Lifecycle Stage Architecture Sales Will Honour

Lifecycle stage lives in one system and that system is the CRM. Everything else reads it. I have yet to open an instance where that rule held and the funnel report was still wrong, and I have opened plenty where three teams each held their own definition of MQL and the board deck quietly averaged them. This engagement runs 4 to 6 weeks, and about half of that is agreement rather than configuration. The stages themselves: Fewer than most decks propose. Subscriber, Lead, MQL, Sales Accepted, Opportunity, Customer, plus the two states people forget to design: Recycled and Disqualified. Each gets an entry condition written as a boolean a system can evaluate, and an exit condition that is not merely the next stage's entry. If a stage cannot be expressed that way it is a feeling, and it does not go into the model. Sales Accepted is the argument: It is the one stage requiring a human to agree, and it is where the relationship between sales and marketing is actually settled. I run that conversation with the sales leader in the room, not with a marketing ops sponsor relaying it afterwards. What counts as acceptance. How long they have. What happens at hour 49. What a rejection must contain for marketing to be able to act on it. Written down, signed off, then configured. Configuring an SLA without holding the meeting produces a timer nobody honours. Timestamps, because reporting depends on them: One datetime field per stage, stamped on first entry and never overwritten, plus a parallel set for most recent entry where re-entry is legitimate. Velocity and stage conversion come out of those fields directly. Without them a funnel report is a snapshot that cannot say how long anything took, and reconstructing the history afterwards is guesswork. Where entry dates are derivable from existing activity I backfill them and document the method, so nobody later mistakes a reconstruction for a record. Recycling: Most models leak here. A rejected lead returning six months later should not re-enter as new and reset its history, and it should not sit in Recycled indefinitely because no rule ever takes it out. I define the re-entry trigger, the cooling period, and whether the previous owner keeps it. In banking and insurance there is a further wrinkle: an inquiry that lapsed may no longer carry consent, so the re-entry rule checks consent state instead of assuming it. For accounts, not only people: Where you sell to committees, which covers most of banking and most fleet purchasing, person lifecycle and account lifecycle are different objects and one does not roll up to the other by summing. I define both, and the rule for how a person's stage influences the account's stage is stated explicitly rather than implied by whichever report someone builds later. What I hand over: The definitions document. The field specification. Transition logic configured in the CRM. The backfill with its method noted. A funnel report built on the new timestamps so you can watch the model working before I leave. And a change process, because the model will need to change and it should not change because somebody edited a picklist on a Friday. What I will not do: Give the automation platform write access to the lifecycle field. Add a stage so a team can claim credit for a handoff. Or run this without the sales leader: if they cannot give four hours across six weeks, the model will not be honoured and the engagement is not worth your money. Not for you below roughly 500 new leads a quarter. At that volume a spreadsheet and a weekly meeting beat a formal model, and I will tell you so.