We live in an era where starting a business is easier than ever, but growing has never been more challenging. Customers are more demanding and have higher expectation than ever before. When you have just started your business, marketing is almost everything you can do to make your brand reach your potential audience, but once you have your first customers, your sales and services processes become essential for the growth of your business.
We have spent a long time thinking that an Inbound business runs through a Funnel method. You feed your funnel (potential buyers) through marketing actions to see what comes out of it (converted customers). But the funnel stops producing anything once you stop feeding it.
Let’s imagine for a moment that if thanks to high levels of customer experience and positive opinions, reviews and referrals about your brand, the bottom of the funnel is able to impact how the top of the funnel is refilled (as demonstrated in the picture below). But this is not really how the mechanics of a funnel work, is it? This how the Flywheel model comes into play.
Shift in the Inbound paradigm
HubSpot reshaped the Inbound business model and turned into a Flywheel. Currently customers do not only rely on what the brand says about themselves. Anyone considering purchasing a product or service will try to obtain referrals and information from third party sources such as opinions from friends, family and acquaintances, and reviews and user-generated content online (1). Because let us be honest, everyone else is a more efficient marketer than marketers themselves. As Kip Bodnar, CMO of HubSpot states “potential buyers care less about what you have to say about yourself, and more than ever about what your customers have to say about you” (2). Current customers are highly informed and understand well the market and how companies treat customers, causing the customer themselves to be the ones who have the real power to influence when making purchasing decisions.
Research conducted by HubSpot stated that Word-of-mouth (WOM) referrals and customer references were the most reliable sources of information for potentials buyers at the time of making a purchasing decision (3).
The Flywheel is a customer centric model, putting the customer in the center of your operations to make sure the service you provide to them reaches the levels of excellence required for them to become, not only recurring customers, but also promoters of your brand and product of service. Your customers are the core of your inbound strategy because if your customers are successful, then so are you. This is the customer experience that makes your customers become your best marketers.
However, funnels do not disappear from the new Inbound approach. The Flywheel represents your company’s processes as a whole, but you still have funnels that fuel or feed your Flywheel and give you critical information about the performance of different regions of your Flywheel. By taking a closer look to each region, you will more easily identify where friction is happening.
Identify and reduce your Flywheel’s friction.
Making your flywheel spin faster does not only require adding more energy to it. It also means eliminating or reducing the friction that causes it to slow down, or like Jon Dick, VP of Marketing at HubSpot claims, “kills” it (4). Nowadays excelling at every stage of the Inbound strategy is essential to reach high levels of customer experience. Because no matter how state-of-the-art your marketing efforts are, nothing can compensate your team delivering poor customer service after completing a sale.
Friction in the Flywheel can be caused by several factors, such as your teams not being properly aligned and communicating smoothly (internal friction) or your customer having to go through a too complex sales process or not communicating with them in their desired methods (external friction). Identifying these areas of friction and smoothening them is essential for your Flywheel to move faster. And the faster the Flywheel spins, the more customers you will turn into your business’ promoters.
HubSpot offers you the tools to make sure that the entire Buyer Journey of your leads all the way to the point of purchase happens smoothly and in an integrated manner. We in Hubit, as HubSpot partners and a leading Nordic HubSpot Sales and CRM specialist, help dozens of companies every year to make the most of their HubSpot account. If you would like to hear more about how you can implement HubSpot into your company to find better ways to grow -or ways to grow better – please do not hesitate to get in touch with us.