Sales
Lead Generation
Marketing
Defining Your Life Cycle Stages with Clarity
Seamlessly turn prospects into customers by clearly defining life cycle stages that align your sales and marketing teams.
Seamlessly turn prospects into customers by clearly defining life cycle stages that align your sales and marketing teams.
Efficiently converting prospects to customers is the ultimate goal and a smooth hand-off from marketing to sales is vital to achieving it. But take note that sometimes, barriers such as miscommunications and dropped prospects are inevitable without a clearly defined lead life cycle.
What’s a lead life cycle, exactly? Think of it as your prospect's journey — from their first interaction with your company to becoming a valued customer.
Without mapped-out stages, prospects fall through the cracks between misaligned marketing and sales teams.
In this guide, we'll help you clear any confusion by explaining the lead life cycle and its typical stages. Let's get started!
A lead life cycle is simply the steps a potential customer takes on their journey with your business. It starts from the moment they first become aware of your company, through getting to know you, until they finally decide to purchase.
Clearly defined life cycle stages boost your lead management by ensuring your marketing and sales teams are on the same page. It's like passing the prospect baton seamlessly between teams so no one drops the ball.
Leads gradually move through the life cycle stages as they engage further with your company and team. Each stage should have:
Stages may vary depending on your business. How quickly or slowly someone goes through this journey depends on a few things.
Firstly, it depends on what you're selling. If it costs a lot, like in business-to-business (B2B) sales, the journey might take longer.
Each lead is different. Some might be ready to buy right away because they urgently need what you're offering.
On the other hand, someone else might take a lot of time. They might require months of information and reminders before deciding to purchase.
Below, we defined some typical life cycle stages and explained what you should do at each stage to move prospects forward:
Becoming a lead is the first step in the customer’s life cycle. A lead is someone who just started learning about what you offer.
They may show interest by checking out your website. But they’re still just window shopping. They need more nurturing before they’re ready to talk to a salesperson.
Your marketing team needs to nurture leads by providing valuable content that engages them. Think blog articles, guides, webinars - things that attract them and answer their questions.
At this point, you’re raising awareness, getting leads to keep interacting with your content, and developing their interest level before sales steps in. You want them excited!
To move a lead to the next stage, they should show increased engagement by downloading more content assets, signing up for email newsletters, or participating in webinars.
Once a lead demonstrates regular engagement, they’re ready for the next step.
So, your lead is now becoming an MQL. They’re going beyond just poking around your website.
MQLs are downloading your gated assets like ebooks or whitepapers. They could sign up for your newsletter or fill out a contact form. They’re actively raising their hand for more info from your marketing team.
To push MQLs closer to sales, your team should keep nurturing them with targeted content like email campaigns, guides, and webinars — whatever provides value and builds interest.
The goal now is gauging buyer intent to see how sales-ready they are. Marketing is still hosting the party but getting MQLs prepped and excited for when sales steps in.
When your marketing efforts pay off, your lead turns into a SAL.
SALs directly express interest in buying by requesting a demo, responding to sales outreach, etc. At this point, they’re ready to talk business with sales.
The sales team takes over directly contacting SALs and developing the opportunity. They’ll qualify leads further and pitch solutions tailored to their needs.
Now, you want to assess if SALs are solid prospects and guide them into the sales pipeline.
To determine if a SAL is a strong prospect, the sales team needs to qualify them by asking questions about their needs, challenges, budget, timeline, etc.
This qualification process aims to understand pain points, determine whether the solution fits, and evaluate the lead’s readiness to move forward.
Once your sales team qualifies the lead and sees strong potential, the SAL graduates to become a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL). SQLs represent hot opportunities that are worth ongoing nurturing through the sales pipeline.
The goal with SQLs is to guide them through demos, proposals, and negotiations to close the deal. With proper qualification upfront, SQLs have a high likelihood of becoming customers.
Sales have been nurturing this lead and now see some real hot potential! The lead has become an opportunity.
Opportunities are qualified prospects that sales believes are likely to become customers soon. These get added to the sales funnel for ongoing nurturing.
The sales team continues to contact and guide opportunities through demos, negotiations, and proposal discussions. The goal is closing the deal!
Now, you’ve reached the stage where the lead isn’t just listening to you talk about your product — they’re trying it themselves! This hands-on experience turns the lead into a Product Qualified Lead (PQL).
PQLs engage directly with your product by signing up for a free trial or specialized demo. Now they’re kicking the tires and seeing firsthand if you live up to your claims.
