Avoid lead lifecycle design pitfalls...and get a template to help you fix your lifecycle

Hey! 👋

Hope you’re doing well! Today, I want to fill you in on a topic that I personally think isn’t talked about enough within marketing ops groups, but is super important: lead lifecycle.

When done right, lead lifecycle drives the customer journey all the way through to becoming a customer. If you map it out and measure it, you can create processes surrounding each stage and make your marketing super consistent and effective.

If your lead lifecycle isn’t defined or is a mess, well….you’re automating a mess, and likely:

1. Confusing your prospects/customers with mixed messaging

2. Losing money on paid media by targeting the wrong people at the wrong time

3. Losing marketing and sales productivity, because everyone is trying to cover every stage and missing key activities in the process

4. Unable to measure campaign effectiveness and sales conversion

Let me tell you more about it after a quick note from our wonderful sponsors 💖

Lifecycle Stages: How to Define, Measure, and Optimize Them

Lifecycle stages are one of those things in marketing operations that should be simple. After all, SiriusDecisions Waterfall came out in what, 2002? Check out this dinosaur:

LOL. Beautiful. 🦖

Anyway, despite needing to be simple, I’ve seen companies overcomplicate their lead lifecycles with 10+ stages, while others have leads going right from Inquiry to Closed Won. And, of course, the latter always wonders why they can’t measure anything and why such a large clean up is needed. 😅

I’m going to break it down for you: how to define and optimize lifecycle stages so you can have some order and drive revenue.

1. Defining Lifecycle Stages (Without Overdoing It)

So we’re on the same page: lifecycle stages are milestones that track a lead’s journey from awareness to becoming a customer (and beyond). The goal is to give your team a clear, shared understanding of where a contact/account stands in the funnel.

A solid lifecycle model typically looks like this (derived from The SiriusDecisions Waterfall):

✅ Inquiry – Knows who you are but hasn’t engaged deeply (ex: signed up for a newsletter).
✅ Lead – Expressed basic interest (ex: downloaded a resource or attended a webinar).
✅ MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) – Engaged enough to meet your lead scoring threshold.
✅ SAL (Sales Accepted Lead) – Sales thinks this might be worth a conversation.
✅ SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) – Sales agrees there might be an opportunity here.
✅ Opportunity – Actively in a sales cycle.
✅ Customer – They signed on as a customer.
✅ Evangelist – A really happy customer who refers others.

Pro tip: Keep it simple to start, and expand as needed. If you need 10+ stages to explain your process, you probably need to simplify your funnel. Start with what you know you need, analyze, and iterate!

2. Measuring Lifecycle Stages (What Actually Matters?)

Once you’ve defined your stages, you need to track:

📊 Conversion rates: How many leads move from one stage to the next?
⏳ Velocity: How long do leads stay in each stage?
🚦 Stalled leads: Where do leads get stuck (and why)?

Some conversion rate benchmarks to keep in mind, from Gartner and Mosaic (HUGE asterisk here — these standards change and can vary widely based on industry and business type, so use these as a wide goalpost and do some research on your vertical):

• Lead to MQL: 25% to 35%

• MQL to SQL: 13% to 26%

• SQL to Opportunity: 50% to 62%

• Opportunity to Close: 15% to 30%

If your conversion rates are much lower, your qualification criteria might be off, or your handoff between marketing and sales might need work. Either way, you want to get to the source of “why,” to confirm that things are working properly in your process and training.

3. Optimizing Lifecycle Stages (Fixing the Gaps)

If your lifecycle data is a mess, here’s where to start:

🔍 Audit your CRM data. How many leads are sitting in MQL limbo? How many are stuck as open opportunities for 6+ months? Look to see where people are sitting across your existing lifecycle, even if it’s super basic. Try to drop sections of leads into buckets and see how far off they currently are.

🤝 Align with sales. I can’t tell you how many times in my career Marketing has told me “Sales isn’t following up with our leads, they’re lazy,” only to find out that Sales can’t even see the leads in the CRM. I only find this out by interviewing Sales; I like to do a calibration across the team, from leadership to new IC. Build trust and get their feedback.

🔄 Automate lifecycle stage updates. For Marketing, yes — automate things like lead score threshold newly met = your marketing automation platform changes the stage to MQL. Makes sure MQLs are automatically getting routed to Sales. For Sales stages (post-MQL), this one comes with another huge asterisk: only do this once you’ve had Sales get used to the new process and they have a full understanding of the lifecycle. Once they have full understanding, look to see where there are redundant tasks, like marking a lead as SAL — you might be able to automate this based on email activity or being added to a sales cadence, rather than making Sales manually change the stage.

