5 Signs Your HubSpot Lifecycle Stages Are Broken (And How to Fix Them)

Your HubSpot lifecycle stages are the foundation of everything. They determine how contacts move through your funnel, how you measure conversion rates, how you calculate sales velocity, and how you report ROI to leadership. When they're set up correctly, they provide a clear, shared understanding of where every contact stands in their buyer journey. When they're broken, everything downstream falls apart.

The problem? Most companies set up lifecycle stages once during initial implementation and never revisit them. They use HubSpot's default stages or a generic template from their onboarding consultant. Six months later, they're wondering why their reports don't make sense, why Marketing and Sales can't agree on lead quality, and why their conversion metrics seem off.

Here are the five telltale signs your lifecycle stages are broken, and more importantly, how to fix them.

Sign #1: Your Lifecycle Stages Don't Match Your Actual Buyer Journey

The Problem:

You're using HubSpot's default lifecycle stages: Subscriber, Lead, Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), Sales Qualified Lead (SQL), Opportunity, Customer. They sound reasonable. They're what HubSpot recommends. But when you map them to your actual buyer journey, they don't fit.

Maybe your sales process has a "Discovery Call" stage before someone becomes an Opportunity. Maybe you have a "Demo Requested" stage that's more qualified than an MQL but not quite an SQL. Maybe your Service team needs a "Renewal" or "Expansion" stage that doesn't exist in the default setup.

When your lifecycle stages don't match your reality, teams create workarounds. Sales builds custom deal stages that don't align with lifecycle stages. Marketing creates its own internal definitions that contradict what's in HubSpot. Everyone is tracking the same contacts differently, which means you have no single source of truth.

Why It Happens:

Most companies implement HubSpot quickly, using templates and defaults to "get up and running." They don't take the time to map their specific buyer journey before configuring the system. The result is a generic setup that works for no one.

How to Fix It:

Start by mapping your actual buyer journey from first touch to closed customer. Gather your Marketing, Sales, and Service teams in a room and walk through a real customer's path. What stages do they actually go through? What actions indicate they've moved from one stage to the next?

Document this journey, then map it to HubSpot lifecycle stages. You might need to use custom properties to capture stages that don't fit the default framework. The goal isn't to force your process into HubSpot's template, it's to configure HubSpot to reflect your process.

Sign #2: Contacts Are Stuck in One Stage Forever

The Problem:

You have thousands of contacts sitting in "Lead" or "MQL" for months, or even years. They're not moving forward. They're not moving backward. They're just... stuck. When you dig into the data, you realize that no one is managing these contacts. Marketing thinks Sales should be following up. Sales thinks they're not qualified enough. The contacts languish in limbo.

This isn't just a data hygiene problem it's a revenue problem. These stuck contacts represent potential opportunities that are being ignored. Research shows that over 70% of CRM projects fail due to cross-functional misalignment, and stuck lifecycle stages are a classic symptom of this misalignment.

Why It Happens:

Contacts get stuck when there's no clear ownership or automation to move them forward. Maybe your lifecycle stage criteria are too vague. Maybe there's no workflow to automatically update stages based on behavior. Maybe there's confusion about who owns contacts at each stage.

How to Fix It:

First, audit your stuck contacts. Run a report showing how many contacts have been in each lifecycle stage for more than 90 days. This will surface the bottlenecks.

Next, define clear criteria and ownership for each stage. Who owns "Leads"? Marketing. Who owns "SQLs"? Sales. What actions automatically move a contact from Lead to MQL? What actions move them from MQL to SQL? 

Finally, build workflows to automate stage transitions based on these criteria. If a Lead downloads three pieces of content and visits your pricing page, they should automatically become an MQL. If an MQL books a demo, they should automatically become an SQL. Automation ensures contacts don't get stuck waiting for manual updates.

Sign #3: No One Owns How Lifecycle Stages Are Updated

The Problem:
You open a contact and the lifecycle history makes no sense. Last year they were marked as Customer. Then a webinar workflow set them back to Lead. A form fill pushed them to MQL. Sales flipped them to SQL. Another campaign quietly moved them back to Lead again.

On dashboards, the funnel looks busy and “new customers” keep appearing. But when you click through, half of those “new customers” are old clients, test records or people who never had a deal. Marketing cannot trust MQL or SQL volumes. Sales ignores lifecycle and builds their own lists instead.

Lifecycle stage has stopped being a reliable “where are they in the journey?” field. It is just a label that changes for reasons nobody can explain.

Why It Happens:
Over time, lots of different things start updating lifecycle stage: old workflows, new workflows, forms, list imports, integrations and manual edits by Sales. Each one was added with good intentions (“set to MQL when they download the ebook,” “set to Customer on import,” “fix this one record”). No one keeps a master list of the rules. The result is a property that is overwritten constantly, often by conflicting logic, so the current stage rarely matches what actually happened.

