Journey Stages depict an account's progression throughout its Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Journey with your company. They represent the movement from one Stage to another. Some Stages are more detailed than others, but most represent a progression similar to these core ABM phases: Aware > Engaged > Marketing Qualified Account (MQA) > Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) Opportunity > Pipeline > Closed-Won.
An account can be in only one Journey Stage at a given point of time.
To watch a video about Journey Stages, see Working with Journey Stages (Video).
Access the Account Journey Builder
You can find the Stages of your company’s Demandbase implementation listed on the Account Journey Builder page. On this page a Demandbase Admin can customize the Journey Stages.
To access the Account Journey Builder, from the left navigation bar, go to 
Settings > Journey > Account Journey Builder.
How Journey Stages Are Defined
Account Journeys are defined by:
- Stage Criteria: Each Stage is defined by configuration of Selector criteria in the Account Journey Builder. For example, you might want a Re-Engaging Lost Accounts Stage that’s configured as follows:
- Selector 1: Accounts with Any Opportunity, Stage = closed lost
- Selector 2: Accounts with Any Activity, Engagement Minutes < 30, Activity Date in the Past 3 Months
- Stage Order: The Stages of the Journey funnel are numbered from top to bottom to reflect the ABM sequence that an account can progress through–typically from being an unqualified lead, going through the marketing and sales lifecycles, and landing in a Customer or post-sales Stage. But Demandbase determines the Stage of an account by assessing it in the reverse order, from bottom to top of the Journey funnel. See How Accounts Get Mapped to Journey Stages for details.
See Edit and Publish Account Journey Stages for the steps to configure and change Journey Stages.
Demandbase Out-of-the-Box Journey Stages
This section outlines the out-of-the-box Journey Stages. Most companies find they need to customize the criteria for some of these Stages and add other Stages.
- All Other
Accounts that are not showing engagement and don’t qualify for any other stage. - Qualified
Accounts with a Qualification Score greater than or equal to 70. - Aware
Accounts with a high intent strength in the last 30 days. - Engaged
Accounts with greater than or equal to 10 Engagement Minutes in the past 3 months. - MQA (Marketing Qualified Accounts)
Accounts with a Pipeline Predict Score greater than or equal to 85 percent, or marketing Engagement Minutes greater than or equal to 100 in the past 3 months. - Opportunity
Accounts with at least one open opportunity. - Customer
Active customer accounts with at least one closed won opportunity.
How Accounts Get Mapped to Journey Stages
When determining which Journey Stage an account should belong to, Demandbase evaluates each of the stages in a bottom-to-top direction of the Journeys funnel. This order is the opposite of how prospects progress from prospect to customer or up-sell in the funnel. Let's say we have hundreds of accounts that Demandbase processes for the Account Journey Builder with the Stages shown in the screenshot above:
- Demandbase first checks which of your accounts meet the criteria for Customer stage. If 10 of those accounts qualify for the Customer stage, then 90 will be checked against the Selector logic of Pipeline Opportunity.
- If 10 accounts qualify for the Pipeline Opportunity stage, then 80 accounts are compared to MQA Selector logic.
- And so on the process continues upward through each of the Stages in the funnel.
- Ultimately, if any accounts are not mapped to any of the Stages in rows 2 through 7 of the screenshot, they land in the All Other Stage.
Tip: Don't become alarmed if accounts sometimes don't progress through the Journey Stages in a linear fashion or even skip Stages. For example, an account might initially show interest in your product, then become disengaged, and later exhibit their interest by jumping to a Stage that's more than one level away from the Stage they originally reached.
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