Effective lead management is the backbone of any successful sales and marketing strategy. Organising leads ensures that teams can prioritise high-value opportunities, maintain consistent follow-ups, and streamline workflows.
In a CRM like HubSpot, segmenting leads with clear statuses can significantly enhance performance by aligning your sales and marketing efforts.
HubSpot offers users the flexibility to customise lead statuses, enabling businesses to adapt the CRM to their unique processes. Whether you're looking to move a contact to a lead or adjust their marketing status, these customisations help track and nurture prospects effectively.
This blog will guide you through a step-by-step process of creating a new lead status in HubSpot and demonstrate how to maximise its impact on your sales and marketing strategies.
Customising lead statuses allows you to create a workflow tailored to your organisation’s specific sales process. For example, you may want to add statuses like "Follow-Up Required" or "Needs Assessment" to reflect your unique stages. This personalisation helps to improve communication, prioritisation, and conversion rates.
Customised lead statuses bridge the gap between sales and marketing teams. By integrating status updates into automated workflows, such as using HubSpot to change a contact to a lead, your teams can work cohesively to nurture prospects more effectively.
HubSpot Lead Status is a detailed property designed to track the specific stage a lead is in within the sales process. It provides a granular view of the engagement journey and ensures that sales and marketing teams are aligned in their understanding of how to interact with a lead.
Unlike lifecycle stages, which define the overarching relationship a contact has with your organisation—such as "Lead," "Opportunity," or "Customer"—lead status focuses on the precise actions and progress of a lead. For example, while a contact may have a lifecycle stage of "Lead," their lead status could reflect specific nuances like:
While both lifecycle stages and lead status aim to organise and track contacts, they serve distinct purposes:
By combining lifecycle stages and HubSpot lead status, teams can create a comprehensive framework that supports both strategic decision-making and tactical execution.
Customising lead statuses allows organisations to tailor HubSpot CRM to fit their unique sales processes. Here’s how:
Better Alignment with Unique Sales Processes: Every organisation operates differently. Custom lead statuses ensure that your CRM mirrors your specific workflows, making it easier for teams to track progress and collaborate effectively.
Improved Lead Segmentation for Targeted Marketing: With detailed statuses, you can segment leads based on their engagement stage and target them with personalised campaigns, boosting the chances of conversion.
Enhanced Collaboration Between Sales and Marketing: Custom lead statuses provide a shared language for teams, reducing miscommunication and ensuring that everyone understands the lead’s status and next steps.
Greater Efficiency: By clearly defining where a lead is in the sales cycle, teams can prioritise efforts, allocate resources wisely, and avoid wasting time on unqualified leads.
In essence, lead status in HubSpot is not just a tracking tool; it’s a strategic asset that empowers organisations to manage their sales pipelines with precision, ensuring every lead is nurtured appropriately and efficiently.
Before diving into creating a new lead status in HubSpot, it's essential to prepare by reviewing your existing configurations, defining your custom requirements, and ensuring you have the proper permissions.
Thorough preparation not only streamlines the setup process but also ensures your lead management system aligns with your organisation's specific needs.
HubSpot comes with default lead statuses designed to suit common sales workflows. Reviewing these helps you understand the current framework and identify areas that may require customisation.
Steps to Check Default Lead Statuses:
Common Default Lead Statuses in HubSpot:
Understanding the default options allows you to decide whether they meet your needs or require customisation to better reflect your sales process.
Custom lead statuses are critical for organisations with unique sales workflows or specific milestones that aren't covered by the default options.
Questions to Ask When Defining Custom Lead Statuses:
What Stages Do Your Leads Typically Go Through?
Consider the journey of a lead from the first point of contact to conversion. Break this journey into identifiable stages that are actionable for your team.
Are There Unique Milestones Specific to Your Sales Process?
Some organisations may require statuses such as "Demo Scheduled" or "Awaiting Contract Signature" that are not typically included in default setups.
Examples of Custom Lead Statuses:
Clearly defined custom statuses not only help in organising leads but also ensure that sales and marketing teams understand the exact state of engagement.
Creating or modifying lead statuses requires specific user permissions in HubSpot. Ensuring you have the correct access rights is essential to avoid delays during the setup process.
Overview of Permissions Needed:
How to Check Your Access Level:
By reviewing the existing lead statuses, clearly defining your custom needs, and ensuring proper permissions, you set the foundation for a seamless and effective customisation process in HubSpot.
