Alright. Welcome. Let's get started by understanding the importance of life cycle stages. So before we dive into the fun stuff of actually building out the inclusion lists, the workflow automations, reporting and dashboard, and all of the other fun stuff, let's take a step back and understand three fundamental things.

What are life cycle stages, importance of life cycle stages in your HubSpot instance, and some common limitation that it comes with out of the box. So what's life cycle stage again? Basically, at the very fundamental level, life cycle stage is a contact and a company property that is intended to mark and flag their current relationship with your business. It should be reflected where they are at in their customer life cycle or their buying journey.

Now why is it important? Couple of things. It's the very core foundation of your CRM. Without this, you cannot get your volume metrics right, your conversion metrics right, and your time metrics right.

Basically, you cannot define any of your primary KPIs that you can further drill down and see what part of your business is performing well versus not so well, and it has a lot of room for opportunity to grow. So this is where life cycle stage property and life cycle stage as a tool comes into play. It enables your contacts and companies to be segmented via different life cycle stages starting from all the way from a subscriber prospect to MQL, SQL opportunity, a customer, and even beyond that. Finally, it's a key to achieve alignment between different teams and ensure all of them are working effectively and there is no repeated efforts to align sales and marketing, to align sales and customer success, to align marketing and sales, and any other relevant team and leadership within those.

So common limitations. So there are a couple of limitations with this tool as it is out of the box. It allows you to do manual editing of life cycle stages. So people can just quickly jump onto a contact record or a company record and change the life cycle stage as they please.

We don't want that. It will create a lot of data chaos. We have seen in our experience here at our partners working with various clients and companies. And then default automations, while these are great at a very basic level, it will lead to a lot of stages keeping unintended, and that will lead to wrong funnel reporting.

Now that you have learned what are life cycle stages, importance of life cycle stages in your HubSpot instance, and the common limitation, let's move on to the next video where you will learn the building block, where you will learn to collect all of the key information from your relevant stakeholder, your leadership team, your sales and marketing team, your customer success team, and really get them on board and get them to align on your life cycle stages definitions. What does a prospect means to you? What does an MQL means to you? And all other life cycle stages that you might have.

How many life cycle stages do you need, and what are their definitions? What are their triggers? What are the conditions? And what are the actions that needs to take place when a contact hits a certain life cycle stage?

So you will learn all about that. You will learn how to run a successful discovery workshop and lots more. So I'll see you in the next video. Stay awesome.

Keep doing it big and I'll see you.