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Every account BuildBetter knows about resolves to a lifecycle — a single classification of where that account stands commercially. Lifecycle is derived automatically from your billing and CRM data; it is not a field you set by hand.
Lifecycle is a cross-cutting classification, not a standalone page. It appears on Follow-Ups, Customer Detail, Health, and Pipeline, and it is what “lifecycle” refers to in filters and rollups elsewhere in the product.

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The Six Values

unknown is a real, expected state — an account BuildBetter has signals for but no billing or CRM record to place. It means “unclassified,” not “broken.”

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How It’s Derived

BuildBetter resolves lifecycle from the strongest evidence it has, in roughly this order:
1

Billing and health data

An account with subscription data resolves to paid_subscription, carrying ARR, MRR, payment status, and the source that supplied them.
2

CRM pipeline data

An account with an opportunity resolves from its pipeline stage. The source stage is mapped to a canonical stage so different CRMs stay comparable.
3

Customer status fallback

Where neither is available, a stored customer status maps directly: active_paying to paid_subscription, closed_lost to pipeline_lost, churned to churned, prospect to pipeline_open.
4

Unknown

Nothing sufficient to classify leaves the account unknown.

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Canonical Pipeline Stages

Because every CRM names its stages differently, BuildBetter maps each source stage onto a canonical stage. Both are kept: the canonical stage for comparison and rollups, the original stage name so the account still reads the way your team talks about it.
If an account’s canonical stage looks wrong, the mapping from your CRM’s stage is the thing to check — not the account. The original source stage is retained alongside it, which makes the two easy to compare.

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Lifecycle vs. Health

They answer different questions and can disagree:
  • Lifecycle — the commercial state of the account. Are they paying, in pipeline, or gone?
  • Health — how the relationship is going right now.
A paid_subscription account can be unhealthy, and that combination is precisely what Success surfaces are built to catch. Reading only one of the two will hide it.

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Lifecycle Segments

Some surfaces — notably Tracked Items and Triage — group accounts by lifecycle segment, a coarser bucket built on the same classification. Where you see counts broken out by segment, they roll up from the values above.

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Where It Comes From

Lifecycle quality is entirely downstream of your connected data:
  • Connect a CRM so pipeline stages and opportunity state are available.
  • Keep company records linked, so signals attach to the right account.
Without either, most accounts resolve to unknown and lifecycle-based filtering has little to work with.

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Next

Health

How BuildBetter scores the state of a relationship.

Settings & Data

What Success needs connected to work well.