Boost Growth with RevOps: Lead Scoring & Lifecycle Stages in HubSpot

Lead scoring and lifecycle stages are two essential components in HubSpot that create a seamless customer journey. By understanding the importance of each and how they complement one another, you can effectively manage and optimise your sales funnel. Additionally, incorporating the Revenue Operations (RevOps) framework can drive growth and increase efficiency by aligning sales, marketing, and customer success teams. In this comprehensive blog post, we will dive deeper into why lead scoring, lifecycle stages, and the RevOps framework work together in HubSpot to move contacts through the entire customer journey.

The Importance of Lead Scoring and Lifecycle Stages in HubSpot

Lead scoring is a powerful tool that helps your team prioritise leads based on their level of engagement and quality attributes. By assigning scores to leads, you can allocate resources better and ensure that your sales team focuses on high-quality prospects.

Lifecycle stages, on the other hand, help you categorise and track the progress of contacts as they move through the entire revenue cycle. By understanding the stages and their characteristics, you can create targeted marketing campaigns and develop strategies to nurture leads toward customer conversion, increase win rates and achieve customer lifetime value (CLTV).

How Lead Scoring and Lifecycle Stages Work Together

Imagine your B2B health tech company offering a telemedicine platform for hospitals and clinics. Your goal is to target your marketing campaigns to specific segments based on their lead score and lifecycle stage.

1. Enhancing lead segmentation

By using lead scoring and lifecycle stages together, you can create a more detailed segmentation of your contacts. This allows you to develop customised marketing campaigns that target each segment with relevant and personalised content, increasing the chances of conversion and improving customer experience.

For example, you can develop an educational content series focusing on the benefits of telemedicine and industry trends. This will help increase awareness and establish your company as a thought leader in the health tech space.

2. Facilitating sales and marketing alignment

Lead scoring and lifecycle stages provide a clear structure for your sales and marketing teams to collaborate effectively. Both teams can work together to develop strategies for nurturing and converting leads based on their scores and lifecycle stages. This alignment ensures that everyone is on the same page and working toward a common goal.

You can work with sales and create targeted email campaigns that showcase case studies or success stories from other hospitals and clinics using your platform. This helps demonstrate the value of your telemedicine solution and encourages MQLs to move further down the sales funnel.

3. Improving lead nurturing

Lead scoring and lifecycle stages enable you to create tailored lead nurturing workflows that cater to the unique needs and preferences of each contact. By understanding where a contact is in their customer journey, you can offer targeted content that speaks to their pain points, interests, and level of engagement, ultimately increasing the likelihood of conversion.

For instance, you could develop a personalized email campaign that offers a tailored product demo or consultation, highlighting the features and benefits most relevant to the prospect's specific needs. This demonstrates your commitment to providing custom solutions and increases the likelihood of conversion.

4. Streamlining the sales process

Combining lead scoring and lifecycle stages allows your sales team to focus their efforts on the most promising leads, leading to a more efficient sales process. They can prioritise leads with high scores and those in the latter stages of the lifecycle, ensuring that they spend their time on contacts with the highest potential for conversion.

Collaborate with the sales team to create customized content that addresses any remaining concerns or questions the prospect may have. This can include tailored product walkthroughs, ROI calculations, or implementation roadmaps.

5. Enhancing customer experience

When you use lead scoring and lifecycle stages together, you can create a seamless customer journey that caters to each contact's needs and preferences. This personalised approach not only increases the chances of conversion but also fosters long-term customer relationships, leading to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty. By using lead scoring and lifecycle stages together, you can develop targeted marketing campaigns that address the unique needs and pain points of each segment. 

Lifecycle Stages in HubSpot

HubSpot defines its default lifecycle stages to help you categorise your contacts, leads, and customers, as well as move them through the funnel. These stages are divided into three main categories: visitors, leads, and customers.

1. Visitors

   • Subscriber: Contacts who are aware of your business and have opted in to receive updates from your team. For example, these contacts might have signed up for your newsletter or blog updates but haven't shown significant sales readiness. They may be in the early stages of their buyer's journey and might not be aware of the full range of your telemedicine platform's capabilities.
     
     

2. Leads

   • Lead: Contacts who have shown more interest beyond being a subscriber.
   • Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): Contacts who have engaged with your marketing efforts but are not yet ready for a sales call. These contacts have shown interest in your platform by downloading whitepapers, attending webinars, or visiting your product pages. They are more engaged but not yet ready for a sales call.
   • Sales Qualified Lead (SQL): Contacts who have demonstrated their readiness for direct sales follow-up. These contacts have shown clear sales readiness, such as requesting a product demo, filling out a form, or directly inquiring about your platform's pricing.
   • Opportunity: Contacts with real sales potential. These contacts have already engaged in the sales process, and there's an open deal in the pipeline.
     
     

3. Customers

   • Customer: Contacts with closed deals.
   • Evangelist: Customers who advocate for your business and can help generate new leads.
   • Other: A wildcard stage for contacts that don't fit any of the above stages.

🏆 Pro tip: Lifecycle stages can be customised based on your business model and GTM strategies.