How to Fix It:

First, find everywhere lifecycle is being changed.
Run an audit of:

• Workflows that use “Set property value: Lifecycle stage”

• Forms that set lifecycle in their “Set contact property” options

• Integrations and imports that map into lifecycle

• Teams who can manually edit lifecycle in the UI

List these out so you can see every entry point.

Next, decide which events are allowed to move lifecycle. Keep this simple and tied to real actions, for example:

• First meaningful form fill → Lead

• Meets your MQL criteria (fit + behaviour) → MQL

• Sales accepts and creates a deal → SQL

• Deal enters a defined stage → Opportunity

• Closed-won deal → Customer

Everything else (webinar registrations, ad clicks, list uploads) should update other fields, not lifecycle.

Then, centralise the logic.

• Build one or two “Lifecycle Controller” workflows whose only job is to update lifecycle based on those events

• Remove lifecycle updates from old nurtures, campaigns and forms

• Stop imports and integrations mapping directly into lifecycle; map them into custom flags that your controller workflow uses instead

Finally, lock it down.

• Restrict who can edit lifecycle manually (often Ops only)

• If appropriate, add a clear description on the Lifecycle stage property: “Updated only by lifecycle workflows. Do not change manually.”

• Spot-check a handful of contacts each month to make sure the stage and the deal history still line up

Once lifecycle stage is only updated from a small set of controlled rules, the stage on the record again reflects reality. Marketing, Sales and leadership can trust lifecycle in reports, lead scoring and automation, instead of treating it as a noisy, throwaway field.

Sign #4: Marketing and Sales Cannot Agree On What Stages Mean

The Problem:
Marketing reports “80 SQLs this month.” Sales says “only 20 were real.” Both teams use the same words for stages like MQL and SQL, but mean different things. Targets look green in Marketing, red in Sales, and no one trusts the funnel.

Why It Happens:
Lifecycle stages are usually set up inside HubSpot by Marketing, without enough input from Sales. Marketing uses activity rules in workflows, Sales uses fit and deal potential in their heads. Nothing is written down, so definitions drift as people change and stages like SQL turn into a label, not a real handover point.

How to Fix It:
Start with one stage, SQL. Get Marketing and Sales in a room (or online, Slack thread, etc) and agree a one sentence definition, the entry criteria, and who owns it. For example, SQL is a contact Sales has accepted that matches ICP and has asked to talk. Document this, update the property descriptions in HubSpot, then repeat the exercise for the other stages. When everyone shares the same definition, stage reports start to match reality.

Sign #5: Your Nurture And Automation Ignore Lifecycle Stages

The Problem:
You have a big database, a long sales cycle, and plenty of content. But most of your automation is either a generic welcome / “stay in touch” sequence or a monthly newsletter that goes to everyone with the right job title. Warm leads, cold leads and long-term customers all receive roughly the same messages.

Meanwhile, Sales is trying to maintain relationships over two to seven months with manual follow-ups and one-off emails. HubSpot is storing the data, but it is not actually moving people forward through the funnel. Lifecycle stage is a field on the record, not a driver of what happens next.

Why It Happens:
Lifecycle stages are set up, but nurture paths were never designed around them. Marketing builds campaigns by persona, list or topic because that is easier than planning journeys for each stage. Sales assumes “nurture” is a Marketing job. Marketing assumes “follow-up” is a Sales job. The lifecycle property is updated occasionally, but nothing changes when a contact moves from Lead to MQL to SQL to Customer.

How to Fix It:
Start with two or three key lifecycle stages and design one simple nurture path for each, rather than trying to perfect the entire journey at once. For example, define what should happen when a Lead first converts, when an MQL shows buying intent, and when a Customer is approaching renewal. Decide the trigger, the 3–4 emails they should receive, and the low-friction next step for each stage. Then wire this into HubSpot. Build workflows that enrol contacts into the right nurture when their lifecycle stage changes, and add exit rules so they leave earlier nurtures as they progress. Make ownership explicit: Marketing owns the nurture sequence and its messaging; Sales owns direct outreach once a contact becomes SQL. When lifecycle stage is tied directly to your automation like this, your database stops being a static list and becomes a system that actively moves contacts through the funnel.

What Success Looks Like

When lifecycle stages are configured correctly, everything else gets easier. Marketing and Sales speak the same language. Conversion rates are trustworthy. Reports accurately reflect reality. Leadership trusts your dashboards. Teams can focus on optimization instead of arguing about definitions.

Companies that get lifecycle stages right see measurable improvements. Research shows that teams with unified platforms are 1.5x more likely to outperform their goals. The difference isn't the platform, it's the configuration.

Your Next Step

If your lifecycle stages are broken, you can't fix them with a quick workflow or a training session. You need a systematic audit and reconfiguration that involves all stakeholders. That's exactly what we do in the Annual HubSpot Review (AHR).

In a half-day workshop, experts from XEN, will audit your lifecycle stages, identify where they're broken, and build a clear roadmap to fix them. You'll walk away with documented definitions, configured automation, and clean conversion metrics.

Don't head into 2026 with broken lifecycle stages. Fix the foundation first.

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