HubSpot includes a set of default lifecycle stages that define where a contact or company is in its journey with your business:
1. Subscriber
2. Lead
3. Marketing Qualified Lead
4. Sales Qualified Lead
5. Opportunity
6. Customer
7. Evangelist
8. Other
Now, let's determine the HubSpot default Lifecycle stages in more detail.
Subscriber
At the top of the funnel, “Subscriber” refers to people who have shown light interest, such as signing up for your newsletter or blog updates, but are not yet sales-ready.
While the “Subscriber” stage might look simple, it plays a crucial strategic role in your funnel. These are usually contacts captured through low-friction touchpoints—newsletter signups, blog subscriptions, or generic “stay updated” forms—where their primary intent is to receive value, not to buy right now.
In HubSpot, this stage is ideal for delivering educational content, nurturing trust, and learning more about your audience without overwhelming them with sales messaging. For small teams, it’s essential to keep the Subscriber stage clean: avoid pushing contacts forward too early; instead, use engagement signals (opens, clicks, repeat visits, topic interests) to determine when someone is ready to move to “Lead.”
Done well, your Subscriber segment becomes a reliable pool of warm, opted-in contacts you can gradually convert into qualified leads through targeted nurture workflows, progressive profiling, and tailored content offers.
Lead
“Lead” is the next step: these are contacts who have engaged more deeply (for example, filling out a form, downloading a guide, or requesting more information) and are now considered potential customers.
For most small B2B teams, the “Lead” stage is where you start treating a contact as a real sales opportunity in the making, even if they are not yet qualified. These contacts have raised their hands and given you explicit buying signals—submitting a contact form, requesting a pricing overview, booking a consultation, or downloading a decision-stage asset such as a comparison guide.
In HubSpot, this is the point to enrich the record (company size, industry, role, tech stack), begin light qualification, and enroll them in more targeted nurture sequences or sales outreach. It’s essential to keep your definition of a Lead clear and consistent across marketing and sales.
Hence, everyone understands when a contact should move from “Subscriber” to “Lead” and when they’re ready to be promoted to “Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL).”
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
“Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)” is a lead that your marketing team has identified as fitting your ideal profile and showing enough engagement (visits, interactions, scoring) to be considered more likely to buy than the average lead.
At the MQL stage, marketing is signaling to sales, “this contact is worth paying attention to.” Practically, this means the lead not only matches your ICP criteria (industry, company size, role, geography, tech stack) but has also demonstrated meaningful, repeated intent—such as visiting high-intent pages (pricing, integrations, case studies), returning to your site multiple times, engaging with key campaigns, or achieving a threshold in your lead scoring model.
For organisations, this stage works best when you define clear, measurable entry criteria in HubSpot (e.g., job title, company size, and score ≥ X) and automate the promotion from Lead to MQL via workflows. This ensures that only leads with genuine buying potential reach your sales team, keeps your pipeline focused, and creates a shared, data-driven definition of “ready for sales” across marketing and sales.
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
“Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)” goes a step further—these are MQLs that sales has accepted as real opportunities and is actively working through discovery calls, demos, or proposals.
At the SQL stage, sales is confirming, “This is a real deal we should actively pursue.” In practice, that means a rep has qualified the contact against basic BANT-style criteria (budget, authority, need, timeline) or your own sales methodology and confirmed there is a concrete problem your solution can solve.
Typical signals include a completed discovery call, a clear use case, identified decision-makers, and agreement to explore pricing, a demo, or a proof of concept.
In HubSpot, it is helpful to tie the move from MQL to SQL to specific sales activities—such as a completed meeting outcome, qualification fields on the contact or company record, or a custom “Sales acceptance” property—so you can report exactly how many sales accept marketing-sourced leads and how efficiently they progress toward an Opportunity.
Opportunity
Once a deal is formally opened in your pipeline, the associated contact or company becomes an “Opportunity,” indicating they’re in an active sales process.
At the Opportunity stage, your team is no longer asking “is there a deal?” but “how do we win this deal?” In HubSpot, this typically means there is an associated deal record in a pipeline, with defined value, expected close date, and a clear stage (for example, “demo scheduled,” “proposal sent,” or “negotiation”).
For startups and established companies, it is crucial to keep deal stages tightly aligned to your actual sales process and to update them consistently—this is what powers accurate revenue forecasting, win-rate analysis, and performance reporting by rep or channel. Using workflows and required fields, you can also automate tasks such as follow-up reminders, stakeholder mapping, and handoffs to technical or legal reviewers whenever a contact becomes an Opportunity.
Customer
When a deal closes successfully, it moves to “Customer,” indicating a signed contract or completed purchase.
Becoming a Customer is not just a status change; it marks the start of the retention and expansion journey. In HubSpot, this stage should trigger onboarding workflows, customer communication sequences, and, where relevant, handoff from sales to customer success or delivery teams.
Keeping Customer data clean and structured (products purchased, contract terms, segments, renewal dates) allows you to run targeted upsell and cross-sell campaigns, track churn risk, and measure customer lifetime value over time.
Treating the Customer stage as an operational signal—not just a label—helps you build a scalable post-sale experience and ensures that marketing, sales, and service teams are all working from the same source of truth.
Evangelist
“Evangelist” describes delighted customers who promote your brand, refer new business, or serve as case-study partners.
In HubSpot, treating Evangelists as a distinct lifecycle stage helps you operationalise word-of-mouth and social proof instead of leaving them to chance. These are customers with high satisfaction, strong outcomes, and an evident willingness to speak positively about you—ideal candidates for testimonials, reference calls, co-marketing, and reviews on key platforms.
You can use metrics such as NPS, success metrics, and engagement with your content to identify potential Evangelists, then trigger workflows to invite them to participate in case studies, referral programmes, or beta launches. Over time, a healthy Evangelist segment can become one of your most efficient acquisition channels.
Other
The “Other” stage is available for exceptions that don’t fit the standard journey (for example, partners or vendors). Still, in a well-structured HubSpot setup, it’s used sparingly to keep reporting and automation clean.
Think of “Other” as a controlled parking space rather than a general dumping ground. Typical use cases include internal contacts, agencies you collaborate with, technology partners, investors, or vendors who need to exist in your CRM but are not moving through your marketing–sales funnel.
To avoid distorting your funnel metrics, define clear rules for when a contact or company should be set to “Other” and exclude this stage from core revenue reports and lifecycle-based automation. This way, you maintain a single, unified database in HubSpot while keeping your lifecycle reporting focused on genuine prospects and customers.
Conclusion
In practice, the power of HubSpot’s default lifecycle stages lies in using them consistently across your entire organisation.
Clear, shared definitions for each stage—from Subscriber through to Evangelist (and the occasional “Other”)—give you reliable funnel reporting, more intelligent automation, and a common language for marketing, sales, and service to coordinate around.
If your team hasn’t reviewed this recently, now is a good moment to audit how lifecycle stages are used in your portal, document your agreed criteria for each one, and align your forms, workflows, and pipelines to that standard so every contact and company moves through a predictable, measurable journey.
At Velainn, we audit and organise a precise Lifecycle Stage alignment between marketing, sales, and customer support teams.