Sales Flywheel Model

We should all be familiar with the sales and marketing funnel model, where you spend a lot of time and effort marketing to potential leads to turn them into qualified sales leads for the sales team to connect with in hopes that a small percentage of those leads will become a sale.

It’s exhausting and there has to be a better way. There is.

About ten years ago, I came across the idea of the sales and marketing flywheel model, developed by Hubspot.

Flywheel: a heavy metal wheel for opposing and moderating by its inertia any fluctuation of speed in the machinery with which it revolves.

In other words, a flywheel is a device that stores energy until enough friction is applied to make it stop. According to Hubspot, because they’re linear, funnels don’t reveal the momentum you build through a great product and customer experience, nor the drag you experience when your processes start to slow down growth.

In your business, the flywheel is your customer base. While you’ll always need new customers and new business for your company to grow and scale, your existing customer base should be your focus. As long as you take care of your customers, and the continue to buy, your business can survive. Simply put, the flywheel is a more comprehensive look at where your business is growing fastest, and it reveals your biggest areas of opportunity.

This means that your marketing efforts should be segmented. There are marketing campaigns that can go towards new business, while the majority of them should be utilized to communicate with existing customers. The flywheel model actually encourages better alignment between your marketing and sales teams, where instead of marketing to the masses, the two teams work together and the marketing efforts are tailored to the needs of not only existing customers but also specific customers.

When it comes to adopting a new product, think about your flywheel and ask yourself if the new product can be used by your existing customer base before you look at attracting new business with it. The existing customers can be forgotten in all the fanfare of the new product launch and when you go back looking for them, they may be gone. New products and new customers aren’t a bad thing, quite the opposite actually, just make sure that in the execution of the launch, you don’t forget about who got you to where you are.

Think about it this way. Is it easier to onboard new customers or does it make more sense to find new ways to take care of your existing customers? If a new product is geared more towards existing customers, even if it is a new product add-on to your proprietary product, it can still attract a new customer who has been on the fence about buying your product.

There are a few ways to put enough friction on the flywheel to stop it. If your call center is taking as many calls that come in, the customers will call the company that will answer and take their business there. If you have a product shortage, customers will find a different solution. When the product becomes available again, it may be too late to bring them back for any reason, whether it is price, functionality, or support. If a service center is difficult to work with or not responsive enough to a customer’s needs they’ll go to the competition. In the modern business world, there are enough options out there that even if your product is the best if your team doesn’t show up every day and keep the flywheel spinning, it will stop.

It's easy to get complacent and sit back and wonder where all the customers went. The usual reaction to this is to put your sales team into an activated panic mode to go out and find new business, but this almost always detracts from your existing customers. Keep the focus on the existing customers and make sure the flywheel doesn’t stop spinning.