Creating a new lead status in HubSpot is a straightforward process that allows you to tailor your CRM to fit your sales and marketing workflows. This customisation ensures your team can track leads effectively and prioritise opportunities. Below is a detailed step-by-step guide to help you create and implement a new lead status.
Begin by accessing HubSpot’s property settings, where all CRM properties are managed.
Tip: Bookmark this page for quick access in the future, as you may return to modify properties or add new ones.
The Lead Status property is where you’ll add or edit options to reflect your custom sales stages.
To customise your Lead Status property, you need to enter edit mode.
Custom lead statuses allow your team to track unique sales or engagement milestones.
Tip: Use consistent naming conventions to avoid confusion, and ensure the statuses align with your sales and marketing strategies.
Once you’ve added your custom statuses, it’s time to save your work and make the changes live.
Adding a new lead status in HubSpot ensures your CRM is aligned with your specific sales and marketing processes.
It enables better tracking of leads, clearer communication among team members, and improved prioritisation of opportunities.
Effectively managing your contacts involves keeping their lead statuses up to date. Whether you need to update the status of a single contact or multiple records, HubSpot offers straightforward tools to make the process efficient. Keeping lead statuses accurate not only reflects the current position of leads in your pipeline but also ensures your team can focus on the right priorities. Here's how you can update lead statuses for existing contacts, step by step.
If you need to update the lead status for an individual contact, HubSpot provides an intuitive process directly within the contact record.
Open the Contact Record:
Locate the "Lead Status" Property:
Select the New Status:
Pro Tip: Add notes or use other properties to document why the status was updated for better context and tracking.
For larger updates, such as changing the lead status of multiple contacts at once, HubSpot provides bulk editing functionality to save time and maintain consistency.
Navigate to the Contact List:
Select the Desired Contacts:
Use the "Edit" Feature:
Update the Status:
Pro Tip: Use bulk editing cautiously to avoid accidental updates. Double-check your selection to ensure only the intended contacts are included in the edit.
Accurate lead statuses are essential for:
Whether you're working on individual contacts or updating statuses for a large group, HubSpot's tools make the process seamless and efficient. Keeping lead statuses current ensures your CRM remains a powerful asset for driving sales and marketing success.
Using lead statuses effectively can significantly enhance the alignment between your marketing and sales teams, improve visibility into your sales pipeline, and provide actionable insights through detailed reporting. Below is an exploration of how lead statuses can be leveraged to optimise these areas.
Lead statuses serve as a critical bridge between marketing and sales, ensuring that both teams are on the same page when identifying and nurturing prospects.
Identifying Qualified Leads:
Syncing Lead Statuses with Email Campaigns and Workflows:
Result: A seamless handoff between marketing and sales leads to higher conversion rates and better resource allocation.
Tracking leads through their statuses gives your sales team a clear view of where each prospect stands in the pipeline, enabling more strategic decision-making.
Tracking Lead Progress:
Prioritising Follow-Ups:
Result: Enhanced pipeline visibility allows sales teams to work more efficiently and close deals faster.
Lead statuses provide valuable data points that can be incorporated into reports, offering insights into your pipeline’s performance and helping identify areas for improvement.
Creating Reports Based on Lead Status:
Tracking Pipeline Performance:
Result: Data-driven decisions based on lead status analytics enhance your ability to optimise the sales process and forecast revenue more accurately.
Incorporating lead statuses into your workflows doesn’t just streamline operations—it creates a cohesive system where marketing and sales efforts work in harmony.
By using lead statuses to improve pipeline visibility and reporting, you gain a competitive edge that directly impacts your bottom line. HubSpot’s robust features ensure that these practical applications are easy to implement and customise, making lead statuses an invaluable asset for any organisation.
Once you’ve set up lead statuses in HubSpot, leveraging advanced strategies can help maximise their efficiency and effectiveness. By automating updates, using them to create custom views, and integrating them with third-party tools, you can further streamline your sales and marketing processes.
Manually updating lead statuses can be time-consuming, especially for large teams managing hundreds of leads. Automation helps reduce errors and ensures consistency across your CRM.
Setting Up Workflows for Automatic Updates:
Benefits of Automating Lead Status Updates:
Custom views in HubSpot can help teams stay organised and focus on the leads that matter most. Lead statuses play a critical role in creating these views.
