A property (see above) tracking where a contact currently sits in their relationship with a business — commonly including stages like subscriber, lead, marketing qualified lead, sales qualified lead, opportunity, and customer.
Why it matters
Lifecycle stage gives marketing, sales, and customer success a shared, common language for where a contact stands, which is what allows automation and reporting (like MQL-to-SQL conversion rate) to function consistently across an organization, rather than each team defining "qualified" differently.
In a sentence
"The contact's lifecycle stage automatically updates to 'customer' the moment their first payment is processed, which then removes them from any pre-sale nurture workflows."
Related terms
- Often confused with: Deal stage (lifecycle stage tracks a contact's overall relationship status with the business over a long period; deal stage tracks the progress of one specific sales opportunity, and a single contact can be associated with multiple deals over time, each with its own stage).