♻️ Make sure people can go back through the lead lifecycle. What if you want to upsell or cross-sell someone? What if someone gets to SQL, becomes unqualified because of timing/budget, and then starts engaging again once the timing or budget is right? Will your systems surface those people to Sales? I’ll cover this more while talking about Customer Lifecycle in a later edition, but start thinking about how someone could close on one product, re-engage, score, and then come back in for another product or service. If your company has more than one product or service, this is key — they may not reach out to their rep, they may come back in through a web form. You don’t want to lose them because you don’t have a way for someone to come back through as a hot lead who has re-engaged.

📉 Fix stage stagnation. If leads aren’t progressing, ask why:

• Wrong ICP?

• Poor sales follow-up?

• Lead scoring misalignment?

• New persona without a sales playbook?

• Incorrect visibility within CRM?

• Poorly designed/misfiring automation?

I could list a million reasons why things may have gone wrong, but this really does come down to looking at the data, talking with marketing, and talking with sales. Ask them to walk through their processes…typically, the gap will become very clear by doing this.

4. What To Do With This Info

A well-defined lead lifecycle keeps your funnel healthy, improves attribution, solidifies processes, and ensures marketing’s efforts lead to actual revenue.

So, take an hour this week to review your lifecycle model. Ask yourself:
✅ Are your definitions clear?
✅ Are the right people moving through the funnel and the right pace?
✅ Do the GTM teams know what they are supposed to do during each stage?
✅ Is sales actually using this data?

And reply to me with any questions you have! I’d love to know if there are any other areas you’d like to see covered on this topic, so I can look at putting them into future issues of the newsletter. 🙂 

But this isn’t all! I put together a quick brainstorming template for you to take and work from:

📖👉️ Check it out and copy it here.

P.S. Do you want me to send a walkthrough of how to set up lifecycle stages in HubSpot or Salesforce? Respond and LMK, I’m gauging interest in the technical details. 👀

What I’m up to/what I’m studying ✍️

I’ve recently gotten into Severance and am looking to talk to anyone and everyone about it! Also, the new seasons of White Lotus, Love is Blind, and Traitors. I won’t put any spoilers, but I’d love to know your thoughts if you’re watching any of these too!

I also recently spent some time enjoying amazing food in Yountville, up near Napa in northern California…highly recommend! 😋

Dear Sara ✍️

New to marketing operations? On a team of one at your company? Shy/introverted? Wish you could ask a question to an experienced marketing operations professional, without them knowing who you are? Here’s your chance! Submit an anonymous question to me here and I’ll answer a new question in every issue.

Here’s my answer to a question from last week:

Ooooh, this is a tricky one. I know a lot of Marketo loyalists follow the newsletter, and I respect you all. 🫡 Marketo has been a great product.

That being said, as per usual with acquisitions….word on the street is that the product has become a bit…outdated. In the meantime, vendors like HubSpot and Braze are building new features at breakneck speed. It’ll take time to see who wins the race, but I’ll speak for myself here.

For me, the Marketo certification made a huge deal in my career — it was my first mainstream cert outside of the Salesforce ecosystem, and it was a milestone that meant that I could be a flexible marketing operations professional. I was diversified.

BUT it isn’t high on my list of priorities right now. I’m more focused on newer and more quickly-growing tech like HubSpot. Why? Welp, because I like to have a job and be in demand. And those products are in higher demand right now.

HOWEVER — if I was interested in going to an enterprise or large enterprise company, I’d probably think differently. Marketo is very sticky for orgs like Amazon, and I don’t see them migrating quickly. And if you look at web scrapers, Marketo still has a pretty decent presence in the top 10k websites based on traffic.

So, long story short: I am witnessing a lot of companies in small-to-medium-sized businesses move away from Marketo, towards HubSpot (or Pardot, for cost savings if they use Salesforce). If you’re looking to work in the SMB space, I’d seriously consider prioritizing HubSpot experience and certs over Marketo. But, as always, your mileage may vary…look at the orgs you would want to join, see what they use, and plan your certs based on that. 🙂 

Want more Dear Sara? I probably don’t advertise this enough…if you want to read previous editions of the newsletter, you can check them out here (just scroll down to the archive).

Thanks for reading,

❤️ Sara