Overview

Lifecycle Stages give you a full perspective on where a Prospect is in your sales and marketing processes. Prospects are meant to be promoted through each Lifecycle Stage, from beginning to end. The order of the Lifecycle Stages is as follows:

Suspect > Engaged > Marketing Qualified > Sales Qualified > Opportunity > Customer > Evangelist > Disqualified > Other

Description of Lifecycle Stages

Each Lifecycle Stage has its own purpose and meaning. Definitions are provided below:

Managing Lifecycle Stages

Lead Liaison will automatically manage when a Prospect moves into these Lifecycle Stages:

  1. Anonymous = Any Prospect, such as a visitor, who does not have an email address is added to this Stage. 
  2. Suspect = Any Prospect without inbound activity who has an email is promoted to this Stage. 
  3. EngagedAny Prospect with inbound activity is promoted to this Stage. 
  4. OpportunityAny Prospect associated with a Deal created in OneFocus™ will move to this Stage. For customers using Salesforce.com, any Contact in the Contact Roles section of the Salesforce.com Opportunity will move to this Stage.  
  5. CustomerAny Prospect associated with a Closed-Won Deal created in OneFocus™ move to this Stage. For customers using Salesforce.com, any Contact in the Contact Roles section of the Salesforce.com Opportunity and the Opportunity is moved to Closed-Won status will move to this Stage. 

You're responsible for defining and setting up your company's business processes to move Prospects into the following Stages:

  1. Marketing QualifiedUsed by your marketing team to show a prospect is sales ready. Qualify prospects through key conversion forms (such as contact forms, demo requests, trials, etc.) and high-value gated content (such as buying guides, videos, playbooks, case-studies, etc.).
  2. Sales Qualified = Used by your sales team to indicate which Prospects they've accepted as being ready for direct contact, and qualified for sales. 
  3. Evangelist = Used to put your promoters or evangelists into this stage. These are the people that spread the word about your organization through word of mouth, referrals, and high online ratings/reviews. 
  4. Disqualified = Used by sales or marketing to indicate that a prospect does not qualify for your services.
  5. Other = Use this however you'd like!

Where You'll Find Lifecycle Stages

Lifecycle Stages can be used in the following areas of Lead Liaison:

Using Lifecycle Stages in Automation

As discussed in the prior section, a Change Lifecycle Stage action helps automatically promote Prospects to a new stage. By default, Propsects cannot move backward in their stage. For example, suppose a Prospect was in the Customer stage. They cannot be reverted to the Engaged stage. However, there may be times when you want to override the default behavior to revert a Prospect's Lifecycle Stage. Reversion can be done when:

Suspect Stage and Suspect Status

Suspect Status Overview

The Suspect Lifecycle Stage has an additional set of configurable options to further define the status of a Prospect in the Suspect stage. The default statuses, called Suspect Status, are listed below but can be changed to meet your business preferences:

Configuring Suspect Status

To configure your Suspect Statuses do the following:

Updating a Prospect's Suspect Status

A Prospect's Suspect Status can be updated manually, from the Prospect Profile page or via the Change Suspect Status action that's found in Fulfillment Actions or Automations. 

From the Prospect Profile page:

From Automation: