What is it?

With Customer Lifecycle Stages, accounts will be automatically segmented into Leads, Prospects, and Customers in Partner Center and Sales & Success Center. This makes it easy to automatically serve customers based on where they are in your sales process.

Why is it important?

Segmenting by lifecycle stages allows you to better interact with a customer depending on where they are in their buying journey, and powering lifecycle stages through Vendasta's Automations allows for this to happen with the minimum number of clicks. 

Some ways to utilize lifecycle segmentation include:

• sending one email campaign targeted to Leads and another targeted to Prospects
• notifying salespeople when a Lead logs into Business App, but not when a Customer logs in
• activate express products when a Lead becomes a Prospect

How does it work?

Vendasta has set up a default group of built-in Automations that will segment 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 a lifecycle stage does not stop automations 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criteria to set lifecycle stages do not match how you would like to segment accounts, the built-in Automation can be unpublished and your own unique criteria can be created!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 automations can be found in our resource article on built-in automations.