Three weeks into a new portal audit last year, I asked the ops lead how they were identifying current customers for their CS team. She said "lifecycle stage equals Customer."
Then I pulled the data. Forty percent of their Customer-stage contacts hadn't had a single activity in over a year. Two of them were companies they'd lost to a competitor. One was a prospect who'd filled out a demo form in 2021 and somehow got stamped through a workflow nobody remembered building.
I've had a version of that conversation on nearly every portal I've walked into. Identifying active customers inside HubSpot has been one of those foundational problems that gets rebuilt from scratch on every project.
HubSpot shipped a fix for this last week. It's small, and there are some gotchas to be aware of, but it matters more than the release notes let on.
What the Current Customer Property Is
“Current Customer” is a new system-managed property on contacts, companies, and custom objects that flags whether a record is a current customer.
"System-managed" means HubSpot maintains it. You configure the definition (lifecycle stage equals Customer, or a custom logic rule, or a combination of both) and HubSpot handles keeping it current. New customers get a default definition applied automatically. Existing customers will need to set it up for themselves.
Here's the thing about this property: you could build it yourself in about five seconds. Create a custom checkbox property, write a workflow to stamp it based on lifecycle stage, done. Nothing about the underlying infrastructure is revolutionary.
But that’s not the point.
The Difference Between You Knowing and HubSpot Knowing
There are two different things happening when you identify your customers in HubSpot:
You being able to segment and report on your current customers.
HubSpot recognizing, at a system level, who your current customers are.
Custom properties solve problem one. This property solves problem two. And those are not the same problem.