Hello. I'm Frank Devine, solutions engineer here at RevPartners. And today, I wanna make a quick video for all the rev ops, sales ops, marketing ops peers out there coming out of a role where I was a team of one. I wish I had this kind of information, and that's why I wanted to share it with you today.

So let me ask you this. How many times have you been in a training with sales team, BDR team, account executive team, and you were presenting a slide like this? What are life cycle stages? What's the difference between MQL and SQL?

And you begged them to then maintain these on your contacts, on your deals in in the CRM.

It's really important, guys. Come on. We're gonna make some good metrics. But, ultimately, those meetings really never led to the outcomes that you wanted. And I know it's hard, but life cycle stages are incredibly important. It's so much more than a drop down field and a bunch of values and definitions.

And this is an actual playbook that we execute for about ninety nine percent of our clients because it is that important. I wanted to show you guys why. Quickly, I'm going to walk through more of the why behind life cycle stages before we get into the how. Now for the sake of time for this video, I'm not gonna go through the definition of every one of these different terms. But if I mention something that you're not aware of and you have questions, please drop it in the comments below. I definitely wanna help you understand what we're trying to achieve here.

So like I said, life cycle stages really become foundational to your data model within your CRM.

Now we at RevPartners like to leverage this bow tie model created by Learning by Design. And what it does is it helps us visualize the experience of the buyer's journey from the time that they become aware, purchase decision all the way through renewal and expansion. As you can see here at the top, your life cycle stages map to each stage of this journey.

Here in the bottom section, there's a lot of detail and it's kinda small, but this is the creation of the metrics that are going to turn life cycle stages from a field into the way that you answer questions about the performance of your business.

Conversion rates, volume of leads at each stage, the time that it takes to move from one stage to the next. These metrics are gonna be key to you being able to understand the performance and communicate that effectively to leadership across the organization. So let's look at it quickly here in HubSpot. You can find life cycle stages by coming to the gear icon, going to settings, dropping down into to objects and selecting contacts.

It'll take you to the setup page and they can click over to life cycle stages. So life cycle stages is laid out here. You can see all of the different values in the list. Depending on your business, you can customize this to you guys.

You can personalize the values and you can add or remove options as needed. Here at the top, there are some very tempting automation pieces that you can turn on, but I'm gonna ask you to please resist turning those on right now. And the reason is automating some very key steps of this process when it when a deal is created, when it's moved to closed won, that's great. But if you only automate a few of the steps, what's gonna happen is you're gonna have contacts skipping stages, and that will make it impossible to report on your performance overall.

So let's resist turning those on for now and talk a little bit about how RevPartners will help in this process.

What's most important with your life cycle stages starting out is getting good definitions of what each stage means.

Then you need to define those triggers, the actions that occur that move a contact from one stage to the next. And this is something that we help our clients define, make sure that it's a hundred percent perfect, and then we take that information and we start building real automation behind it. Step one, we're gonna come in and we're gonna create based on the number of life cycle stages your company is using ten to twenty lists. Now these lists are gonna be those definitions.

Here are the people that based on our understanding of our business match this life cycle stage.

Then once all of our lists are created, we're gonna come in and, again, create ten to fifteen workflows that are gonna automate the movement of your time stamp for when that happened, update the value, and then get it ready to capture the trigger for when it moves to the next step. So why are automations so important in this process? Well, for one thing, it's gonna be a lot more consistent and reliable than what you're gonna get out of your sales reps and your teams trying to do this manually. With automation, you're gonna ensure that first, no contact is missed.

Your tighter date your entire database will be complete. Secondly, you're gonna make sure that your definitions are applied the same way every time. And lastly, it's gonna make sure that your data model is set up to start capturing the data that you need to build actionable models. Now let me show you what that looks like with a practical example.

So here are before and after pictures from one of our clients' HubSpot instances.

Here on the left, you can see before they started working with us, you know, things like neglect, missing data fields, skipping stages made it so that you were able to track what became a lead, but nothing else. Anytime a contact skipped one of these stages, it got pulled out of the report. It got no conversion, nothing actionable.

After we defined the life cycle stages, built the automations, and applied it to their system, we were able to see an actual nice funnel view measuring every step of the of the process, how they're moving through. You're getting the volume. You're getting the conversion rates. And here at the bottom, you're able to now see the time that is happening.

So time from lead to customer, time from opportunity to customer, time from excuse me, from MQL to customer, and then time from opportunity customer. Why does this matter? So this RevOps leader can now take these inputs and calculate average deal size times the number of leads times the conversion rate by each stage times sales cycle time to know how much revenue they're gonna produce. They can then go to the VP of sales, to the CRO, to the CEO, and answer questions about sales marketing performance, what our pipeline is gonna generate in two months from now.

It's gonna help with revenue forecasting. And then at end of year when you're trying to forecast how big of a plan can we make next year? You come up with numbers and now you can go back to your model and mess with the inputs to see where can we improve our performance that will result in the growth we're trying to achieve for next year.

That's all enabled by life cycle stages.

And that level of confidence in reporting is what we strive to give to each one of our partners. So if you wanna feel that level of confidence in your metrics as well, please reach out to me or reach out to RevPartners linked in the comments below. Thanks.