Hubsessed Office Hours: HubSpot Super Admin

A stage before Lead: the wayback machine

George B. Thomas · Friday, October 16, 2026

What do you call the people in your database who haven't done anything yet? Let's take a trip back in the way back machine. Lifecycle stages were subscriber, lead, marketing qualified, sales qualified, so anything before Lead was somebody who took a very micro action. Nobody was a cold contact. That was HubSpot before the leads object, when lead status was a property dropdown. That's not where we live now. Two places my brain goes. One: if you're using the leads object, something has to connect the Lead lifecycle stage to creating a lead record there. Two: whatever you name the stage before Lead (I hate "parking lot"), it's the holder for every human we want to run an engagement campaign for, say a three or four email sequence to get them to become a subscriber or a lead. At that stage we don't know their ICP (ideal customer profile) or persona, so the flow should be the workhorse that gets them to fill out the forms that tell us. You get a way to think about what lives in the stage before Lead and how people leave it. What does your portal do today with someone who's in it but hasn't done anything yet? October sessions are free; all you need is a free Hubsessed subscription. Replay clip from Hubsessed Office Hours: HubSpot Super Admin. Chris Carolan and I hosted as equals. Clip page: https://www.hubsessed.io/clips/hsa-2026-10-16-a-stage-before-lead-the-wayback-machine