After the sale, the context about a customer's situation ends up scattered and unstructured, and key moments get missed. That is the problem HubSpot's Customer States are aimed at.
Per the update, customer success managers can track states such as onboarding, upcoming renewal, declining usage or cancellation indicated right on the customer record, and trigger standardized follow-up actions for each one from the Customer Success workspace or through workflows. It is in beta, for Service Hub Professional and Enterprise.
I came in arguing that it likely exists because "there's nothing in lifecycle stages" for what comes after someone becomes a customer.
Ryan Ginsberg went straight to what anyone building this has to answer: "what are the systems that are being set up to trigger when customers move into these states?" And what to do before you touch the configuration: "what does it mean when they're in onboarding and what does it mean when we're declining usage? So all of those things need to be defined first."
If you run customers after the sale, write down what each state means before you turn any of them on.
The next step