flywheel marketing

adopted from HubSpot

by Slamet Purwanto

Basic Principles

Invented by James Watt, the flywheel is simply a wheel that’s incredibly energy-efficient

With the flywheel, you use the momentum of your happy customers to drive referrals and repeat sales. Basically, your business keeps spinning

How It Works

Your flywheel contains depends on three things:

1. How fast you spin it
2. How much friction there is
3. How big it is

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Speed

The speed of your flywheel increases when you add force to areas that have the biggest impact

For example:

1. inbound marketing
2. a freemium model
3. frictionless selling
4. a customer referral program
5. paid advertising
6. investing in your customer service team

Friction

Friction is anything that slows down your flywheel

For example:

1. poor internal processes
2. lack of communication between teams
3. misalignment between your customers and your employees

You can reduce friction by looking at how your teams are structured, why customers are churning, and where prospects are getting stuck in the buyer’s journey

Decrease friction

How hubspot decrease friction

Speed & Friction Resultances

The more you increase speed and decrease friction, the more you will create promoters of your business. And all those promoters become a force that spins your flywheel

The Inbound Methodology and the Flywheel

When you use the inbound methodology as a foundation, the three phases of your flywheel are:

• Attract
• Engage
• Delight

By applying force to these three phases, you can provide an amazing customer experience.

The Inbound Methodology and the Flywheel (examples)

Hubspot quote

Companies that choose to use the flywheel model over other models have a huge advantage because they aren’t the only ones helping their business grow — their customers are helping them grow as well

The Flywheel vs. the Funnel

Today, customer referrals and word-of-mouth have become the largest influence on the purchase process, which means the funnel has one major flaw: It views customers as an afterthought, not a driving force.

You see, funnels produce customers but don’t consider how those customers can help you grow.

Third-party review sites, peer-to-peer recommendations, and word-of-mouth play a bigger role in buying decisions than ever before

81% of buyers trust their families’ and friends’ recommendations more than companies’ business advice

How Your Market Decide Today

But that’s not how people make decisions today.

• They ask their networks for advice
• they search for mentions of your company on social media, and you bet
• they’re reading third-party review sites.

How to Flywheel-ize Your Funnel

1. Identify the core flywheel metrics your company tracks
2. Identify your company’s forces by flywheel stage
1. Re-draw those forces to maximize delight and word of mouth
3. Identify points of friction between your customers and your employees, and points of handoff between internal teams, that affect customer experience
• Re-align those points of friction to better serve the customer through automation, shared goals, or a reorganization

Templates: Google slide or PowerPoint

Assignment 1: Measuring the Flywheel

understanding the status quo of your flywheel

At each stage depicted below -- attract, engage, and delight -- HubSpot has different priorities and commitments that we’ve made to our prospects and customers

To determine the health of our flywheel, we asked ourselves two questions:

1. What investments are we making at each stage of the flywheel?
2. How are we measuring the success or failure of those investments?

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Part 1: Mapping your go-to-market strategy

Part 2: Measuring success

In this step, identify the most important metric for each activity. Make a note of conversion rates between each stage here as well -- this measures the friction in your flywheel.

Then, record (either month-over-month or year-over-year) how much you added or lost in that bucket, and your total number.

• Attract: Our topline metric here is monthly website traffic.
• Engage: HubSpot’s flywheel moves visitors through the “Engage” stage in two steps, free user and paying customer
• Delight: We run Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys with our customer base quarterly, and we track the number of customers who are promoters

Assignment 2: Maximizing Delight

Assignment 2: Maximizing Delight

Assignment 2

Assignment 3: Reducing Friction

the thornier sources of friction at your company: Your organizational chart.

You can break this down into four steps:

1. Where are your points of friction?
2. What can be automated?
3. What can be addressed through shared goals?
4. What can be addressed through team reorganization?

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Step 1: Identify friction

Externally, think about the complaints you hear from customers and prospects -- where do they have difficulty interacting with your company?

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Internally, consider which metrics you struggle to move despite repeated efforts, processes that take longer than they should, and sources of common problems.

Step 2: Automate repeatable tasks

Consider the activities your customers and prospects want to do, but are complex for humans to execute

look for the repetitive, mechanical tasks that fall on your team’s plates -- can you free up their time for work that’s more valuable for your customers?

consider which parts of your go-to-market currently rely purely on your employees to function but could be supplemented by automation.

Step 3: Reset goals to bridge teams

Often, friction exists because two teams are moving in opposite directions.

For example, marketing is traditionally goaled on an overall lead generation number -- but optimizing for lead quantity doesn’t always lead to good-fit customers.

Step 4: Restructure teams

Some questions you can use to self-assess here are:

1. Do employees who work in the same functions sit across different departments?
2. Are teams over-specialized?
3. If your organization has a systemic blind spot, do you have a team dedicated to solving it?

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References

• https://www.hubspot.com/flywheel
• https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/our-flywheel