customer. Why? because they made it to “Customer”, and therefore don’t fit anywhere else. They are just a former customer.

In short, don’t do this. Please.

2. Status (The Current State)

This is where people get tripped up. Attributes like "Churned," "Delinquent," "Paused," or "Active" are not stages in a funnel. They are temporary states of being. When you make them a lifecycle stage, you are basically building the system to assume you will never get them back. But for many businesses, churned customers come back all the time.

When your customers come back, you don’t want to have put them in a lifecycle stage and have to backtrack. You want to be able to just switch them back to “active”.

The "Churned" Fallacy

When you force "Churned" into a Lifecycle Stage property, you also break two things immediately:

1. Reporting: Funnel conversion rates rely on linear progression. Moving a contact from Customer → Churned isn't a conversion; it’s a reversion. It messes up your conversion percentages and breaks your funnel visualization.

2. Automation: If "Churned" is a stage, you have to build suppression logic into every other workflow. You force yourself to say, "Enroll MQLs, but only if they aren't Churned."

The Fix

Keep your Lifecycle Stage pure. Use a separate custom property (e.g., "Account Status") to handle the state of the relationship.

But even with the right properties, your workflows can still betray you. In the next email, we’ll discuss the most dangerous button in HubSpot: "Is None Of."

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