The customer journey statuses show where in the sales process your contacts or companies are. The main statuses are Lead, Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), Assigned, Pipeline and Customer. Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) requires Marketing Automation. Depending on the business model your organisation uses, there are two ways of using the statuses:
Sync on: If closing an order with one contact working a company should set the status to 'Customer' for the company and everyone working at that company, we recommend syncing the status.
Sync off: If you'd like the company to have the customer status, and its contacts to only acquire it when you've placed an order with that specific contact, not syncing the status is the way to go.
To turn on the sync, an administrator goes to Settings → Account → Business rules → Journey and turns on Sync status between contact and company at the top of the page. It is off by default.
Turning on the sync does not change existing companies and contacts. A contact is updated the next time the journey status of its company, or of another contact at the same company, changes.
Syncing status between a company and its contacts
Imagine your business model is like Upsales. Where selling your services to one person at a company means that the entire company, and its contacts, should be labelled Customers.
Having the sync-option enabled means that closing an order with one contact (which makes that contact acquire the Customer status) syncs that status to its company, and the company then syncs the Customer-status to all of its contacts, making the company and everyone who works there acquire the 'Customer' status.
The sync only moves contacts forward in the journey. A contact that already has a later status keeps it. Pipeline and Customer also replace Lost opportunity, Disqualified and Lost customer. Setting a contact to Disqualified changes only that contact. The full order is in How can I change a company/contact journey status?
Not syncing status between a company and its contacts
Imagine you're into organising B2B events and in this case you are targeting bigger companies, like Apple Inc.
Closing an order with a single contact doesn't mean that everyone working at the company should be labelled 'Customer'. The contact may only represent a single team at Apple. The other teams should probably also have some fun and buy your services, and they shouldn't be labelled as Customers yet.
With the sync turned off, the customer status will only be applied to the contact that's added to the order and the company they work for. This way you can clearly see that Apple Inc is a customer, and which contacts haven't bought your services yet, and so aren't labelled with the Customer status.