Flywheel vs. Funnel

In a November 2018 Harvard Business Review article, Brian Halligan, the CEO of Hubspot, outlined why his company is ditching the marketing funnel and moving to the marketing flywheel. His argument? The funnel doesn’t take into account marketing momentum; and using a flywheel model makes it easier to understand the forces that help the business and the frictions that hurt the business.

And while I agree that it’s important to consider both forces and frictions, I don’t believe that the flywheel will be replacing the funnel anytime soon. Here’s why:

The Marketing Funnel

When it was first created in 1898 (yes, more than 120+ years ago), the marketing funnel was so profoundly easy to comprehend that it quickly became the definitive solution for understanding the buyer’s journey. Since then, the AIDA-model funnel has been successfully adapted across just about every type of organization in just about every industry:

• Awareness: the customer is aware of the existence of a product or service

• Interest: actively expressing an interest in a product group

• Desire: aspiring to a particular brand or product

• Action: taking the next step towards purchasing the chosen product/service

At its core, the basic tenet of the marketing funnel is that every person follows a similar path as he or she moves through the process of purchasing something. And if a company maps out that process it can better target its marketing messages to each step and coax a buyer down the funnel towards purchase.

It’s Simple

That’s it. It’s simple. People who don’t work in marketing can look at the visual representation of a marketing funnel and understand the strategy.

Modern Marketing Funnel

The Marketing Flywheel

In his HBR article, Halligan explains that the flywheel model allows Hubspot to focus more on how it captures, stores and release its own energy (as measured in new customers and the enthusiasm of existing customers) and how it accounts for loss of energy (where lost customers work against momentum and slow growth). Functionally, the flywheel spins faster when more force (dollars/man hours) is applied and slows down when friction (poor customer experiences) occurs.

Marketing Flywheel

Force

Halligan and I agree that word-of-mouth from peers now wields more clout than ever before (92% of people trust recommendations from friends and family over any other type of advertising); so a major driver of energy creation is the customer experience. And where the funnel fails to capture momentum, the flywheel factors in the ongoing delight of customers and how that delight can be leveraged to attract and engage new customers.

Friction

Modern consumers (of any product or service) value a frictionless experience. And eliminating friction to improve the customer experience will help the flywheel spin faster and generate more energy, increasing customer delight.

The Customer

At its core, the marketing flywheel focuses on customers and how business resources can be utilized to make those customers happy, in hopes of having them drive new business, and so on, and so on.

Should Your Business Use the Flywheel?

It’s a neat model, but your business should probably not use the marketing flywheel. Where the flywheel is most attractive is in its perpetuity (it can be applied to every purchaser/potential purchaser, forever), but unless you already have a mature and well-developed funnel marketing program, there’s a few reasons you should pass on the flywheel (at least for now):

1. The funnel is intuitive (wide at the top, narrow at the bottom) and easy to explain to peers outside of marketing, making it easy to get buy-in as it is implemented and refined.

2. The funnel is the current industry standard and integrates into most of the sales/marketing software that is currently available, including Google Analytics. Want to map our your sales/marketing funnel in your automation platform? Want to use the out-of-the-box funnel reports built-in to your CRM? No problem.

3. A young marketing program that consolidates funnel steps across purchasers/potential purchasers to create a flywheel could miss opportunities from not drilling down into specific audience subsets.

4. You don’t need the flywheel to focus on customers; and in fact, focusing on customers should be a core component of your funnel. Reducing friction along the buyer’s journey and increasing the forces dedicated to customer-centric initiatives are fundamental to the success of every business.

We will continue to recommend the funnel to our clients but I’d love to hear your thoughts. Will you be ditching the funnel for the flywheel?

Full disclosure: I approve of Hubspot and the Hubspot family of products (some of which are used on this website).