Customer lifecycle stages automatically divide your Partner Center and Sales & Success Center accounts into Leads, Prospects, and Customers. This makes it easy to automatically serve customers based on where they are in the sales process.
Why is it important?
Lifecycle stage segmentation allows you to better engage with your customers based on where they are in the buying journey. By providing lifecycle stages through Vendasta automation, you can do this with a minimal number of clicks.
Here are some ways to use lifecycle segmentation:
- Send one email campaign targeted to the Leads and another targeted to the Prospects.
- Notify Salespeople when a Lead logs into the business app, but not when a customer logs in.
- Activate the Standard product when a Lead becomes a prospect.
How does it work?
Vendasta set up a default group of built-in automation that segments accounts based on key actions.
- When an account is created, it will be marked as a Lead.
- When an Opportunity is created on an account in the Lead lifecycle stage, the account will be moved to the Prospect lifecycle stage.
- When a product is purchased for an account and you are successfully billed the wholesale cost, the lifecycle stage is set to Customer.
Manually Changing Lifecycle Stage
The lifecycle stage of an account can be manually set by navigating to the account page in either Partner Center or Sales & Success Center and selecting the appropriate stage from the drop-down menu at the top of the page.
Examples of when you might use this feature include:
- An account "skips" a step in your sales process.
- An action is done by accident that automatically moves the account to a different stage.
Note: Manually changing the lifecycle stage does not prevent automation from changing the lifecycle stage in the future.
Customizing Lifecycle Stage
If the default built-in Automation criteria to set lifecycle stages do not match how you would like to segment accounts, the built-in Automation can be unpublished and your own unique criteria can be created!
Setting a lifecycle stage is available as an Automation step and can be included in any Automation workflow.
More information on editing built-in automation can be found in our resource article on built-in automation.