Remember that this model is all about the customer, so you’ll want to align your Flywheel with the three main customer-facing pillars of your organization that I mentioned earlier: Marketing, Sales and Service.
In this model, you should add force and reduce friction in order to build momentum and accelerate your company’s growth. And with a growing mistrust of marketing in a social media-enabled world, a happy customer can be your strongest marketer.Īnd the Flywheel is built to be in motion, spinning all the time. Retaining and upselling an existing customer is far more effective and profitable than pitching and converting a net new one. This model is great at reminding you that your customers are your biggest asset, and you need to treat them accordingly. In the Flywheel model, customers are at the center of everything, and the three major customer-facing pillars of any company, Sales, Marketing and Service, all revolve around them. HubSpot wanted to solve that challenge by blowing up the linear funnel and reimagining it as a circular Flywheel with no end. A New Model is Born: Welcome, the HubSpot Flywheel And that is absolutely not how any growing business should ever view their customers. Possibly the most glaring is that this model looks at the customer as the end result. When we embark on a sales enablement program with a client, these steps are extremely useful in helping them to really understand what’s actually happening in their sales process.īut, as I mentioned earlier, there are flaws. Which stages can have some parts automated and which ones need to be manual?.What specific actions are happening during each stage?.What is the “gate” or specific action or activity that we’re going to use to graduate a lead from one stage to the next?.It’s a great tool to force conversation to answer questions such as: I have found that it helps them to tangibly define the interactions between sales and a potential customer. I do think that using a funnel is extremely helpful for companies that don’t have a formalized or effective lead qualification process today. I haven’t (as yet at least) found a great theoretical approach for that use case.
It also doesn’t provide an easy way to visualize leads that flow fluidly up and down the funnel. It doesn’t represent the nuance of sales and marketing nurture that occurs over the time it takes to move through the funnel – often many months or even years in B2B sales. The exact stages can be adjusted to match the terminology and needs of the company using it, but the stages in the example funnel below match the out-of-the-box Lifecycle Stages and philosophy that HubSpot recommends, and I find them to be broad enough to fit most companies’ sales processes. In traditional theory, an individual enters at the top of the funnel as an unknown visitor, then over time, they move lower down the funnel as they become more and more qualified.
It’s shaped as a funnel to represent the winnowing down of leads from many to few, as they progress through different interactions and touchpoints with your company throughout the sales process. The lead funnel, also known as the sales funnel, is a way to visualize and organize the different stages that leads will pass through as they move along your sales cycle. Let’s take a step back and break it all down. That’s the big problem the Flywheel solves.īut, after a lot of thought, I think that the traditional funnel provides something that the Flywheel can’t: a tactical, hands-on methodology for structuring sales processes. And that is true – the funnel is not a comprehensive way to look at your entire customer lifecycle. The Flywheel was first developed by HubSpot because that funnel of old is flawed: it turns customers into a raw output that get dropped out the bottom and forgotten. I believe that the HubSpot Flywheel actually complements the traditional lead funnel. My short answer is: no, at least not completely.