Creating Custom Views with Lead Statuses:
Using Lead Status Filters to Prioritise Leads:
Shared Views for Collaboration:
For organisations using multiple platforms, syncing lead statuses across tools ensures data consistency and enhances operational efficiency.
How Lead Status Syncs with Other Platforms:
Integration with Email Marketing Tools:
Ensuring Consistency Across Systems:
Using advanced tips like automation, custom views, and integration with third-party tools takes your CRM management to the next level. By minimising manual work and ensuring seamless data flow, these strategies allow your teams to focus more on nurturing leads and closing deals.
HubSpot’s flexibility and robust feature set make it easy to implement these advanced practices, giving your organisation a significant edge in managing its sales funnel effectively.
While HubSpot is a powerful CRM for managing and organising leads, users may encounter some common challenges related to lead statuses. Understanding these issues and knowing how to resolve them ensures that your lead management remains smooth and efficient. Below are two key challenges with lead statuses and the steps you can take to troubleshoot them.
One of the most common issues that users face when trying to edit or customise lead status is related to permissions. Permissions in HubSpot control what each user can see and do within the CRM, and if you do not have the necessary permissions, you may find yourself unable to make changes to the lead status property.
What to Do if You Can’t Edit the Lead Status Property:
If You're an Admin and Still Encounter Issues:
Another issue that often arises is when the lead status does not update as expected. This can occur due to a variety of reasons such as workflow errors, manual overrides, or sync issues with integrated tools. It’s essential to identify the root cause and address it promptly.
In this section, we’ll answer some of the frequently asked questions related to lead status in HubSpot CRM. These answers will help you gain a better understanding of how to manage and optimise your lead statuses effectively.
Yes, you can delete lead statuses that are no longer relevant to your sales process. However, it’s important to note that deleting a lead status may impact your existing records. If a contact’s lead status is set to a value you plan to delete, you’ll need to assign a new status before proceeding.
Steps to Delete a Lead Status:
Note: Deleting a lead status may cause issues with existing data if not managed correctly, so it's always a good idea to ensure any contacts with that status are updated beforehand.
HubSpot allows users to create multiple lead statuses to accommodate various stages of the sales funnel. There is no strict limit on the number of lead statuses you can create, but it’s essential to keep them organised and aligned with your sales process to avoid confusion.
Best Practice: Keep your lead statuses manageable by only creating those that are truly necessary. Too many lead statuses could complicate the tracking and prioritisation process.
The Lead Status property tracks the current stage of a contact within your sales process, whereas the Lifecycle Stage refers to the broader stage in the buyer’s journey.
Lead Status: Customisable based on your internal sales processes, helping to track a lead's progress (e.g., "Qualified," "Demo Scheduled," "Contract Sent").
Lifecycle Stage: A predefined set of stages (e.g., Subscriber, Lead, Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), Sales Qualified Lead (SQL), Opportunity, Customer) that reflects the contact's relationship with your organisation.
While Lead Status offers more granular control over the sales pipeline, Lifecycle Stage offers a high-level overview of the contact's journey from initial awareness to becoming a customer.
Yes, you can use Lead Status in HubSpot’s free CRM version. While the free version may have some limitations compared to the paid plans, such as fewer reporting features and customisations, you still have access to essential tools for managing leads, including the ability to customise lead statuses.
The free version of HubSpot CRM allows you to manage your leads and track them through your sales funnel without any cost, which is especially valuable for small businesses or nonprofits looking to optimise their lead management without a large investment.
Customising lead statuses in HubSpot CRM plays a crucial role in streamlining your sales and marketing efforts.
By tailoring your lead statuses to match your unique sales processes, you can gain better visibility of your sales pipeline and prioritise follow-ups more effectively.
At Pixcell, a HubSpot Gold Certified Agency Partner, we’re here to help you make the most of HubSpot’s powerful tools. Whether you’re managing lead statuses or exploring advanced functionalities, we provide expert guidance to maximise your CRM's potential.
those new to the platform, our Beginner’s Guide to HubSpot CRM offers a comprehensive overview to get started.
To further enhance your sales strategy, consider reading our blog on Lead Scoring in HubSpot, which delves into qualifying and prioritising leads effectively.
Start refining your lead statuses today to optimise your sales process and ensure that every lead gets the attention it deserves!