Trap: Be Careful with Forms Overwriting Lifecycle Stages

📢Announcement: Contact And Company Board Views

The deal-stage-based kanban board view has always been the default and most popular sales command center. In the past few years, they added some analytics to the top of it. But if you get used to it, you might ask yourself, why can’t I see companies and contacts in that way?

Well now you can. It’s in beta, here’s how to sign up:

✅ Tip

Quick fix for a common HubSpot headache.

Add a Task or a Notification to Crucial Workflows

In a perfect world, every workflow would do an intended set of actions and nothing would ever go wrong. Using HubSpot would be awesome there. But in our world, there are always edge cases.

For workflows that are critical to some function of sales/marketing/service/ops/etc., I usually add a task or notification to the “none met” side of an if/then branch.

This will catch edge cases and notify me, or someone else who has been assigned to reviewing them for cleanliness and consistency.

Now your workflow does it’s thing for the people who have the expected properties, but notifies you when an object doesn’t “fit in” with the rest.

⚠️ Trap

Mistake to avoid before it causes chaos.

Be Careful with Forms Overwriting Lifecycle Stages

A loyal customer downloads an ebook and suddenly their lifecycle stage reverts to "Lead," wrecking your reporting. This common trap occurs when a form submission automatically overwrites a contact's existing, more advanced stage.

• This is especially dangerous for contacts who are already "Opportunity," "Customer," or even "Evangelist."

• To prevent this, use a workflow for your form submissions instead of the default form settings.

• In the workflow, add an enrollment filter that excludes anyone whose lifecycle stage is already Customer (or any later stage), protecting your most valuable contacts.

🔄 Try

Something small to test or improve this week.

Show Deal Progression with a Stacked Bar Report
This is a quick way to see if any deals are lagging behind the pack, or if any are moving faster than others.

I use the single-object report builder to keep it simple. I display “Deal Create Date” and “Deal Stage” by Count of Deals, on a horizontal bar chart. Then I click on stacked bars.

A deal created 3 months ago is still in an early stage? A deal created this week is about to close? Now you can quickly find and investigate anomalies like that.

👋 Need a Spot?

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