Lifecycle
Define the stages your customers move through, watch them on a kanban, and let events move accounts on their own.
The lifecycle answers a simple question: where in their life with us is each customer? Onboarding, adoption, maturity, renewal. Knowing that changes what you offer them and when.
In LealUp this is configured as a pipeline with stages, and viewed as a kanban.
Pipelines and stages
A pipeline is the sequence of stages your customers move through. You can have several defined, but only one is active at a time: the active one governs your whole book.
On a pipeline you can:
- Create stages, delete them and reorder them.
- Clone it, to try a new structure without touching the one in use.
- Activate it, when it is ready.
Activating a pipeline moves all of your customers. When you activate one, LealUp deactivates the previous one and reassigns every account to the first stage of the new one. It is not a smart migration: it is a reset of everyone's position.
So clone and adjust before activating, and do it at a calm moment, not in the middle of month-end. A pipeline with no stages cannot be activated.
Event definitions
Events arriving from your product have technical names (user_invited_v2, report_export_pdf). An event definition gives each one a readable name and a category.
It serves two purposes: the interface reads "Invited a user" instead of the raw name, and an event can be marked as a milestone, meaning a moment that genuinely matters in the customer's lifecycle.
Events with no definition yet show up in a pending list, so you can map them as your product starts emitting new things.
The kanban
The kanban view shows your accounts spread across stages. It is the fast read on where your book is stuck: if one stage piles up while the others sit empty, that is your bottleneck.
Each card shows the account and its signals, so you can tell apart an account that has been in a stage a long time because it is going well from one that has been there because nobody touched it.
LealUp does not automatically flag an account as "stalled", and it does not warn you when someone has spent too long in a stage. The kanban shows the state; the reading is yours. If you want an automatic alert, the route is a playbook with whatever condition matters to you.
How accounts move
Accounts advance through automatic evaluation: when new events arrive for a customer, LealUp checks whether they should move. Every transition is recorded, so an account's history through the pipeline is queryable.
A stage change can also trigger a playbook, which is how you automate "when a customer enters renewal, create these tasks".
Building a pipeline that works
- Few stages. Four or five. A ten-stage pipeline is one nobody keeps current.
- Stages with a clear exit. If you cannot say what has to happen for an account to leave a stage, that stage is not well defined.
- Name them for the customer's state, not for what your team does. "In adoption" describes the customer; "Pending call" describes your calendar.
- Clone before redesigning. It is free and it saves you from the mass reset until you are sure.
Common problems
"I activated a pipeline and all my customers went back to the start"
That is the expected behaviour, not a bug. Activating reassigns everyone to the first stage. If you need the previous positions back, write to support before making further changes: transitions are recorded.
"I cannot activate my pipeline"
A pipeline with no stages cannot be activated. Add at least one.
"I see event names I do not understand"
Those are events with no definition. Go to the unmapped events list and give them a name and a category.
"An account is not advancing"
Accounts advance on evaluation when events arrive. If a customer is not emitting events (because the integration broke, or because they stopped using the product), they will not move. Check first whether their events are arriving at all.