Unfortunately, the world we live in the CRMs are set up with linear stages denoted by chevrons. SFDC and Hubspot are set up with linear thinking in a non-linear world.
operations wise, how are other people tracking this non-linear progression in their CRMs so they can track a customer journey ‘theirs’, not ours.
David B. so, in your example, how are you tracking that journey in the CRM so you can see if a person went:
PLG -> Demo - Closed (won/Lost) or if they
requested a Demo online first -> free trial -> Closed Won (Loss)
how are you marking this with fields or stages, etc.
How do you operationalize your example?