By using the product, PQLs demonstrate solid interest and intent. They’ve invested their precious time to take a test drive. That shows commitment on their part.
Your sales team will continue nurturing PQLs by checking in, answering product questions, and highlighting specific benefits that address their needs.
You should aim to leverage their active product experience to steer them towards purchasing. You want to convert all that promising engagement into revenue!
Your teams help address any barriers or concerns that are making PQLs hesitate. You assist them to ensure they succeed with the product trial.
With some focused nurturing, many PQLs will realize firsthand the benefits of your solution and become happy customers.
After moving through all the previous stages, the lead is now a full-fledged customer!
The customer decides your product or service solves their needs. The sales process was successful in converting initial interest into an actual purchase.
This customer can receive onboarding, support, upsells, and retention communications. The goal becomes getting them to renew or expand their purchase.
Now that we’ve discussed the common life cycle stages, let’s jump into why they’re essential for your business.
When you clearly outline life cycle stages, your teams see eye-to-eye. No one is confused about where leads are at or who handles what.
Your marketing and sales teams can work together seamlessly instead of in silos.
Marketing knows when and how to nurture leads to make them sales-ready. Meanwhile, sales understands how to progress leads smoothly into opportunities. Both teams optimize tactics appropriate for where leads are in their journey.
Well-defined stages allow effective lead hand-offs between marketing and sales. Transitions are seamless when the ownership and goals for each stage are clear.
Based on engagement triggers, marketing can identify the appropriate time to pass a lead to sales. And the sales team knows what criteria make a lead viable so they can prioritize follow-ups.
Smooth hand-offs prevent leads from stagnating in between siloed departments.
When you know a lead’s stage, you can customize messaging and offers based on what they care about at each point in their journey.
For example, awareness content for early-stage leads versus product demos for later-stage SQLs. Personalized nurturing makes the content feel relevant so leads can progress faster.
Without defined stages, generic nurturing can make leads disengage. In contrast, stage-specific programs make every interaction feel valuable.
Tracking conversion rates between stages highlights what’s going well or poorly. If leads stall at a particular stage, you know that area needs work. Fast transitions mean processes are solid.
For example, if you notice that a low percentage of leads make it from MQL to SAL, that’s an issue. Your marketing team may be struggling to get leads ready for sales.
It could mean marketing and sales have different criteria for what makes a lead sales-ready. Marketing may need more automation, content, or alignment with sales.
On the other hand, if you have a high conversion rate from PQL to Customers, that's great! It shows sales have excellent processes for nurturing, negotiating, and closing deals with these leads.
Having precise life cycle stages is helpful, but it's not guaranteed success. It's important to keep improving and fine-tuning your strategy to make the most of the life cycle.
Here are a few ways to do it:
First, get everyone using one Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system like Salesforce. Doing so gives sales and marketing a single view of every lead.
No more juggling spreadsheets and emails! A unified CRM shows the entire journey and hand-offs between teams — no leads vanishing between the cracks.
It also streamlines processes when data is centralized. Monitoring relationships and interactions with leads becomes easy.
Next, look for manual processes you can automate in your CRM. Automation saves time for salespeople.
For example, set up automatic email sequences to flow without manual sending or automate data tasks like imports and logging.
Automation lets reps focus on more strategic parts of the funnel that need personal outreach. More done in less time!
Develop a scoring system to tag and group leads based on profile and behaviors — systems like this help sales priority.
Score factors include the lead source, titles, email engagement, etc. Higher-scoring leads get faster follow-ups.
Segment into groups like “ready for sales call” or “send more content.” Scoring and segments help focus effort on hot leads.
Looking at key performance indicators (KPIs) for each life cycle stage provides clues to improve. Tracking metrics like:
If metrics show issues, fix them. Low sales qualified leads? Enhance content for marketing qualified leads. High trial conversions? Expand free trials.
By constantly checking the metrics, you can spot what's working and what needs work. The numbers point the way to getting more profitable customers!
A clear cycle lets you track prospects, optimize hand-offs, and reduce wasted efforts. Your teams will work together like a well-tuned machine to delight prospects while improving conversions.
Remember to collaborate on concise life cycle stage definitions. Track progression metrics to double down on what works. Automate tasks for efficiency. And score leads to focus effort.
With an optimized life cycle framework, leads seamlessly transition through milestones guided by insights, not guesses.
Now that you have the blueprint, go and define those stages, align your teams, automate workflows, and start racking up the wins!