For decades, marketers have relied on the funnel model to visualize the customer journey. Prospects enter at the top, move through various stages, and either convert or drop off. But what happens after conversion? This is where the traditional funnel falls short.
Enter the inbound flywheel – a revolutionary approach pioneered by HubSpot that reimagines how businesses attract, engage, and delight customers. Unlike the linear funnel that ends with a sale, the flywheel is circular, continuous, and gains momentum over time.
Why the Funnel Is Becoming Obsolete
The traditional marketing funnel treats customers as an outcome rather than a driving force. Once prospects convert to customers, they essentially exit the funnel, and the process begins anew with fresh prospects.
This approach ignores one crucial reality of modern business: your existing customers are your greatest asset for growth.
In today’s digital landscape, word-of-mouth travels faster than ever. Research from Nielsen shows that 92% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family over all forms of advertising.
When the customer journey ends at purchase, you miss countless opportunities to harness the power of customer advocacy.
Understanding the Flywheel Model
The flywheel, by contrast, places customers at the center of your growth strategy. It recognizes that delighted customers become promoters who feed new prospects into your business, creating a self-perpetuating cycle of growth.
This model consists of three primary stages that continuously flow into each other:
Attract: Drawing in the right visitors with valuable content and conversations.
Engage: Building lasting relationships by providing insights and solutions that align with their challenges and goals.
Delight: Helping, supporting, and empowering customers to succeed with your product or service.
The magic happens when these stages work in harmony. Happy customers become advocates who attract new prospects, creating momentum that accelerates your flywheel’s spin.
Building Your Inbound Flywheel
Transitioning from a funnel to a flywheel mentality requires rethinking how your teams operate and collaborate. At InboundMarketo, we’ve seen firsthand how this shift transforms businesses from growth-limited to growth-enabled.
Start by identifying the forces that add speed to your flywheel:
Force 1: Aligned Teams
When marketing, sales, and service teams work in silos, they create friction. Align these teams around a unified customer experience strategy.
Your marketing shouldn’t promise what sales can’t deliver, and your service team should understand what prospects were promised during the sales process.
Reducing Friction in Your Flywheel
Friction slows your flywheel and diminishes customer delight. Common sources of friction include:
Poor handoffs between departments.
Inconsistent messaging across channels.
Complicated purchase or onboarding processes.
Inadequate self-service resources.
Examine your customer journey for points of friction. Each friction point resolved accelerates your flywheel’s momentum.
Measuring Flywheel Performance
To determine if your flywheel is gaining momentum, track metrics beyond traditional conversion rates:
Customer satisfaction scores and Net Promoter Score (NPS).
Referral rates and referred customer acquisition costs.
Customer lifetime value and retention rates.
Time to resolution for service inquiries.
The most telling sign of a healthy flywheel is when customer acquisition costs decrease while customer lifetime value increases.
The Flywheel in Action
Consider Spotify’s remarkably successful business model. Their flywheel begins with attracting users to their vast music library. As users engage by creating playlists and following artists, Spotify collects valuable data.
This data powers personalized recommendations that delight users, who then share playlists and recommend the platform to friends. Each new user adds content through their listening habits, further enriching the experience for everyone.
According to Spotify’s Business Intelligence, this self-reinforcing cycle has helped them grow to over 456 million active users without proportional increases in marketing spend.
Embracing the Flywheel Mindset
The flywheel isn’t just a new diagram to replace your funnel charts—it’s a fundamental shift in thinking about business growth.
When your entire organization recognizes that customer success drives business success, decision-making changes. Every policy, process, and interaction is evaluated based on how it impacts flywheel momentum.
This customer-centric approach creates compounding returns that traditional funnel-based businesses struggle to match.
Getting Started
Begin your transition to the flywheel model by:
Mapping your current customer journey, identifying where the post-purchase experience could feed back into attraction.
Breaking down silos between teams with shared metrics and collaborative workflows.
Investing in systems that capture and act on customer feedback.
Developing advocacy programs that make it easy and rewarding for customers to promote your business.
The inbound flywheel represents the evolution of inbound marketing—from attracting strangers to building a community of promoters who fuel sustainable growth.
By harnessing the momentum of delighted customers, you create a growth engine that becomes increasingly powerful over time.