Thinking on the example of the health tech company business model and focusing on the post-sales customer experience. Here's how you can define lifecycles stages to reach compound growth while maintaining front-facing teams aligned with targeted campaigns for these stages to ensure customer success, retention, and growth:

Live (Client Onboard): Clients have been onboarded successfully, and the solution can deliver impact. Initiatives in the stages might be developing an onboarding email campaign that includes helpful resources to support clients in making the most of your solution. Offer best practices, success stories, and educational content related to maximizing the impact of the telemedicine platform. Also, consider sending satisfaction surveys to gather feedback and improve your onboarding process.

MRR (Recurring Revenue Secured): The solution continues to deliver impact, and a recurring revenue stream has been established. Engaging clients with regular updates on new features, enhancements, and industry trends. Share tips on how to optimize their usage of your platform to achieve better outcomes. Additionally, host webinars or workshops to demonstrate new features, gather feedback and foster a community among your clients.

LTV (Lifetime Value): Revenue generated over the account's lifetime, including upsells, cross-sells, or renewals. This stage is where all want to go. In this stage, you can focus on creating personalised email campaigns focused on offering tailored solutions to address clients' evolving needs. Highlight additional products or services that complement their current solution and drive growth. Send targeted promotions or incentives to encourage upsells, cross-sells, or renewals. Schedule periodic account reviews to discuss their successes, challenges, and future goals, ensuring a long-term partnership.

Using HubSpot Lead Scoring

Calculating your score can help you assess and rank the quality and engagement of your leads. Follow these steps to use calculate effectively:

Step 1: List your leads' quality attributes. Focus on the attributes that indicate the target criteria of your leads. These attributes can be a mix of demographic, firmographic, and behavioural factors. For example, job title, company size, industry or geographic location.

Step 2: Calculate the score range of your quality attributes (A, B, C). What weight of your score out of 100 would you allocate to each range of attributes to qualify as MQL?  to determine the proportioned score for each attribute?

Step 3: Repeat steps 1 and 2 with your leads' engagement actions List and score the engagement actions that indicate your leads' sales-readiness; engagement actions are actions of leads that suggest they may be ready to engage in the sales process. For instance, content engagement, email opens and clicks, event attendance and social media engagement. 

Step 4: Use a matrix to set thresholds for your scores. Calculate thresholds for each quality group using the matrix based on the scores calculated in the attributes and actions.

Matrix example by HubSpot

🏆 Pro Tip: Remember that the specific quality attributes that are most relevant to your business may vary depending on your industry, target audience, and sales process. It's essential to evaluate your leads' quality attributes in the context of your unique business needs and objectives.

Predictive Lead Scoring

Enterprise customers also have predictive lead scoring in HubSpot, which is an advanced feature that uses machine learning algorithms to analyse historical data and identify patterns that indicate a lead's likelihood to convert into a customer. This lets you prioritise leads based on their predicted probability of closing a deal, helping your sales team focus their efforts on high-potential prospects.

HubSpot's predictive lead scoring model considers many factors, including demographic information, firmographic data, behavioural characteristics, and engagement with your marketing efforts. By analysing this data, the algorithm assigns a score to each lead, ranging from 0 to 100, with higher scores representing leads that are more likely to convert.

The Role of Revenue Operations in B2B Companies and Enhancing the Customer Journey

Revenue Operations (RevOps) is a strategic approach that aligns sales, marketing, and customer success teams to drive growth and increase efficiency. Incorporating this framework with lead scoring and lifecycle stages in HubSpot can further enhance the customer journey.

1. Aligning teams and objectives

The RevOps framework unifies sales, marketing, and customer success teams under a standard set of goals and objectives. By integrating this framework with lead scoring and lifecycle stages, you can ensure that all teams work together to nurture, convert, and retain customers. This alignment creates a more efficient and cohesive customer journey.

2. Streamlining processes and communication

RevOps focuses on breaking down silos between departments and improving collaboration. By incorporating this framework into your lead scoring and lifecycle stages strategy, you can create clear communication channels, share data, and streamline processes. This results in a more seamless customer journey and improved lead management.

3. Optimising technology and data

The RevOps framework emphasises the importance of leveraging technology and data to make informed decisions. By integrating this approach with lead scoring and lifecycle stages, you can better use your HubSpot CRM data, refine your scoring models, and improve your lead nurturing workflows. This ultimately leads to more accurate lead prioritisation and a more compelling customer journey.

4. Enhancing performance measurement

RevOps encourages using shared metrics and KPIs to evaluate the performance of sales, marketing, and customer success teams. By incorporating this framework with lead scoring and lifecycle stages, you can gain a holistic view of your customer journey and identify areas for improvement. This allows you to optimise your lead management strategy and drive growth continuously.

Conclusion

The combination of lead scoring, lifecycle stages, and the Revenue Operations framework in HubSpot empowers businesses to create a seamless, personalised customer journey. Understanding the importance of each and how they work together can optimise your sales funnel, enhance lead nurturing, and improve customer experience. Embrace the power of lead scoring, lifecycle stages, and the RevOps framework in HubSpot to move contacts through the entire customer journey and elevate your business to new heights.