The Marketing Funnel is Dead and the Flywheel has Arrived
A few days ago, I was preparing my slides for my upcoming cohort this Saturday.
And I was planning to cover a bit on the ever-talked about Sales Funnel in the marketing world. You know, stuff like BOFU, MOFU, and TOFU — how with this simple visualization that you can slowly “guide” the prospect to become a buying customer…
In case you haven’t heard, the Sales Funnel is a marketing concept that maps out the journey of a prospect-turned-buying-customer.
The top of the funnel is usually wide. Many people can become aware of your product, but not all will become interested. The funnel gets narrower as the leads pass through the different stages. Only a small percentage of the initial prospects will actually take the desired action, usually a purchase.
All was good and dandy until I saw this on Twitter:
Then it got me thinking…the relevancy of the funnel might be a thing of the past!
Let’s first explore what is a Flywheel?
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Now, what is a Flywheel?
Unlike the funnel that puts customers as an afterthought in a marketing and sales strategy, the Flywheel Model puts them at the heart keeping customers happy, allowing them to drive referrals, and helping the company make sales.
One of the biggest and notably the most important advantages of incorporating this model is that it helps focus on enhancing a customer’s journey even after they’ve matured into a customer.
Meaning, your customers are no longer treated as an afterthought. They seated upfront and center.
In short, happy customers equals more customers.
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Here are some actionable steps to reduce friction in each stage:
Activate:
- optimizing retargeting campaigns for prospects
- website security [3] (prospects may not be enticed to purchase from you if you have an insecure site)
- team alignment (marketing, sales, and customer service reps should all be aligned with new promotions, features, announcements, etc. to lessen friction)
Adopt:
- having consistent and effective copywriting across your pages, blogs, and knowledge bases
- keeping onboarding and demo files up to date
- ease of upgrading (eg. from a Premium Plan to a Pro Plan)
Adore
- improving personalization for your content
- ease of getting support (live chats or ticket features)
- ease of renewals and billings
- implementing new product benefits based on surveys and feedback forms
Advocate:
- ease of sharing your product or content that promotes your product (eg. incentivizing user-generated content or reviews from current customers, or using social sharing)
- recruiting, onboarding, and management of product affiliates and ambassadors
Key Takeaways
In an era where customers expect more than just a seamless digital transaction, I do feel that the Flywheel does provide the sales team an edge as compared to the funnel.
When the customer is at the heart of your flywheel (and they should be), they’re what’s driving your speed.
Here’s a summary:
- Today, delighted customers are the biggest new driver of growth.
- Funnel is all about how many customers you can output, which can be a pretty inefficient use of energy.
- Also, consumers today are pretty independent. They tend to do their research before wanting to speak to a sales rep. So, putting them in a funnel no longer works.
- Instead, with the flywheel, the customer is the input. The customer starts at the center of the flywheel, and that’s where they stay.
- When a customer makes a sale, they don’t just drop out of that flywheel. Instead, you retain their energy within the flywheel as they become a promoter of your product or service to others in their industry.
- However, in my opinion, the funnel is still useful when it comes to creating content — or in other words, a marketing content funnel.
