HubSpot's Leads object transforms prospect management from chaos to clarity. While its introduction has generated excitement, it's also sparked some confusion and questions. What distinguishes a Lead from a Contact or Deal? How do HubSpot Lead stages align with Lifecycle stages — and your unique sales pipeline?
GSI can help you navigate these nuances. Let's explore the Leads object, clarify its interactions with other key HubSpot Sales Workspace features, uncover the most common mistakes companies make with the tool, and discover how you can make the most of it.
What Is the HubSpot Sales Workspace and the Leads Object?
Managing numerous, varied Contacts is both normal and challenging for companies, since not all Contacts are active marketing Leads. While basic CRM lead status tracking has long been available, HubSpot attempted to address this challenge more comprehensively with the Marketing Contacts functionality. The Leads object further redefines and simplifies the process.
This object is a dedicated feature for managing and qualifying prospects, offering a structured environment for sales reps to engage with potential customers who've not yet become fully qualified. Doing so allows reps to focus on prospecting activities, like initial outreach and data gathering, before converting a Lead into a Contact and adding it to the HubSpot sales pipeline.
The Leads object also addresses a pain point for sales departments — eliminating the need to create a Deal too early in the sales cycle, which can result in cluttered pipelines and make accurate forecasting challenging.
It's important to understand that the Lifecycle stage is a property tied to the Contact, while the HubSpot Lead status is tied to the Leads object, and the Deal stage is tied to the Deal object. These are all separate yet interconnected properties that track a potential customer's journey through your funnel.
HubSpot designed the concept to work like this:
- Your company receives a new prospect who becomes a Contact in the system. Depending on the interaction, your team may record them with a tag such as “newsletter subscriber" in the Lifecycle Stage.
- Once active marketing begins, the Leads object is generated in the dedicated environment. Salespeople begin verifying the Lead as a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) or Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL). Default or custom stages track outreach.
- After qualification, your rep converts the Lead to an Opportunity in the Contact Lifecycle stage. HubSpot Sales Workspace can automatically create a Deal once the Lifecycle stage reaches “Opportunity.”
- The Deal moves through your company's sales pipeline. Reps continue adjusting the Deal stage as it progresses from negotiation to closed. Closed Won deals can automatically transition to the Customer Lifecycle stage with the proper system configuration.
5 Most Common Mistakes With the Leads Object in the HubSpot Sales Workspace
Understanding these five common mistakes and how to avoid them helps maximize the tool's value while maintaining efficiency and alignment between sales and marketing teams.
1. Confusing the Leads Object With Other Features and Objects
Every opportunity to create and maintain an edge matters, reinforcing the need to categorize Leads accurately and understand their differentiation from other roles in your workflows. Confusion can negatively impact your revenue, return on investment (ROI), and team alignment — a recipe for wasted resources, underperforming marketing campaigns, and lower conversion rates.
That's especially true when you don't accurately differentiate Leads from traditional Contacts. Your sales team will spend valuable time on unqualified prospects, while marketers will be unable to nurture leads effectively. The result? A disjointed customer journey and lost revenue opportunities.
The Leads object is specifically designed for engaging with unqualified individuals who may or may not become customers. Conversely, reserve Contacts for qualified entities with whom you're actively building relationships and pursuing sales. With HubSpot's Leads object, you can quickly convert a Lead into a Contact as the journey progresses and into a Deal once it's fully qualified. This new functionality helps ensure effective time allocation and consistent buyer journeys while preventing opportunities from slipping through the cracks.
2. Misunderstanding Lead Stages Versus Pipeline or Deal Stages
Understanding the difference between HubSpot deal stages and lead status is crucial, as attempting to use Deal pipeline stages within the Lead tools is another common misstep that can cause confusion and reduce value. Both serve different purposes in the sales process and need separate tracking approaches. Forcing the HubSpot Deal stage names onto Leads generates reporting inaccuracies and confusion about where prospects are in your unique sales cycle. Ultimately, that can result in forecasting errors and make it challenging to identify where bottlenecks exist in prospecting versus closing processes.
Use Lead stages only to monitor a rep's prospecting activities. These often include stages like “new,” “attempting contact,” and “qualified.” Conversely, use Deal stages to monitor progress after qualification occurs. Typical stages here may include “appointment set,” “proposal sent,” and “closed won.”
3. Ignoring the Lifecycle Stage
The Lifecycle stage can add more complexity without a concrete understanding of its differences from Lead stages. Think of the Lifecycle stage as the map legend and high-level indicator of where a customer is in their journey, while the Leads object is a tactical sales tool for working prospects. These stages work together — once a prospect transitions from MQL to SQL in the Lifecycle stage, the platform creates the corresponding Leads object.
HubSpot Lifecycle stages remain highly relevant because they:
- Let marketing know when to nurture and when it's time to hand off to sales.
- Trigger sales teams' engagement.
- Track overall progression from hello to welcome aboard.
Ignoring the Lifecycle stage has a real-world effect on customer journeys. It can disrupt handoff between marketing and sales and make conversion rate measurement throughout the funnel more challenging. Plus, it could result in prospects receiving the wrong communication at the wrong time, negatively impacting their brand perception and purchasing decisions.
4. Failing to Customize Your Lead Stages
HubSpot Sales Workspace includes default Lead stages, but it's key to remember that these are merely starting points. The defaults typically don't align precisely with your unique customer journeys and prospecting workflows, which can create challenges like:
- Working within a framework that doesn't match your reality
- Less meaningful reporting
- Confusion about when to move Leads forward
- Inconsistent handling of Leads across teams and team members
Customizing the Leads stages allows you to address these challenges. Map out your processes, considering factors like your sales cycle length, qualification criteria, and common touchpoints, and tailor the stages to match your workflows.
5. Lacking a Clear Handoff Process
A clear handoff process is equally important to successfully using the Leads object. Without well-defined workflows that your teams can apply consistently, you risk the following:
- Qualified leads being forgotten or dropped, resulting in lost revenue opportunities
- Delayed sales cycles that create poor customer experiences
- Challenges with accurate conversion metrics
- Confusion about who's responsible at each step
Address these issues by:
- Having clear qualification criteria.
- Defining your conversion triggers and automating Deal creation when possible.
- Identifying ownership at each stage.
The New Sales Workspace Simplifies the Leads Object
HubSpot's new Sales Workspace simplifies the Leads object more than ever. With the right configuration and approaches, you set up your sales and marketing teams for:
- Streamlined processes: A centralized, dedicated environment for Lead management pairs with clear progression paths and built-in qualification and conversion tools.
- Automation capabilities: Robust automation features and AI-powered tools translate into high efficiency. Qualified leads become deals, Lifecycle stage updates trigger next steps, and handoffs occur — all automatically and based on customized workflows and Lead activity.
- High visibility: Teams have real-time, accurate insights into lead status, a single source of truth for interaction history, and clearer, easier metric measuring and reporting.
Make the Most of HubSpot With GSI
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